Closer to Home

This morning I find myself reeling. A woman in an online feminist community in which I participate was raped by three men at knifepoint earlier this week. I
"know" this person only in the sense that I have shared thoughts and discussions in the same discussion forum as her. She is an intelligent, strongly-opinionated, and very bright person who wants, demands, and fights for a better world in which women are treated as equals and are no longer subjected and objectified by men. None of that mattered to three slime of the earth who held a knife at her throat and raped her.
It is the utter callousness of rape that is one of the many things about it which I find so repulsive. The perpetrators of rape simply do not give a shit about the woman's hopes, dreams, ambitions, worldviews. For them, all women are simply a means to an end: their self-gratification. It is the peak of their supposed and assumed entitlement to have sex with any woman at any time in any place, regardless of that woman's objections. To rape is to discard everything human about a woman and reduce her to a hole. It is the ultimate form of degradation, and I am disgusted at the sense of privelige that leads men to do this.

In her own words, "This should not have happened, to me, or to anyone else."