Something Scarier than Walkers...

Last Sunday's episode of the Walking Dead brought up an interesting topic that was briefly touched on in dealing with Terminus...that rape is still just as big a threat, even when there are undead walking everywhere trying to eat your face.

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And that freaking says something!  When as a viewer I'm more scared of the gun toting cop giving Beth the side eye than the yard full of walkers, it shows how ingrained it is in women that we're victimized and treated like shit by society.

If there are flesh eating freaks roaming the earth, that should be my number one fear.  But I understand the notion that moral and ethical boundaries can get warped by apocalyptic circumstances.  Bad people will survive because they have an easier time doing unpleasant/ethically fucked up things.  Like the people who ran Terminus, when it was a shelter for survivors.  They were taken over by evil people who raped and killed, and psychologically damaged the original Terminus owners into becoming cannibals.  It's the extrapolated notion of "nice guys finish last," except rather it is "nice guys become zombies or are raped and murdered."

As the creepy cop made his advances, I just felt it.  The hair sticking up on the back of my neck feeling.  It's an intuition that I've had to hone as a woman because society keeps telling me not to get raped...so now I'm hyper aware of these things.  But I was vindicated by Beth's badassery.

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With what happened at Terminus, the wanderers Daryl joined briefly, and now this abuse of power (which FYI is the point of rape; it's about power not sex), it really says something about people and society...that if the zombie shitstorm hit tomorrow, I would still be more scared of being raped than the undead.  Because it seems like assholes are the ones who are mostly making it through.  Well, that's pretty discouraging for a woman...

With men explaining away street harassment and female students being raped on campus with no punishment for the rapist and athletes using their girlfriends as punching bags with no jail time, is it any shock that as a woman I'm more worried about being raped than the zombies possibly trying to eat me?  Society now keeps telling me I'm not worth anything, so why would this apocalyptic society be any different?