What Is Rape Culture?
I'm so glad you asked!
The system is not broken, it’s working exactly as intended.
Violence against women and children is endemic, a load bearing pillar holding up the Capital’s vaulted ceiling.
Did we learn nothing from Eric Swalwell, whose alleged predatory practices were an open secret for more than a decade (allegedly)?
Social media influencers—women, not politicians, not police—worked together to unmask him.
And yet….Despite the depth and breadth of his alleged crimes, Swalwell did not leave office in shame. He left in stages.
He ended his race for governor of California to “work on his marriage.”
As additional allegations became public, some of his peers suggested he resign from the House of Representatives.
When he finally agreed to leave, his narrative centered his experience rather than the women’s accusations: being drugged and raped.
That’s rape culture.
Voting out centrist Democrats and replacing them with Democratic Socialists will not save humanity.
Trading women’s long-term safety and security for hypothetical, short-term harm reduction is the definition of rape culture.
Letting a pedophile out of jail because his future potential is worth more than women and children’s lifelong trauma, is rape culture.
There can be no lasting change until systemic rape culture is dismantled.
Got any more examples of rape culture? As a matter of fact, I do!
Rape culture is blaming rape victims for being raped in a Reddit post and then saying you didn’t really mean it.1
Rape culture is framing reckless, impulsive, and deceptive sexting with 6–12 women as an indiscretion, a matter between a husband and a wife.2
Every time excuses are made for sexist language, that’s rape culture.
Every time a pass is given for a man’s failure to take “no” for an answer, that’s rape culture.
Telling women to minimize the impact because it was just a joke, and can’t you take a joke, and why are you such an uptight bitch anyway? is rape culture.
Asking women to choose the lesser of two evils rather than presenting a good choice, is rape culture.
Expecting women to self-sacrifice over and over and over again because men start wars and commit genocide is rape culture.
Instead of asking women to take another one for the team, why don’t the “good men” clean up the bad men’s shit?
And what of the “bad women” you ask?
There will be no one left to save them.
They will learn the hard way that loyalty to the patriarchy will not save them either.
Question for the Comments:
Have you ever been asked to sacrifice your own well-being for the good of someone else or a group of other people? How did that make you feel?
More Graham Platner, the symptom of the problem du jour. When someone repeatedly tells you who they are, says they are sorry, blames it on dark times, but hasn’t taken action to become a better person, believe them the first time.
Swalwell. Platner. It just gets worse, the hypocrisy of the “good” guys and their enablers. Thank you, Amy, for such an incisive piece.
I read something awful but relevant in a book called Dear Sisters : Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement (Rosalyn Baxandall). It was actually a quote from the primary obstetrics medical school book that was used up through at least the 1970s. The quote essentially said that all sex is a kind of rape because women naturally want to be dominated by men