sexual assault
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Emma Sulkowicz: A Rumpus Roundup
Emma Sulkowicz graduated from Columbia University yesterday. She might have gone unnoticed had she not also been carrying around a mattress. In her sophomore year at Columbia, Sulkowicz was raped. Like many rape victims, Sulkowicz considered her attacker a friend,…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Dead Girls Sold Here
Why then are we comfortable with women routinely being cast as the victims of violence? Why don’t we see that as sexist? Where is the outrage?
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His Greatest Masterpiece
The banality of evil hides in people, and who they unleash it upon become forever tainted by their names. They become one. Creator and monster. Evil by association.
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The Real Problem with Campus Rape
Fraternities do not have a monopoly on rapists: not at UVA, not at any frat, not even the deep Southern ones where upwards of 100 guys live in the house. (The plumbing; one shudders.) But: what the fraternity system does…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Falling For The Femme Fatale
If power is going to shift toward equality, men have to see power less as an inherent right and more as something we can be incentivized to relinquish.
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The Rumpus Saturday Essay: Stain
It’s hard to remember why I was silent. Maybe, like some of the women only now reporting they were raped by Bill Cosby decades ago, I was afraid I wouldn’t be believed.
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Good Victims
We couldn’t remember his name. We couldn’t remember what he looked like. We couldn’t remember how many there were. We changed our story as we began to remember more details. We changed our story into something we could live with.…
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Not That Kind of Narrator
The problem with unreliable narrators — and the thing that makes them so delightful to read in fiction — is that by design, you never quite know when they are telling the truth. Which makes it a stunningly poor choice…
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Mint
I attempt to wipe my mind clean, but the mint invades all thoughts, keeps me awake. The mint smells like rape.
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“Little Black Girls Are Taught How to Be Silent”
The defenders always ask the same questions: How old is 14, really? Why didn’t they tell anyone sooner if they were so innocent? Why didn’t they say anything at all? Using the recent publicity about decades of allegations against R.…
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The Stockholm Syndrome of Sexual Assault
For Slate, Amanda Hess examines yet another first-person confessional: sexual assault victim Jenny Kutner’s essay “The Other Side of the Story,” published in Texas Monthly. The power of Kutner’s story is that it lends insight into a particular type of victimization—the kind…
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Under the Table
The headaches, my difficulty focusing, my specimen-daze, that floating island, my spastic, nervous heart—which are side effects from drinking, and which were inevitable?