Even though the OP of that was saying some pretty awful shit, I wouldn't wish rape on my worst enemy.

I do think a lot of people are very ignorant as to what rape is and what it does and why it's just so different from every other crime. Men in particular will likely never be raped or be in danger of being raped. And so that gives us this blind spot to what it is and what it means. That is, unless you experience it yourself, or you know someone very well who will describe what it is like to help you understand. For women, I think most women have felt the threat of sexual violence - whether real or perceived - at some point which helps them understand more.

Rape is such a uniquely terrible thing because it's someone taking something precious from you without your consent and rendering you helpless. Something that should be great and fun and wonderful that you should be able to choose to share and they're just taking it and making it into something ugly and terrible and violent.

And then what comes afterwards is possibly even worse. You get blamed for it. Every rape victim I know was blamed for what happened to them at some point. What were you wearing? How much did you have to drink? Did you struggle? I know girls who were beaten up by their boyfriend, accused of cheating, thrown out of the house naked just after being raped. This stuff really is not uncommon. Sometimes your family won't believe you, sometimes the police won't believe you. Sometimes the police will believe you, but your community will turn on you because of how much of a ruckus you're causing. You'll see prayer vigils on the local news praying for "Both parties involved in this awful incident", but you weren't involved. You just lay there and hoped it would be over soon and you wouldn't get hurt. Maybe you got pregnant and there's no easy and affordable access to an abortion. Maybe you get one anyway and now people call you a monster, a baby murderer.

And then at some point you'll realize that every time you tell someone they're going to see you as a victim. As tainted by what happened to you. That you can never go back to before you were raped. And you never see justice. The vast majority of rapists never see the inside of a cell. But you never get to go back and pretend it didn't happen. You have to deal with the nightmares, the nervous sweats, the stigma of being a rape victim, the trauma - what did they have to deal with? Why does it seem like you're being punished for being the victim of a crime?

I have never been raped, never been afraid I was going to be raped, never thought much about it for a long time until I became involved with a rape victim and I saw the pain in her eyes when she talked about it. It blew my mind and opened my eyes in a way that changed the way I saw everything. I see a lot of these same views I used to hold on reddit all the time. It's just ignorance. It's a bunch of people who, like me, have never though about rape or had it described to them. They don't know what it is or what it means.

Check this out. It's a text-based "game" that, I don't know, might help people understand.