Living Lotus Project

"That same work of compassion also calls on us to remember that no person is an island. All of our lives leave ripples. Some lives are tsunamis. Compassion is not summarizing the beauty of the wave; it’s picking through the wreckage, reckoning with who was hurt. Awe without honesty isn’t respect; it’s myth. Admiration of only the easy parts is fanaticism, not reverence."

"What we admire is so overwhelmingly male, so much of the time. And as a result, what we are willing to set aside, what we deem inconvenient, the worse-makers of more important male matters, is overwhelmingly female. If we want our heroes to be better men, and if we want more of our heroes to be women, and if perhaps we want a world in which our stories are more honest than the framework of heroes and villains allows, well — we have to start by telling the whole truth."

Kobe Bryant and Complicated Legacies On the inconvenient women who make matters worse

As a matter of law, we MUST stop blaming r**e victims. He/she is NOT consenting to s*x if they have too much to drink. That getting drunk is referred to in this article as "putting themselves in a dangerous situation" is blatant victim blaming. That these can be conflated in a predator's mind or in his/her legal defense is unconscionable. The ONLY person responsible for r**e is the ra**st, and they should be held accountable without the law giving them a built-in defense.

New York is not the only state with this unforgivable loophole. Please call your governors and senators and demand legislation to fix this!

Rapists who target drunk women cannot be charged with r**e under New York law, prosecutor says Most states only explicitly say that drunkenness implies a lack of consent if the intoxication was involuntary