A Depressing Clarification is Needed
A few months ago, I published a post called Death is the Only Boundary That They Won’t Cross. It discussed how death is the only cage that can confidently hold predators.
But I realize I have to make a disheartening clarification, that is, their death is the only boundary that they won’t cross. They will gladly cross that boundary of their victims.
A dead victim can’t talk back. They can’t fight back. They can’t spill their secrets.
The only peace that the victim is given is that they don’t have to know and endure what happens to their body.
But the perpetrator gives them no peace. Death does.
There are a growing number of ways that victims can be violated when they are dead.
Dead Women Re-Animated for Male Gratification
About 10 years ago, I remember staring at a YouTube thumbnail (I will try to find it). It showed a beautiful woman from the American television series Survivor. In the screengrab, she was bent over a bamboo railing, throwing something in a challenge, her breasts falling forward as she tilted over. She didn’t pose for that moment. It was just a second in time.
Two things bothered me about that picture.
- The thought that someone had raked through the video to find the second where her body was most exposed- and used that as clickbait
- The person who did this was very likely a man whom she had no connection to, or awareness of; possibly not even from the same continent as her
- that the woman had died years earlier
She wasn’t around anymore, and yet I was seeing someone contort her body for views.
Can’t she have peace? I thought.
I also thought about the state of her body in her final years. She had passed away from breast cancer. Had she been in pain? Vomiting? Frail?
Now, looking at the picture, a moment of her life was deranged- for the sake of the attention it would get, not for her sake, but for someone else’s.
This disconnect doesn’t just happen to people in the public eye, though.
I, myself, got very sick in my 20’s. I was bedridden for years. Small tasks like showering or getting a glass of water from the kitchen took herculean effort.
Also during that time, I heard rumours of a group of men (who had previously sexually harassed me) still spreading rumours that I was “begging for sex” (they had no idea I was sick as I deleted all social media and hid myself to avoid them).
So there I was, on my near-deathbed, still “begging for sex”, despite (temporarily) losing my eyesight and being ravaged by crippling pain.
My actual condition and the fantasy that they projected onto my body were galaxies apart.
Yet no one cared.
I was still “begging for it”.
In another post I wrote, I talked about What a Pedophile Taught Me About Manners. Well, that man’s wife passed away recently- and guess what he did? (I will say this allegedly because I wasn’t there, but there were several witnesses.)
He SA’d his wife while she was in the hospital, dying.
Death grants women no peace.
It takes away their voice and any agency that they did have. Predators seek situations where women can’t say no. And death is an extreme example of that.
The women don’t even need to die for this situation to occur.
Gisèle Pelicot was sexually assaulted by over 70 men when she was unknowingly drugged by her husband. She had no idea any of it had happened, the police had to tell her.
When she watched videos of herself, she noted how limp she looked- how lifeless. Just a motionless body, in a death-like state, moved around like a marionette by male animators.
Even in Laura Bates’ novel, The New Age of Sexism, she discusses male desire for female sex dolls. Even myths like the “romance” of husbands buying sex dolls to look like their deceased wives, she says, feel less like tender connection, and more like necrophilia. It is some grotesque, blurred boundary.
Romance disappears the second one party cannot consent.
Do I think the average man is a necrophiliac (someone who experiences sexual attraction to, or engages in sexual acts with, dead bodies)?
No.
I think most men (and women) would be repulsed by the thought.
Yet, over 70 ordinary men were willing to take advantage of Gisèle Pelicot’s lifeless state. They not only saw opportunity, but desire, and acted on it.
To these men, the woman’s lifelessness isn’t an atrocity, it is an invitation.
And somewhere on the spectrum between an unsettling YouTube thumbnail of a dead woman, and a lifelike sex doll, is AI porn.
Even if women kill themselves or die naturally, far away from men, predators can just make AI porn from their everyday, clothed images.
Death won’t stop the harassment.
In fact, there is opportunity to increase it, as the woman is no longer here to hold her boundaries or hold them accountable.
A woman’s death is a boundary that is well tread over; by anyone and everyone.
Women Are Allowed to Rest Peacefully
I am not arguing that women- their bodies, image, and identity should disappear after they pass away. These can evolve and change form in personal and parasocial ways even after they are gone. And that is a good thing… if it is respectful. And a horrific thing if it is exploitative.
There is a big difference between saying “we miss her” and “I get to make her choices for her now”.
Women (and men) should be allowed to rest peacefully.
Messy Bun Book Lover