Double sided 43” x 43” mural installation.

You’ve shored up your defenses, shielding yourself from the words hurled at you in court, in social media, and in the mainstream press. Nevertheless, some pierce the net of your chainmail: young, beautiful, sexy, smart, hot, prude, flirt, oversexed, trouble, damaged, transgressive, hysterical, bitch, suspect, strategic, orchestrating, deceptive, liar, calculating, hostile, vicious, vile.

Those contradictory words are meant to shame and humiliate. You are meant to internalize them, use them against yourself. Dead. That is how they want you to be. Those words pound the message into your mind and body: be dead.

Those words stop you until a woman calls. She was raped. She shares the word that the litigators drilled into her so profoundly that it echoes through her decades: “controlling.” Another raped woman calls. Another courtroom. The word they threw at her was “nasty.” One woman didn’t go to court. She fell silent after her fiancé called her “a dumb cunt” for “getting herself” raped. You know her fiancé. People refer to him as “a nice guy.” There is one word that they call all of you: “liar.”

After the violence of their trials, too many raped women wind up dead. You collect their stories.

Because you, too, are at the mercy of a legal system built on the assumption that women are property, you also collect outrageous rulings on recent rape cases.

Australian judge rules rape of aboriginal girl “traditional.”

New Jersey judge rules rape of twelve-year-old not “especially heinous or cruel.”

A man who raped a thirteen-year-old girl is acquitted by a Swedish judge on the grounds that her body was “well developed.”

A Michigan judge awards a man joint legal custody of a child whose mother he raped when she was twelve.

 Man cleared in the rape of seventeen-year-old girl because Mexico judge rules that he didn’t enjoy it.

London Judge accused a raped sixteen-year-old girl of grooming her teacher for sex. The judge said, “If anything, it was she who groomed you. You gave way to temptation at a time when you were vulnerable because of problems with your wife’s pregnancy.”

You pry each sharpened word out of your body. You are going to make them yours. You get out of bed. You put your fears in the back of the linen closet.

You refuse to be dead.

We refuse to be dead.