#and the parents at the school chase after the bus clearly panicked

[thetimelordbatgirl]

Kinda sad how nowadays Doctor Who will never be able to do a scene like the scene of Gwen, Rhiannon and the kids fleeing the army while Rhys and other men in the neighborhood with eventually Andy fight back against the army. Because lord knows with the UK's constant army adverts lately, that the BBC won't the army be the bad guy in Doctor Who again.

[some---words]

False Accusations (essay)

I knew of the accusation before I ever stepped foot inside the house. Still, I doubted it without question. It was one girl against a house full of boys; of course I believed the boys.

Theirs was my favorite frat despite the strict no-party rule, or perhaps because of that. I’ve always had a fraught relationship with house parties, one that follows me to this day. As a straight-laced high school student with acute anxiety, parties were a minefield of missed social cues and danger at every turn. I can count on one hand the number of parties I attended back then, and they were all agonizing parades of panicked loneliness. It wasn’t until college that I learned to numb my neuroses with cheap liquor, turning the volume down on my inhibitions so I could learn to enjoy myself for once. They were the ones who taught me how.

Maybe she was more like me than I realized. Maybe she was exactly like me. I never even met her, so how would I know?

My college was something like 80% Greek, not uncommon considering it was a small town devoid of any other forms of entertainment aside from themed parties soaked in Natty Light. It wasn’t a matter of whether or not you belonged to a house, it was which house suited you best. There were the stereotypical houses, filled with perfect rich kids whose parents either didn’t know how much Adderall it took for their progeny to pass their classes, or they just didn't care. There were the “loser” houses, filled with boys with no game and girls that no one wanted to take home at the end of the night. This one was somewhere in the middle.

I started going there relatively early on my freshman year, because it was the closest to my dorm and my roommate had made a few friends there. The first night, I met the president of the frat and was immediately smitten by his warmth and effortless cool. I remember setting my new pea coat down on his bed and watching later as he chased down a girl who tried to steal it. When I got my radio show shortly thereafter, in the not exactly prime midnight to 3am slot, it felt kismet because the frat was two doors away. I’d stumble over to the booth with seconds to spare, head still buzzing with Jaeger bombs and shitty vodka, and the boys would filter in throughout bearing gifts and jokes and company. If I missed a party, I’d invariably hear from President Cool and his friends, leaving funny messages on my answering machine and pleading with me to show my face. When I left school at the end of the year, fed up with my directionless life in the midwest and itching to return to California, President Cool was the one who helped me move my couch to the curb. I’d never felt more like I belonged.

I was pretty then, but not confident enough to realize it, so I was glad when the brothers took me under their wing. They would check on me throughout the night, make sure I was comfortable and intervene if I looked like I needed it. They gave me my first drinks and didn’t laugh when I coughed from the burn. When Rush Week came and I didn’t get into the sorority next door, they offered to rush me as their first “sister” and build me my own wing on the ground floor. They really did feel like brothers to me--cool, handsome brothers who named drinks after me and made sure I had a warm coat and someone to walk me home at the end of the night.

I never gave much thought to the social probation. Technically, they were banned from partying altogether, which I soon found out stemmed from the discovery of a secret room in the basement filled with racist and anti-semitic graffiti. A part of me deep down was disgusted when I saw it for myself, that dank chamber that seemed to house the ghosts of so many untold horrors, but I trusted my brothers when they told me they had been caught unaware, that this stuff had been here long before them. I didn’t give it a second thought because it was them, and they had given me no reason not to trust them.

So when I heard again about the accusation, I gave it even less thought. “I know about her, she’s such a slut” was the common refrain, as if the whole school knew more about this one random girl than any subject they might be studying. I never even knew her name, but I took it for granted that she slept around. It was the only explanation that didn’t challenge my precious beliefs, so it was the only one I needed. When she came forward, insisting that she had been assaulted by multiple brothers of my beloved frat at the start of the semester, I dismissed it out of hand. Clearly she was lying. Clearly she had a score to settle. The narrative I painted for myself was simple: she must have slept with someone who rejected her the next morning, so she threw the whole house under the bus with false cries of “rape” in retaliation. What a monster, I thought, only of her.

Back then, I considered myself lucky. I assumed I had never been sexually assaulted, and it would take years to realize how wrong I was even then. It’s all too easy to blame the victim when the alternative is challenging the intricate web of excuses that society has thrust upon us. At 18, I still believed rape to be an abomination, a burst of violence in a dark alley, perpetrated by a monster straight out of a scary story. How could the boys I loved so much, the same boys who once pulled a handsy stranger off of me, be monsters? It was so much easier to blame her.

Because it’s always easier to blame the woman. Hell, I’d spent so much time blaming myself for my own sexual assaults at 15 that I wouldn’t even recognize them for what they were for nearly 20 more years. Women make good scapegoats: we’ve been othered for so long that our “mysterious” nature is the source of good-natured ribbing. Men aren’t expected to understand us, the implicit conceit being that they needn’t worry about respecting us, either. We’re taught as far back as elementary school that our bodies need policing, that we can’t dress or act a certain way because of its effect on boys. And that’s to say nothing of the rape culture that makes us culpable for our own victimhood. If I went out, even today, wearing a short skirt and intending to drink, any consequences would be no one’s fault but my own. Assaulted by a stranger? It was my own fault for going into his hotel room and expecting him to listen when I said no. Assaulted by a friend? It was my own fault for leading him on.

So of course we blamed her, this Jane Doe with the reputation that preceded even her name. She went to the party, she drank the cheap beer, she knew what she was getting into. The only explanation that made any sense to my 18-year-old brain was that she woke up the next morning, regretted her decisions, and convinced herself that she had been raped to absolve herself of responsibility. Only now do I realize that most women just aren’t wired to think that way; on the contrary, most of the women I know try to justify even the most horrific violations of their bodies by placing the blame squarely on themselves.

If she was telling the truth, which I’m increasingly certain she was, think of the courage it took for her to do so. So early in the school year, challenging the underdogs that everyone on campus loved. People were outraged when SAE lost their party license; there’s no way they would’ve taken a rape charge any lighter. She had to have realized, at least somewhere in the back of her mind, that she was entering a battlefield, and she did so anyway. She took on a popular fraternity and watched as her reputation was torn to shreds for the rest of the school year. As everyone, including countless girls with experiences not unlike her own, vilified her with all the rest. I remember hearing that she was leaving school after the first semester; I couldn’t be sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised. So what’s more likely, that a conniving slattern would target a group of innocent young men who just happened to also be under social probation already and risk her entire college career on the off chance that the false accusation would be the one that was believed, or that an innocent young girl got deeply hurt and found the courage to tell the truth?

Fifteen years later, I’ll probably never know the truth. But at least now I believe her.