Dr Zuleyka Zevallos

So I have kept drawing him, kept needling, kept laughing at him, for a lot of reasons. It’s strategic. It’s a teaching opportunity, especially for men who might not realize that “unspeakably awful” segues into garden variety dudeliness real fast.

It’s also empowering. Someone who wants to intimidate women by threatening that deep a dehumanizing violation, that graphically? Wants power. Wants fear. Wants to have a weighty presence that commands some serious response that can be spun as “respect”.

Mockery and snark are the opposite of those things. You can watch how his DMs to me got increasingly desperate. You can watch how he tried to defuse things multiple times, to get me to play “we are now friends no harm no foul”

You can, in other words, tell that he very much wanted something from me. Anything sincere. Anything he could twist into an ego pat.

But there was harm. And it was a foul set of things to do and say. And I am not here for playing nice with rapists or rapist-wannabes. So I poked at his vulnerable spots and laughed at him.

But the most important reason, is that indigenous women are the most likely to be sexually assaulted of all racial groups.

So anytime someone wants to feed off my fear, I grow stronger from theirs. Anytime someone wants to objectify and dehumanize me, I make them the object of my scorn. I do it for myself. And I do it for the rest of us. And I’ll do it, and more, again and again.

And I hope, not because I think so much of myself, just because I want it so badly That by ridiculing disgusting horrible creeps, maybe I can help support healing and empowerment.