Apollo, Daphne, and #MeToo
After reading Helen Morales's chapter called #MeTu, I was so shocked to find out just how many rape myths there are in ancient mythology. Before this class, I was familiar with the big name gods and basically what I learned in Percy Jackson, but I didn't have an extensive knowledge. I was so angered by the story about Apollo and Daphne. Even after she begs not to be raped and is saved, he still uses her. It's disgusting. Morales said it teaches us that "it is the woman's appearance that is to blame for inciting male sexual aggression: she was asking for it." It's sad to me that it has been more than 2,000 years and we still tell the same story. We say that her skirt was too short, or she was too drunk, that she was asking to get raped. This chapter just really made me mad, because all of these stories still happen to girls now, and if we've been writing about it for that long you think we'd have found some way of stopping rape culture by now, but no. There were also some parts of the chapter that showed women supporting other women, like Philomela and Procne coming together and the woman who made Demeter laugh when she was searching the earth for Persephone. Still, I can't get past the fact that rape culture existed back then and still exists to this day, and there are so many parallels between there stories and the stories that victims share today about being silenced and not believed.