February 1 Weekly Response

Still Needing the F Word & I’m Not Talking Feminism 

Fucked Up  

The reading on the case about Arnold Schwarzenegger is a true slap in the face to women. A case held against him as a serial sexual bigot, with a total count of 16 women coming forward and testifying about his harassment. The fact that he stated, “ he thought that reaching up women skirts or into their blouses was nothing”. It’s one thing to do it but to say this validating your actions and still getting off as partisan politics and even personal behavior. This put me in agreement with the narrative of the statement, “Personal behavior is when you have a girlfriend. When you touch someone intimately without her consent, it’s sexual battery.” Although, I’m not surprised that they only gave him a slap on the wrist, this case actually reminded me of the Brock Turner case.

Brock Turner was a three-time American Stanford swimmer who was charged with sexual assault of an unconscious woman. What’s wrong if he was charged? Well the catch was, he raped the victim not just ‘sexually assaulted’ her and on top of that he was only sentenced to 6 months jail because the Judge felt that he was a good kid and didn’t want to ruin his life with a long term jail period. The Judge, Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky actually had the balls and audacity to actually have sympathy for Turner. Someone who felt that he could just take something. Even after the victim stood on stand and gave an emotional speech saying, “My independence, natural joy, gentleness, and steady lifestyle I had been enjoying became distorted beyond recognition. I became closed off, angry, self-deprecating, tired, irritable, empty,” she said. She even went on to say, “I stood there examining my body beneath the stream of water and decided, I don’t want my body anymore. I was terrified of it,” the woman wrote in a letter to Turner and Persky that she read in the courtroom during the sentencing. “I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else.” Welcome to America….the land of free.