Things I will not do to my characters. Ever.

This upsets me on so many levels, but I think the one that goes deepest for me personally is because this is kind of how I feel that I as a woman have been treated all of my life. My parents have always acted as if going outside after dark or wearing the wrong kind of clothes or going to the wrong kind of parties automatically means I will be raped. At one point when I was seeing a movie late and didn't immediately call afterwards, but went to my friend's place and called from there instead, my dad actually walked all the way to the cinema and looked in every park he passed to see if I was lying there raped and broken. I have been told by them since I was old enough to understand what rape is that it's the worst possible thing to ever happen to a woman, worse than dying. And it has left me with a deep fear of dark roads, even when I know that the chance of an attack!rapist lurking in the bushes at 5 am when it is balls-freezing cold outside is pretty fucking slim.

And this idea that you as a woman are destined to be raped if you don't follow all the "rules" is only fortified by the way rape is used as a trope in every tv-show, every comic, every book, every single work of fiction available as a way of making things dark and edgy, or giving a female protagonist "depth", or explaining why she's such a badass. And sometimes to lend her vulnerability so that the male protagonist or love interest or whatever can save/comfort her (because a badass woman can handle many things, but rape is so horrible that even she will need a man). The Rapist Monster will inevitably turn up around almost every single female heroine at some point, and she's almost always helpless to stop him.

And this means the fear of the Bad Man lurking in the shadows rather than in the eyes of a male friend who has problems with boundaries still persists. It means people will keep telling women to be afraid, and telling them they're to blame if they're not. It means rape culture gets even harder to get at because these tropes exist in the entirety of the public consciousness. And because my parents have been force-fed this trope too, it means I burst into tears on my way to work the early shift because it's dark and I feel like I'm just waiting for the inevitable attack. I keep wondering when I'll finally be raped.

Rant rant rant, but yeah. I wish the world wasn't a shitty place and that so many of its inhabitants weren't shitty people, and I'm sorry you as an author got treated shittily because you refused to feed this monster of a trope. Kudos to you.