There was a girl-duck in the pen with the big bunny today. She’s been there for a week or two, this nameless downy white she-duck, sitting on one end of the long pen, George the giant bunny on the other, a nice safe distance between them. They seemed to be pretty good pen mates.
She came from the pond in Wildlife to stay with us for a few weeks while she healed. She’d gotten hurt at the beginning of mating season. The male ducks have been, well, the way males are when they’re mating, focused, single minded, goal oriented — aggressive. It’s primal. It’s hard wired to ensure survival of the species, that need to spread the seed at any cost. She’d been raped, repeatedly, because she wasn’t strong enough to get away or dissuade any unwanted suitors. So, she’s living in a “safe house” with George, who has little or no interest in her.
All kinds of animals rape. Ducks can be violent, including gang rape, sometimes ending in death. The females have evolved complicated oviducts (vaginas) full of internal twists, turns and dead ends to try and prevent the males from fully penetrating them, evolution’s way of saying No!
Dolphins do it. Gangs of cute, cuddly dolphins will separate a female from the pod and have at her. Chimps too. I hate knowing this is part of the cycle and not some deviant, aberrant behavior.
I wonder, now, about Man. Is it is so hard-wired in us as well? We think we’ve evolved past certain things, into some higher form of life. We have emotions, language, logic, compassion, empathy. Yet men rape in every city and town in the world, sometimes secretly and individually, sometimes proudly and in gangs. Government sanctioned soldiers rape in Darfur, in the Congo, Bosnia, Colombia, all over the world.
When it happened to me, I was told I’d gotten what I deserved. I thought it was just part of human nature, or at the very least the nature of the humans I’d chosen to be around. If I’d had a complicated oviduct, if my vagina had had twists and dead ends, I would’ve been killed, without a doubt. Instead, I evolved my own defense. I played it “cool”, let it slide and rolled it into a little ball of anger that I kept inside for a long, long time. I kept it secreted away, feeding it until it grew so big it was like to crush and kill me.
I don’t know how to stop any of that, how to change people, to make them see the damage they do, the effect it has on the world, on their own souls and hearts, on their children, their families, on the future of our race, the damage it does not just to the survivor but to the perpetrator. I don’t know how to change that any way other than talking about it.
I can make a safe place in the world for myself today. And I can make a safe place for a duck, too.
