shhh.. / just let it happen
A The Rape Sloth post.
An empty train carriage, forty free seats, and the one man who gets on sits next to you. He leans over to read your phone. You're reading about personal space. It doesn't help. "Smile, love, it might never happen." It's happening now, at the bus stop, and it's wearing a lanyard. At the office party, a colleague three wines in tells you "you're actually really fun" for the fourth time, from about four centimetres away. You've crossed the room twice. He has followed, like weather. You said no thanks to a drink at the bar. He heard "convince me". Twenty minutes later he's still explaining why, and your friend is pretending to faint so you can both leave. **Why it caught on:** it's a sloth's ordinary, permanent smile, edited to lean in close to a woman's face and captioned with rape jokes, the shock humour of early meme sites. The only true thing in it is the man who won't take no, and nearly everyone has met him. The sloth just has that face.