[…] that sexual crimes are not the work of individual deviants, mental patients or social anomalies, but expressions of a deep symbolic structure that organizes our acts and our fantasies and gives them intelligibility. In other words: the aggressor and the community share the gender imaginary, they speak the same language, they can understand each other.

Rita SEGATO

The writing on the body

They rape us over and over again, the terrifying silence resounds around us, as if it were a daily act, as if they didn't realize it. As if they didn't understand.

They rape us and kill us, over and over again, but that act is not the beginning or the end point. It is the consequence of a long succession of behaviors and habits that accumulate at the hidden base of the iceberg of violence. Simple daily events that do not trigger alerts and hide us, even from us, that dark background that they drag.

They rape us and kill us over and over again, physically, carnally. As if our body were a territory of daily conquest. We have learned to live with these permanent behaviors of intervention on our bodies, silent, silenced, because they have taught us that silence is elegant, that scandal and insult and anger are not typical of good and correct women.

They also rape us because we are not sure of the freedom to go out, to desire, to have sex when we want and with whom we want. We have been condemned to the oppressive sexuality of belonging. On the contrary, that other sexuality, the freely chosen one, has been, only for us, a sign of promiscuity, of a licentious, dissolute life (attend to these terms from the perspective of the dictionary, since they would not be so negative).

We have been kicked out of the fullest act of decision of our lives, the decision about our body and desire. They have colonized our ability to choose. Even so, we claim the right to voice.

We are also violated in emotional abuse. In the systematization of instinctive, thoughtless, uncontained behaviors. In those primitive acts that unload, like animals, without feed. Disconnected from the real existence of the other, from the emotion, so as not to take responsibility for the harmful behavior. Then we shut up again, so as not to pass for "hysterical" or "dramatic." Thus we continue to endorse each of the underhanded aggressions, without understanding the dimension of our silence.

Because in each violation, in each political act of violence, they annul our body, but they also annul our voice, they empty us of words, of questions and instead fill our backs with weight. Once again, alone with the responsibility and the eternal burden of assuming our actions. Like girls reprimanded for having misbehaved.

Until, as a society, we are not capable of looking in depth at the impulsive and violent acts that are born of the male, until we are capable of claiming action, reaction and transformation, they will continue to rape us with impunity.