"Silly me, how could I not realised that the real victims here are the men who have to live in fear of women who talk about their genuine fears of being killed."
Yes, literally everyone agrees that rape is bad. The problem is that in our culture, we have a bad habit of rationalizing what we do as not really rape. How many times have you heard someone ask what a woman was wearing, or why she was walking home at night instead of driving, or why she was alone at a bar, or why she didn’t fight back, or why she didn’t report sexual violence as soon as it happened? Why does nearly every woman have at least one experience with sexual violence? Why did we elect a guy who openly admitted to sexual assault as president? It’s almost like we have a culture around enabling and forgiving rape, in large part by rationalizing it as “not really” rape. I wonder if there’s a word for a culture that enables sexual violence.
Yes, literally everyone agrees that rape is bad. The problem is that in our culture, we have a bad habit of rationalizing what we do as not really rape. How many times have you heard someone ask what a woman was wearing, or why she was walking home at night instead of driving, or why she was alone at a bar, or why she didn’t fight back, or why she didn’t report sexual violence as soon as it happened? Why does nearly every woman have at least one experience with sexual violence? Why did we elect a guy who openly admitted to sexual assault as president? It’s almost like we have a culture around enabling and forgiving rape, in large part by rationalizing it as “not really” rape. I wonder if there’s a word for a culture that enables sexual violence.