When I get a press release about an artist creating work about something terribly painful and terribly personal, I worry.

As a person, I worry that the artist will somehow be hurt in the process of showing the art. People won't like it enough, or they will like it too much. There will be too much response, or too little. The original trauma will be reaccessed and reshaped, made worse.

As a critic, I worry that I won't respond the right way to the art. What's the right way? I don't know. I worry I'm supposed to know.

I haven't experienced rape. I fear it—I even fear typing these words, as if they will make it happen somehow. Someone recently carded me at the grocery store, and told me I looked younger than my years, and my first thought was to wonder whether the statistics that say older women get raped less will help any if older women don't look like older women to potential rapists.

To my beloved friends who have been raped, and to those of us who live scared of it, we all should know that people will be standing together, and trying to make art against rape and for sexual consent, on Thursday night at V2 on Capitol Hill. No, I don't know whether a work of art can stop a rape. Don't ask me to answer questions like that. I'm busy enough looking over my own shoulder and raging at what's happened to far too many of the people I love already.