cake terrorist + fashion police = completely out of line

Enjoy, the cake terrorist at work, today said something so completely inappropriate I almost got out of my seat and punched her. And what worries me is that this kind of insidious thinking is what's going on inside all the quiet, mousy people of the world.

We were talking about fashion. About how too many women like to cram themselves into clothes that don't fit, or clothes that show off a lot of skin. And philosophically, I'm all for it. Women should have the right to wear whatever they want, whenever they want, and should catch no flack for it, as we're all individuals in this great country of ours. If you think that falling out of your clothes is hot, then you should have the right to fall out of your clothes in as many spots as you want to. Secretly, though, I'd like there to be some sort of sensor on people's front doors so they can't get outside if they're wearing something that looks appalling. Who designs that sensor? Me, of course.

All of that aside, though, I was prepared for an argument on the right to wear whatever you want, balanced by the responsibility to be aesthetically pleasing to your surrounding viewers. I think that's an interesting argument, from both a social responsibility and/or a feminist perspective, and I can see both sides of it. But what I got instead was this:

Enjoy: The way these women dress is just shocking.
Enjoy's Neighbor: I know, I know.
Enjoy: You know, when women dress like that, they're just asking to be raped.

I'm not kidding. She actually said that. I picked my jaw up off the floor, wheeled around in my chair, checked the calendar to see if it was, in fact, 1950, and said (much louder than I'm sure I needed to), "I cannot believe you just said that!! No woman EVER asks to be raped! EVER!" She started to defend herself, but I cut her off, because to me, there is nothing you can say to defend that statement. The essence of rape is violation. Are these women asking to be violated? Absolutely not. (Are they asking to be fucked? Maybe... But I'm not getting into that.)

One of my co-workers, Francesca, is super-duper smart (she's a recent college grad and hasn't flushed all her brain cells down the toilet yet), so I had to run upstairs to tell her. I made the argument to her that women who dress, shall we say flashily, are asking to be looked at, but not violated. And she managed to come up with some good counterpoints even to the Looked At argument. (I like talking to her. I always come out feeling smarter than before, by way of getting dumber first)

So how many soft-spoken, apologetic, unimposing women (or people, for that matter) are walking around thinking thoughts that the rest of us thought had disappeared years ago? And how do we reach those people, to make it clear to them that rape victims are just that, victims. A woman doesn't bring it on herself or ask for it in any way. Where is Mariska Hargitay when you need her??

I'm opening a bigger can of worms than I know I can handle ("EEK! WORMS!") but I feel confident that no woman wakes up in the morning, puts on her clothes (be they flashy or no) and says to herself, "I'd really like to be violated today." And that it discounts the pain and suffering of the thousands of new rape victims every year to ever say that a woman asks for it by dressing the way she does.

I may have to punish her now by never eating her cake again.