Five thousand blazers in a single quad.
A sea of wool and cold entitlement.
The weight of five thousand men standing on the chest of one girl.
We can hear the ribs snapping under the pressure of the endowment.
The alumni.
The legacy.
The Board of Governors.
The organisation.
They are not anomalies.
They are the curriculum.
They are the architecture.
The porcelain cold of the dormitory floors where the secret is ironed into the sheets.
We cannot breathe under the sheer volume of the share.
They starch the collars to hide the bite marks.
They use the Latin for reputation to bury the English for rape.
The news calls it a guest commentary.
We call it the logistics of a war zone.
The Kansas City Star is just one witness in a global organisation of silence.
Editorial cowardice as a form of active participation.
The opinion is a bandage on a decapitation.
The ink is a bribe.
The paper is a shroud.
CNN uncovers the hidden world.
Sixty two million visits in a single month.
Motherless dot com.
A moral free file host where anything legal is hosted forever.
Nidal Al-Khatib sits in a room that smells of stale sweat and data.
He is the architect of the digital cage.
The curator of the auction.
The industrialisation of the violation.
He built the platform where the scream is converted into currency.
The Rape Academy is not a site.
It is an industrial complex.
The #eyecheck tag.
Lifting the closed eyelids of women to prove they are sedated.
Fifty thousand views on a video of a girl who cannot blink.
The #passedout tag.
Twenty thousand videos of sleep content.
The Zzz chat group where they trade the doses.
One hundred and fifty euros for a bottle of tasteless liquid.
Your wife won’t feel anything and won’t remember anything.
A milkshake spiked with tablets.
Imodium to stop the nausea so the violation can continue.
The digital bile of the comment section.
Twenty dollars for a livestream.
Three guys watching an unconscious wife in real time.
Cryptocurrency for the privilege of directing the predator.
This is the brotherhood.
We are the meat in your machine.
We are the bitches in your browser.
Annabelle Montagne calls it a bond.
Sandrine Josso calls it a school of violence.
We call it the end of the world.
Every woman knows another woman who has been assaulted.
The statistics are a map of our bruises.
One in three.
One in four.
The math is written in our blood.
But every man claims he doesn't know a rapist.
Where are they hiding?
They are in the quad.
They are in the counting house.
They are in the pub.
They are the ones you call mate.
They are the ones whose reputations you protect over our lives.
The silk noose of the old school tie.
How does every woman know a victim but no man knows a predator?
We were taught to clutch our keys like talons in the street.
We were taught to look over our shoulders in the dark alleyway.
But we were never warned about the man who makes the tea.
We were never told the predator is the person we lie next to.
That the front line is the home.
That the war zone is the bed.
This is the final extraction.
Primitive accumulation through the violation of the girl in the blazer.
The body as the last colony.
The organisation is the disease.
Management of reputational risk.
The non-disclosure agreement is the new gag.
The safeguarding policy is a suicide note for the victim.
The algorithmic commodification of the non-consensual.
Compliance as a form of burial.
Due diligence as a form of erasure.
The privatisation of the scream.
This is not a glitch.
This is the tradition.
The Magdalene Laundries with a high speed connection.
The St. Paul’s locker room with a global reach.
The comfort women of the digital age.
The Pelicot trial where seventy men lined up for the slaughter.
Gisele drugged over two hundred times by the man who shared her bed.
It is the same harvest.
The same extraction of the spirit for the profit of the elite.
Valentina says she was treated like slaughterhouse meat.
The husband you lie next to is the one you should fear.
The verdict is in and the data is an acid.
It is dissolving the edges of the self.
The Prozac is a placebo for the metadata.
The algorithmic assault is unravelling the weave.
We are a mess of doll parts and data.
Shattered things flickering on a screen.
The general misery of the owned image.
Our anatomy is a file to be downloaded.
Our fear is a metric to be tracked.
The industrialisation has reached the marrow.
We are not your guest commentary.
We are the decapitated heads on your table.
The share button is the guillotine.
But the blade never falls.
It just stays.
The notification is a permanent strike.
The share is forever.
Data retention as a form of prolonged assault.
The cache is a wound that refuses to clot.
You cannot safeguard a panopticon.
You cannot archive a violation that is still happening.
The share.
The share.
The share.
It is a technical manual for a crime that never stops.
The archive is not a memory.
It is a weapon that is always loaded.
The #eyecheck is the final law.
The world looking at the victim.
But the victim’s eyes are held shut by the very men who are watching.
And you are watching.
You are the view count.
You are the subscriber.
You are the silence in the quad.
The trigger is in your pocket and the screen is a mirror.
The end of the world is not a bang or a whimper.
It is the sound of your thumb clicking share.
Comments
Post a Comment