Why do these women go the fat route after sexual assault and not black belt in karate? I could understand the first year or two, but come on. Learn some damn skills after a bit and toughen up.
To echo everyone else - karate skills won't do much against rape, unless your vision of it is you getting assaulted by a lone, unarmed individual that's not yet gotten into a position to overpower you. And that you're in a position to even defend yourself in the first place, not held down or intoxicated or freezing from fear or being coerced into it with a weapon.
Nobody knows what Bekah's particular experience was, but dark alleyway assaults by unarmed strangers while you're just coming home completely sober are a small minority, not a rule. And you also have to keep in mind that women in general are less prone to risk-taking behaviour than men. While karate chopping a knife or an arm away might look cool in movies, irl you can just get shanked for your troubles just as easily, if you even attempt it in the first place, which a lot of women won't, instead choosing the compliance route in hopes to get out of the situation alive.
And once the assault happened, a lot of women dissociate from their bodies, and indeed fatten up or starve themselves to try and become as unappealing as possible to prevent future assaults.
You seem to underestimate how hard it is to get out of the rabbit hole though. Starting from your physical well-being, once you've been a sedentary lardass for a year (or even a couple of months), it is very hard to change the habits that got you there in the first place. Mentally too, you get the feeling that everyone is judging you (when nobody actually cares), so you might as well stay at home and keep eating. Mental health is tricky that way.
You can snap out of it even without any outside assistance or therapy eventually of course, but it's a personal journey, and one that Bekah is clearly not ready to undertake, especially not with all the delusions the HAES community keeps peddling to her.
Well that, and some individuals are just mentally stronger than others, I guess. Not to PL too much, but I've seen a friend shrug off a parking lot rape by a nigger, well cope with it as best she could by blocking off those memories and "moving on", while an acquaintance fell into the same "I must eat" HAES rabbit hole after a way less objectively traumatic assault (getting molested, not raped, in a nightclub).
