Spare me your rape fantasies.

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Miss Sassy, the Ohio cat that started rumors Haitian immigrants were eating pets, is safe, at least until J.D. Vance eats her. Just my opinion, but frankly, Miss Sassy could stand to have a little bit less sass, given the full-scale national moral panic she incited.

Anyway, with Miss Sassy safe from hungry Haitians, we’re back to the classic “immigrant rapist” discourse.

Rep. Nancy Mace introduced a bill to deport any “illegal aliens” accused of sexual assault or domestic violence. “I find the debate shameful,” declared Mace, a woman sponsoring a bill named, “Violence Against Women by Illegal Aliens Act.”

“I myself am a survivor or rape. I understand the lifelong trauma as someone who has survived rape!” OK, cool, sponsor a bill that helps rape survivors.

With rape in the air, my online feeds were flooded with B.S. stats apparently showing high high HIGH HIGH! rates of rape by Latin American immigrants in the US and Middle Eastern and African refugees in Europe. These, of course are ridiculous. Studies show violent crime rates are lower in immigrant communities.

Of course it happens. Anyone, immigrant or native-born, is more likely to commit sexual assault than eat a cat! But you already can be deported for a violent crime. Why would you risk it after everything you’ve been through because you can’t control yourself and just have to rape?

This is so fucking obvious that I’m boring myself: The obsession with rape is rooted in racist fears of miscegenation. And it’s a symbol of the penetration of the body politic, here represented by young fertile white women. It’s the exact same dynamic at play in the foul, pornographic rape fantasies graphically evoked in the NYT’s disgusting “Screams Without Words.”

Stop! Just STOP! I’m sick of hearing people’s demented rape fantasies. Wasn’t there a whole thing a decade ago where feminists debated if it was feminist or not feminist to have rape fantasies? Let’s go with, I couldn’t care less, but I’d rather not hear the rape fantasies of fascists and right-wingers.

***

My friend Julie and I went to a refugee camp in Bulgaria last year. It’s mostly young Syrian men. See, something I learned there, that I should have known, was that my wealthy Syrian friends in New York? God bless ‘em and they didn’t have it easy. But when the war escalated their parents sent them to Europe or Brooklyn on an airplane. Meanwhile, Merkel suctioned up a lot of the upper middle-class professionals because Germany was short of doctors and engineers.

These guys we met at the camp, they were working class or poor and had to slog through the woods and get smuggled through the border overpaying smugglers with money saved over months or years. One 16-year-old, who’d made the crossing by himself, was covered in burn marks, not from a bomb but because he’d been electrocuted doing construction as like a 12-year-old.

The war had started when they were children; like the children of Gaza they have exactly zero role in hostilities, except for as innocent victims.

As my friend Julie and I walked around the dusty, gutted town, we were repeatedly told by the townspeople that the refugees “carry knives” and “rape.” (Do you see what I mean about how bored I am by the symbolism? I feel like I’m teaching a Semiotics class to myself).

“They rape children,” some 9-year-olds told us somberly. That’s what they’d heard.

“Honey, they don’t rape children,” I said gently, and he admitted that there was a nice Syrian girl in his class, who was not a rapist. I fumed against the monstrous old people who’d planted the idea in their little heads. At the very least, why make a child think about child rape?

I partially take that back. The townspeople aren’t monsters. Unlike in Britain, or in Turkey, where many refugees came from, there hasn’t been mass violence directed at the refugees. When I told my Mom, she had an interesting observation about why older people might be telling children the refugees are rapists. Racism, obviously, but not just the racism of the townspeople, but the polite, structural racism of everyone else.

The EU tries to fop off the refugees on poorer members like Bulgaria. Then, the Bulgarian government places the refugees in a poor rural village, even though it would be better for everyone if they were processed in cities with resources.

Let’s say you’re a poor Bulgarian villager. You’ve rarely left the country. You rarely go to Sofia. You’ve known every single person in your village since birth. All of the sudden, the place is bursting with Syrian and Iraqi young men. They are very handsome, let me just observe. You start to worry that in a fit of rebellion your teenage daughter will take up with one of them. Of course it’ll manifest in absurd paranoia about them “raping children.” Ugh this Semiotics class is getting more tedious by the minute.

***

After dinner, my friend and I got a hotel room in the town. As it turned out, four young guys had pooled their money and rented the room across from ours to get a break from the camp. We hung out with them all night, going back and forth on Google translate, which is a lot more fun than it sounds.

They did nothing even approximating a display of sexual aggression.

Think about it: this is four 23-year-old men, who haven’t seen women under 60 in months (the town is one of those places young people leave). They got insta-crushes on Julie and I, because, as I like to point out, despite our government’s best efforts, people love Americans. To them, some random, relatively attractive, relatively youngish American women just popping into their shitty camp in the shitty town was tantamount to seeing a movie star.

I don’t want to be like, “You see!? These refugees didn’t rape us!” because that’s an odd form of argument… I guess I’m just trying to explain why I get into HULK RAGE when people spread tropes about immigrant rapists. As a woman you get vibes, about whether it’s a good idea or a bad idea to go in a room by yourself with strange men. It’s based on body language, words, degree of aggressive ogling, and of what areas. Would I feel comfortable in RFK’s hotel room? Probably not (because I wouldn’t trust myself to not sexually assault him and then batter him with nude pics, natch).

These guys were flirty, but they never, ever made us uncomfortable. It just sickens me someone would look at them and think potential “rapist” because … of their skin and country of origin? Spare me your rape fantasies.