The Inverted Castle
TW: csa, rape
I think about the inverted castle a lot.
From Symphony of the Night.
The mirror nobody knew was there, but of course it was, it always is.
Saying I was a girl got me taught through sexual violence that I had to be a boy or I would be raped again.
The violence is staggering, and my body never forgets, but for most of my life, I have no conscious recollection, and so, no conscious understanding. The fear my body stores is that if she is ever found out to be a girl again, she will immediately be raped by someone ten times her size.
This fear adds tremendous weight to every cultural rule around masculinity and I am autistic — already overly sensitive to The Rules™. It’s not just that I learn I’m supposed to be Han Solo et al cornering Princess Leia etc., it’s that my body reinforces the lesson through constant terror from the trauma of childhood rape, while the culture reinforces the lesson through constant terror from the gender police.
I’m taught that raping is like swimming and I’d better get in the pool or everyone will know, and
, here comes my dad again, crashing through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man, except instead of saying OH YEAH! he asks me if I want to be a girl so bad. But it’s not a question. It’s a lesson and a command.
Get in the pool.
With the rest of the rapists.
The castle this builds is authoritarianism, white supremacy in our case, made up of bricks like Brock Turner, whose nature is so agreeable to raping that these lessons activate him. The brick, already formed, now fired, now fixed.
The inverted castle is made of failures like me.
The inverted castle is hollows in the earth, a mass grave where living things bury themselves.
(People who have been forced to pretend to be) boys who can’t say no to PIV sex or everyone will start violently questioning whether they are really boys.
Boys will be boys, and boys can’t say no to sex.
That is an awful lot of (people who have been forced to pretend to be) boys who can’t actually consent to PIV sex because they are culturally not permitted to refuse it. Who are then made to broadcast their availability to be raped, their desire for it.
(People who have been forced to pretend to be) boys are also taught they are sexually monstrous and repulsive — so who would want them? Making every offer of PIV sex they receive seem rare and valuable. There’s already violence for not going along with it, so why not just lie back and enjoy it? Sounds familiar, right?
(People who have been forced to pretend to be) boys are also taught they can’t be raped by envelopment — explicitly defining rape solely as various forms of unwanted penetration implies that the penetrator always wants to penetrate, disguising this extreme vulnerability to being raped as a core power of who they are.
Boys will be boys, and boys don’t cry.
(People who have been forced to pretend to be) boys are also taught they don’t really experience emotions, making them
woefully unprepared for the work of healing from the sexual trauma they’ve survived, and
perpetually attracted to (girl*) children, their emotional peers
“The power of the pussy” is the power to rape (people who have been forced to pretend to be) boys with impunity, exacerbated by a rape culture that says they can’t refuse, mitigated by teaching (people who have been forced to pretend to be) girls that they don’t want or like sex. (People who have been forced to pretend to be) boys are abandoned to be repeatedly raped by a culture that mocks their emotional incapacity as ruthlessly as it mocks any attempt they make to develop some.
(People who have been forced to pretend to be) boys grow to have children stolen from their bodies through culturally-sanctioned rape that reduces them to (coerced) seed donor and financial supporter to reinforce the notion of their only real cultural value, as (coerced) laborer.
Rape and white supremacy and authoritarianism and fascism and capitalism are all fundamentally the same thing and that’s why I can’t do any of them. Songs I write during my exile in guy show what came of my attempts. Relentless self-destruction, an absolute refusal to see myself as anything other than a rapist, a monster, no matter that I was the only one who ever really believed it.
Text from the image above is not mine, transcribed here for accessibility:
Unpopular opinion: Telling young children that they’re gonna grow up to be sexual predators because of their penis unless they fight against their own “natural male urges” IS WHAT CAUSES SEXUAL PREDATORS
“We know this from a very early age, we can’t act out our [male] sexual nature. It’s made clear to boys in the vast majority of instances at a very early age, and it is a good thing that it is done.”
NO IT IS NOT! That’s child sexual abuse & grooming & self fulfilling prophesy! DOING THIS CREATES SEXUAL PREDATORS!
(An adaptation of a Twitter thread I wrote this morning.)
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