Happy Belated Birthday
The title is sarcastic. I was assaulted the day after my sixtieth birthday.
Around 9:30 or 10 p.m. as it was getting dark, someone called out "Who's in the tent?" We didn't immediately reply in part because there was traffic noise, he was likely drunk as he smelled of beer and was slurring his words and my sons didn't immediately understand what he was saying, plus it's a strange thing for someone to ask.
Usually, someone is asking if you are someone they already know and promptly leave when it turns out you aren't.
Before the tent door was fully open, he hit me in the face with a heavy metal object that turned out to be a gun and justified the assault with "You didn't tell me your name."
It was a brief scuffle, thirty seconds or a minute, and the first physical altercation of that sort of my life and I was hit repeatedly in the face and left quite bloody.
Early on, I picked up my phone because I've been in other confrontations that ended and they left as soon as they saw I had a phone and might call the police. But he grabbed the phone out of my hand and said "You're not calling anyone, bitch."
The following day, I concluded this seemingly completely random violent assault without provocation was most likely attempted rape.
It was dark, I was the first person he saw and heard, no one ever thinks there are THREE people in our little tent and people are consistently startled by that fact. He was a drunken homeless man thinking he had found a homeless woman alone in a secluded spot and without getting a good look at me promptly hit me in the face expecting me to cower and try to go along with his shit and try to beg him to hurt me less.
I'm a survivor of incest where I was nonviolently sexually assaulted daily for two and a half years and I've studied this stuff. Cooperation doesn't protect you.
I tackled him and my sons piled out the tent to join the fray and protect their mother. My shoulder still hurts and my sons kept talking about details I couldn't make sense of. They thought the guy threw me into shrubbery and scattered branches everywhere.
He threw me into the mud nearby. Odds are good HE landed in plants of some sort and it's a cactus strewn area.
We have no idea how badly hurt they are. They left in short order in spite of instigating this assault and, according to my sons, they backed out of there, visibly afraid. His buddy physically took a step back when he saw two men pile out the tent to protect me.
I couldn't see out of one eye and was focused on retrieving my phone. They weren't going to leave with my phone if I had anything to say about it.
They had a gun and kept threatening to shoot us but it may not have had any bullets. Those threats didn't have any impact on our actions.
We called the police, filed a police report and I and probably one son were checked by paramedics but ultimately declined to be transported to a hospital.
I have a bloodshot eye but paramedics told me it's not a serious injury. I briefly thought he had permanently blinded me in that eye but most likely I temporarily couldn't see because of heavy bleeding from my forehead.
I looked really bad that night but the next day my face didn't look too bad. I may end up with a permanent scar on my forehead but I don't seem to be permanently seriously disfigured.
I generally get social feedback suggesting I look good for a woman my age and my brother made me believe he molested me for two and a half years "because I was too beautiful to resist". But I have no reason to believe that this man assaulted me because I'm a good looking woman and every reason to believe he assaulted me merely because I'm a woman at all and he saw opportunity to commit rape.
I have Venus at one degree of Cancer, Uranus at eleven degrees of Virgo and Pluto at fourteen degrees of Virgo. This means that Uranus and Pluto form a loose conjunction which is a concentration of power and the near point -- the point between them NOT on the far side of the circle (because there are always two mid points) -- is almost exactly quintile my Venus.
This describes the sexual abuse I endured and how it shaped my identity as a woman and made me fiercely protective of my freedom.
I have Mercury and Jupiter conjunct at eleven degrees of Gemini and my rising sign is at eleven degrees of Aries. I write a lot generally and I write frequently about myself having tried various approaches and found that it's the least worst answer in a space with zero actually good answers because using specific examples of social phenomena is a best practice for communicating ideas effectively but talking about other people is rife with endless problems, from not actually knowing all the details to violating someone's privacy to risking being sued for defamation.
I talk a little about famous people. I use snippets from movies and other popular media to illustrate ideas and make points. But mostly I talk about me because I know more of the details, I can disclose as much as I want about myself, it's my privacy and my right to treat it as I see fit.
I get accused of being a narcissist and talking too much about myself. You can't please all of the people all of the time and no matter what you do, someone somewhere won't like it.
Your rising sign describes your public image and this large piece of my natal chart describes my long quest to find solutions for seeing myself clearly and for trying to get the world to see me as I want to be seen.
So it describes my desire to start a clothing line so I can dress prettily without it being overly sexual.
Yes, I think that such clothes would help women with office jobs make their lives and careers work better, in part by simply making it easier to get dressed for work at all and in part by reducing friction with coworkers misinterpreting their clothes as an invitation to hit on them.
No, I don't believe how you dress either gets you raped or deters rape. People who commit violent assault randomly because they thought you were alone aren't doing it because of how you look, what you were wearing, because you smiled too much, were too friendly etc.
I'm pro death penalty and I wish planet Earth would start EXECUTING people who are the sort to smack a woman in the face without getting a good look at her first because that's their bizarre idea of foreplay.
There's absolutely nothing whatsoever I did to provoke this. I wasn't even actually ALONE somewhere. He merely THOUGHT I was alone and that made his decision to smack me in the face with intent to rape me without even knowing what I looked like.
Dressing better and in a less sexual manner to further your career works in a generally civilized setting where your biggest concern is unfortunate misunderstandings with men that you would like to do business with and not play footsies with.
That has zero bearing on whether or not some nutcase will violently assault you.
Nutcases violently assault you because they are violent rapey nutcases and anything they SAY about YOU and what you supposedly DID as to WHY they chose to commit violent assault is a bullshit excuse to try to help them get away with it.
They were going to do that regardless of what you did. Their primary reasons for it are:
1. They are just like that.
2. They saw OPPORTUNITY to do this shit and get away with it.
I desperately wish planet Earth would EXECUTE people like that and then leave the rest of us dealing with problems like "How do I dress appropriately for work so I can get a promotion?" and NOT wasting countless hours arguing about whether or not she was asking for it.
No, asshole, she wasn't ASKING to be raped. The definition of rape hinges on the detail of CONSENT and if you need to PROVE that how she was DRESSED somehow was a secret coded signal to a random stranger that she WANTED to be raped, you never had her consent and you fucking KNOW IT.
