i think this hits the nail on the head. the widespread, longstanding denial about the ubiquity of sexual assault is not necessarily always motivated by a desire to protect abusers at all costs-- that's just the practical end result of a more complex set of psychological impulses. a lot of it is that people tend to behave in ways that accord with what they wish were true, even with a mountain of evidence suggesting the contrary.

i only bring this up because it's relevant, but i have been the victim of multiple sexual assaults in my own life. it took me decades to even admit to myself that they happened, and then years of therapy to make my peace with it all. it's like the old saying about eating an elephant, you have to do it a bite at a time. it took decades of chewing to get to the point where i can talk about it matter-of-factly, even pseudonymously on an internet forum.

and during that process, the biggest and hardest bite to swallow, for me, was realizing that i live in a world where all the people who do these horrible soul-destroying things are normal human beings, with thoughts and feelings and insecurities. they all have inner lives just as rich and varied as my own. they are just like all the people i already know. hell, statistically speaking, they ARE the people i already know. they are not uniquely evil monsters, born to be a villain in a story. we just live in a world where people have the ability to hurt each other in permanently debilitating, ineffably cruel ways, and do so regularly.

and that's too big and too scary of a reality for a lot of folks to face, especially if they haven't experienced that kind of psychological violence firsthand. it's so much easier to mentally inhabit a world where our psyches are perfectly elastic, and however much they temporarily deform under the stress of a violent collision with another, they always pop right back into shape afterward. but that's not the world we actually live in. and i kind of wonder if society is collectively even willing to make the effort required to accept that.