The Ties That Strangle

Take a look at the above drawing, it was done by Raine over at Deviant Art under the screenname Raine—Angel. She writes more about the picture there. But the idea that I want to get across is that the picture says so much. There's an important message right there in the picture and some people might miss it. Both of the girls, very different kind of girls, have cuts down their arms. As a matter of a fact, the picture is called cuts.

About a year ago I was sitting down with a couple of friends and talking about some everyday stuff, somehow or another we got on the subject of cutting. I think back then I really didn't understand it. But the strange part is that two of the people in the group, both of them women, had each on several occasions cut themselves. They talked about the rush and the feeling and they shared a little bit about it. Oddly enough they were very different, they were the kind of people that didn't normally talk to each other really. But when we got on this subject they suddenly seemed to connect.

Conversation erupted from there and when they talked more and more about it I think that I grew to understand it just a little bit more. I think that I do understand something though, a lot of the issues that women face today are because of the things that society places on women's head. America expects women to be so much all at one time; they're expected to be sexy some of the time, a parent some of the time, beautiful all of the time, have careers balance them with a perfect home life, and sexually devious when called for, but only when called for.

And most of these stigmas are just the one's we see placed on older women. When women are younger they are bombarded with so much telling them how to be, likewise young men have constricting things thrown at them all of the time too. So many times older men will tell younger ones things that you should never tell a child. I can speak from experince, I've got a certain family member that lives out of state and when he came down and saw a picture of one of my friends and he mistakingly thought it was my girlfriend. He told me, You need to dump her because her tits aren't big enough.

I was offended, really. I think that this is just part of the problem. I see so much wrong with how women are treated, especially here at college; a guy gives a girl home and he's supposed to get sex in return, another guy has nude pictures of girls and shows them to whoever he wants? Granted, the girls should have never agreed to those conditions in either situation. But many times the female may be scared, embarassed or just want to conform.

I can think of several cases where people have held things above someone's head, blackmailed them. The worst example that I can think of is I had a friend when I was younger who was dating a football guy. He secretly videotaped them having intercourse. Well when he had enough, he showed her and told her that he would show everyone what she had done if she didn't agree to service his friends. He made her sleep with about six of his football buddies whenever they requested her. And she didn't know what to do about it.

What would anyone do in that situation? The guy was as close to they come to evil, he deserves to be in some kind of prison. Yet there are men like this in high schools and colleges. It takes a lot of effort to care for someone so little. To think of someone as an object to such a high dregee, even to thing of sex as nothing more than something fun to pass the time like a video game. I think knowing that these kinds of things, this is why people cut. Because they really just want to know that their not objects, they want to know that their alive and that they're still humans able to feel.

No one should ever have to test that.