How Hard Can It Be?
Graphic by Abby Gleason
How hard can it be to believe girls and women who talk about their treatment at the hands of men and boys? Especially the ones that need to be talked about – the violence that men perpetrate on women? Are girls and women so irrelevant as human beings except as a means to an end? The end being a man’s pleasure, domination, desire, and right to take what he wants when he wants it? What makes people so sure that what happens to women is up for discussion or debate? Women are helpless? Manipulative? Coy? Teases? ….Available? Just bodies put on the earth for men’s pleasure and use? What they say has no meaning or relevance unless they are praising a man?
This most recent rape of a little pregnant girl and the likely life-saving healthcare to prevent her from being forced to give birth has been politicized to a point where the two sides are locked in head-banging dispute. It is bad enough that grown women are not believed when they say they have been sexually assaulted, molested, and raped. It is bad enough that only about six of 100 rapes result in an arrest, and less than one results in conviction. It is bad enough that hundreds of thousands of rape kits, from the less than one-third that are reported to police, are warehoused, never tested or processed. That women instinctively know they will be interrogated about their role in the violence they are subjected to and will begin to doubt themselves as people with agency, which is so carelessly stripped from them. People they know will wonder how she “allowed” her assault to happen. No wonder so few of us report rape and sexual assault. We are not convinced in any way that we will be heard, believed, and cared for. And law enforcement, dominated by toxic masculinity, doesn’t seem to be friendly to us.
A female child is now the hot potato of the anti-choice/forced birth wing, where everything about the fact that she was held down, forced to “accept” a grown man’s penis in her tiny, child-sized vagina (about half the length of her hand), and kept down until he could ejaculate inside her, providing himself with pleasure at her incredible expense (apparently at least twice), is disregarded. Forced birthers are focusing on the problem of immigration and “illegal aliens.” The problem of mandated reporting. The problem of the doctor’s credentials. The problem of the child’s home state anti-reproductive healthcare policies. The problem is everything except believing what a man could and did do to a little girl. Because he could. Because she was a means to an end.
This true story of a horrific crime was not believed by so many people until a suspect was produced. Once a man became part of the story, it began to gain some traction. It wasn’t enough for authorities that doctors saw this little girl with their own eyes. What is pro-life about that? A life standing before them, a life about 4 feet tall and about 60 pounds. A life with a fertilized egg, about ¾ of an inch in size, inside her tiny uterus, a uterus the size of her little fist. Her little body was no doubt shocked by the invasion and emerging consequences. She undoubtedly felt ashamed, sad, afraid, and humiliated, unable to trust the adults in her life to keep her from such harm. That he is from Central America allows Americans to distant themselves further.
Questioning the veracity of the report of a young girl who “turned up” pregnant should never have become the abortion lightening rod it has become. She was definitely pregnant and there was no chance of an immaculate conception, a fantasy imagined by religious men who recognize that the body of a female is defiled by sex. A man did this to her. As men and boys do. The abuse at the hands of someone a little girl should have been able to trust to help her grow up happens extremely frequently in this country. That she was already someone’s commodity is worse than shameful. But that she now represents all that is wrong with banning abortion care focuses the issue on child abuse, never an excusable occurrence, when it needs to be focused on all women and girls who are not permitted to own their own bodies. The right to protect one’s own body from the predations of others extends to all of us. Whatever it takes, it takes. But let’s put this man and anyone who protected him away so he and they cannot harm children, and keep the attention focused on the normal and usual rights men want for their own lives that they deny women. Girls and women are not a means to an end.
The anti-women campaign couldn’t blame the little girl for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or being so provocative and attractive that no normal man could look away and not be titillated. Was it what she was wearing? Or that she seemed ripe for the taking, too sweet and available to be resisted by a grown man? A female’s second-class status in most of the world is unrelenting. If she is attractive, it is her fault that men want to put their hands on her and their penises in her. If she is alone, she invites harassment and potential assault. If she gets pregnant, she obviously didn’t care enough to prevent it, and it is her fault for her condition. It is horrific to imagine this about a child. But the misogyny that prevails in this country and around the world worsens as girls become women and face the reality that they are too often a means to an end for boys and men. This is the issue. This is one of those things we cannot just let go.