You know, the more I think about this, the less I feel like people should be hard on the rape-joke-accusing commenter.
She's wrong, yes. Very wrong. And she refuses to admit it. But from my experience knowing a survivor of severe childhood trauma, her behavior fits the bill for someone who's gone through a lot more in her life than anyone should ever have to -- and that behavior is a subconscious attempt to keep from becoming a victim ever again.
There's two parts to this, actually.
1) The initial freak-out.
Sometimes, when something reminds a trauma survivor about their own experiences, they begin to relive what happened to them. And I don't mean "Think about what happened and feel bad about it," I mean "Their mind literally goes to a place where the event is happening again and they have a hard time distinguishing it from reality." It's possible that the specifics of what was said on the most recent page (The language used by the demon, the reference to "dog pile") triggered that kind of memory, and in the confines of her mind she was raped all over again.
This isn't Thunt's fault. No one who hasn't been through exactly what that specific commenter has been through would even think about interpreting the page as a rape joke. But it isn't worth being hard on her for interpreting it that way.
2) The refusal to admit she's wrong.
One of the main things that traumatizes rape victims is the sense of loss of control. Having something forced on you that is usually reserved for the most intimate and joyful occasions can completely redefine a person's sense of self, a person's view of the general trustworthiness of the world.
I'm going somewhere with this, I promise.
To keep the trauma from happening again, it's often instinctual for victims to try to remain in control. If the they can keep in control of everything around them, then they can keep herself from being victimized again. This attitude becomes a fundamental part of the way victims deal with and react to the world.
Here's the key to all this: Victims don't trust that things will be okay if things don't go they way they planned. They didn't turn out okay before, and they don't want things to turn out the same way again.
In her mind, the safest thing to do is to assume that the people gaining up on her and calling her wrong is an attack on her as an individual, rather than an attack on her ideas. And even if people try to make it clear that that's not the case, she won't trust them. She can't trust them. That kind of basic trust in humanity led to her rape in the first place. She will do everything it takes to defend herself from an attack and control the situation she's in, no matter how much it she has to reach to find a way to come up with a defense.
And she will never admit that she is wrong. To admit that she's wrong requires trust that she cannot give.
So, in short: it's best to just leave her be. We're not going to change her mind, or even put her in a place where she is capable of seeing that her mind needs to be changed. Getting her to that place would take years of therapy and would be a major breakthrough for her.
It's best to just let her be.
