The fact that most people with PTSD are sexually abused women, and yet only male soldiers are ever focused on just doesn’t sit right with me
I promise you the PTSD of prostitutes is often worse and worse to live with than that of a war veteran.
Nothing is quite as profoundly destructive psychologically than sexual violation and violence are. "Death before rape": "the bear might kill me but least it wouldn't rape me": these mentalities exist for a damned reason.
Also, chronic traumas typically effect a person more significantly than traumas from relatively isolated incidents and experiences. It even has a new designation to account for that: C-PTSD, meaning complex PTSD. Women can easily be sexually harassed and abused their whole lives from the time of early childhood; and the sick reality is that women who were molested as girls are more likely to end up prostituted and sex trafficked. Meaning trauma upon trauma.
Men however are not sent to war at five, then again at ten, at twelve, at sixteen, at eighteen; or even sent to war at five only to never get to come home. And they don't have four billion people roaming around the planet with them who can possibly throw them onto the battlefield at any given moment, and who will probably do so more than once during their lives.
They go over to the battlefield at some point, serve a tour; and once they come back home they can typically guarantee they won't be dropped into it again. Sure, they may serve a tour or two more, but they leave home for it; and they can often avoid doing any more depending on the details of their military contract.
Sure; they may have trauma, but if they go to the bar to drink it away they don't have to worry that some man will come along and suddenly teleport them back into it. Etc, etc...
Sex is also something that you're supposed to be able to share with someone you love, and find intimate pleasure and connection in. Having trauma around that is extremely damaging and debilitating. There's no equivalency there with war.
Men/veterans also don't experience a whole systemic invalidation, mockery, and even fetishization; of their traumatic experiences.
Prostituted women do. All women do.
Living as a woman with sexual abuse trauma is worse, and there are a lot of reasons.
Thank you so so so so much for saying this !!!! War veterans are not even 25% of all the victims who have PTSD. But as they are seen as only men then suddenly it matters! Like always, nothing is important until it concerns a man or men even if it already conceded millions of women and girls. 💀














