Deadly Waters (Rebecca Sorley, #1)

by Dot Hutchison

“You don’t get justice from guys like him. They join the Supreme Court or get elected president.”

Somewhere, someone has to be sad. Somewhere there are people who are more afraid of the gator than the man. Right?

what a wasted life if your death is met largely with relief. Sad and, well . . . horrible.

“I’m getting some air,” she tells the others. Susanna blinks at her. “What flavor?” she asks. “Swampy, humid, tinged with gasoline fumes, and, if there’s a bit of a breeze, maybe some eau de dumpster.” “Oh. None for me, then, thanks.”

She was smart, she was careful, she was sober, and none of it made any difference when a man decided he was entitled to her time and attention.

She’s not sure which of them needs the comfort—both, probably—but it brings with it the familiarity of a lifetime of sharing beds and air mattresses and sleeping bags with her horde of cousins and extended cousins, just because they could. Because it made the world a little less lonely.

If Ellie isn’t already a killer, is there anything in the world that could keep her from becoming one if she thinks she’ll be fucking thanked for it?

We spend so much time, she thinks, teaching girls how not to get raped, and then we attack them for it. If you drink, it’s your fault, but if you don’t drink, you’re a killjoy. If you show too much of your body, you’re asking for it, but if you cover up, you’re a prude, and you’re asking for it. You’re too loud; you’re not loud enough. You’re too paranoid; you’re not paranoid enough. It’s your fault. It’s your fault. It’s your fault. It’s impossible not to internalize that to some degree or another.

So many ways to tell girls they should protect themselves, she muses, but what are they telling the boys?

“Social contracts are often contradictory,” she continues. “A lot of them are designed to only benefit the people already in power. So, for example, if a man tells a woman she’s pretty, one set of contracts insists she say thank you, while another insists she modestly demur. Neither allows for the possibility that she’s uncomfortable or busy or at work. Neither allows for the attention being unwanted. ‘Thank you’ or ‘Who, me?’ Those are the acceptable answers, and there’s absolutely no way to know which contract the man is invoking, so either one you choose, you could still be punished for it. Or you can refuse the contract as a whole, reject the attention, and also be punished.”

“You see them all the time,” she says quietly. “When a man insists on buying a woman a drink she doesn’t want, but somehow she’s the rude one for declining. It’s used to coerce dances and dates and sex because we’re made to feel like we’re failing societal expectation.”

White straight men expect to feel safe in the world, whether they consciously think that way or not.