Choice

I stay at home late because I have evening Dutch class, and try to work from home, but make the mistake(?) of going to the toilet with a printout from Haaretz magazine, in which 4 women that participated in a documentary about rape and sexual abuse speak out. Then I read the talkback comments on Haaretz online. So many blame the victims, so many say such "ugly" (as in average-looking) women probably fantasize, because they wish they were getting any, no matter that they talk about the ages 3-16, no matter that their stories are backed up by legal evidence, by hospital records, by attackers caught and put away (for a couple years mind you... this is Israel I am talking about).

It's good in a way that I didn't read this sooner (doesn't everything happen for a reason), else my weekend with P. would not have been the eventual restful bliss that it was (especially last night). I am just not strong enough to write this here, and my blood pressure and heart rate increase as I write this. P. was the first person to say to me, on an offhanded comment I made, that when someone forces you to come that is rape. He is so pure. And I didn't tell him anything. I will not contaminate our relationship. Or my life. I will not turn myself into a professional victim or an archtype of something that I am not (HIV is something else, HIV is relatively light stuff, a disease... stigmatized no doubt and related to the whole thing, especially when you read horror stories from countries like S. Africa where babies are raped to "protect" men from HIV). So maybe in a way I am strong, strong enough to be over it, live it and have it and leave it all at once, without letting anything define me. Because although what these women do is service to other people, don't they crucify themselves on the cross of one kind of reality, when there are other realities out there to be picked and chosen from. Yes Israel is Rapeland, I always knew this... but not just. It has other facets and I am free to choose, even if I never ever live there again, I am free to choose what it will be for me. Homeland, holy land, childhoodland... I am not going to give in to the whirlpools, just let go and float through them, onwards, until they spit me out on shore again. That is my choice.