Disclaimer: I’m sending this out at 9AM PST. So I feel like I should tell you: this newsletter is about sexual assault. Please be forewarned.

Rape is a crime about property ownership. Almost all crimes are. The people in power (and their accomplices) know this. It is why we fund cops, instead of services. It is why cops rule every city and town, and why they’ll respond quickly to the wealthy and terrorize the poor.

Who has ownership over the territory of my body and mind? You, the rapist, have decided it isn’t me.

But the ownership of a female-coded body never belonged to the person who lives inside it, even before the moment of assault.

I never had ownership over my body in the first place.

The category of female (and, even, just plain femininity) sits at the base of a hierarchy of power. In our dualist society¹, we are either male or female, powerful or powerless. To enforce this hierarchy, certain people need to lose, or never obtain, rights to their own body.

This could be a crime—being forced to lose the right to one’s body. But it is not. It is actually a function of a robust institutional system, performed daily via several avenues.

Prisoners and immigrants placed in concentration camps lose the rights to their own bodies. They are forced to live in conditions they cannot choose; to eat, shower, and shit on someone else’s timeframe and usually in public view. They are often sexually assaulted by their captors.

Those who are left houseless by this system face a similar fate. Often, those left houseless are exiting carceral environments like prisons or foster care systems or fleeing domestic violence. Or, they have become old, infirm, ill, and have fallen behind on rent or mortgage payments. Their bodies have “failed” in the capitalist system, and they have, subsequently, lost the right to the body they occupy.

Without a house, people immediately lose the right to privacy and, therefore, to their own bodies.

People without homes usually cannot choose where to sleep, eat, shower, or shit. They can only fulfill basic needs on someone else’s timeframe or on someone else’s “charity.”

They are often forced to perform (saying prayers, for example) to gain access to basic needs, all while being gawked at. They are often victims of assault and sexual assault by people who are housed, or by the police themselves.

The institutional touch of this crime spree becomes softer as we enter settings with fewer restrictions (but similar surveillance), like the school, workplace, or home. These institutions often force those who push the issue to perform (in testimonies, HR meetings, or at divorce court).

But, for some of us, the institutions occasionally pretend to get on our level. They do a little performance back. Sometimes, a woman leaving an abusive relationship will get full custody. A creep will get fired. Harvey Weinstein will be jailed. Donald Trump will be president.

We have now entered an era where rape is no longer functionally legal. When Roe ended, millions lost any semblance of ownership over their bodies. Rape is no longer functionally legal; it is in fact legal.

Power has only ever had one playbook, reliant as it is on its pyramid structure.

Crows can pass information about human faces they have seen to their children. Humans are not so different, passing down ideas on faces (and their worthiness to the structure of the system) from one generation to the next.

We are at a contraction point globally. Those at the top are worried about the climate collapse. It will, most assuredly, have an impact on the system. So they are shoring up the base, making sure they get it strong and add as many people to the bottom as they can.

There is no better way to do that than by establishing, in the course of everyday life, who has power over our most basic things, like the territory of the body one occupies every day. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici writes of the 15th century:

…As, as the state-backed raping of poor women undermined the class solidarity that had been achieved in the anti-feudal struggle. Not surprisingly, the authorities viewed the disturbances caused by such policy (the brawls, the presence of youth gangs roaming the streets at night in search of adventure and disturbing the public quiet) as a small price to pay in exchange for a lessening of social tensions, obsessed as they were with the fear of urban insurrections, and the belief that if the poor gained the upper hand they would take their wives and hold them in common.

Women’s bodies are a peace offering made by the state. The violence the state enacted on feudal serfs, could be re-enacted by men in the streets, netting them a social cachet not unlike the wages of whiteness.

The system has stopped performing back even for those who they would have performed for in the past. A woman at Cornell was gang-raped by seven men. A horrific crime by any measure. The victim, on account of her youth and the sheer brutality of the crime, should be the type of victim for whom the system pretends to enact justice. Instead, Polymarket encourages betting on the outcome of her life.

Power has only one playbook and that playbook starts with a foundation of misogyny.

P.S. - Go see The Devils (1971) restoration while still in theaters.