17,571 notes

What kind of world do we live in when young men are so proud of violating unconscious girls that they pass proof around to their friends? It’s the same kind of world in which being labeled a slut comes with such torturous social repercussions that suicide is preferable to enduring them. As a woman named Sara Erdmann so aptly tweeted to me, “I will never understand why it is more shameful to be raped than to be a rapist.”

And yet it is: so much so that young men seem to think there’s nothing wrong with—and maybe something hilarious about—sharing pictures of themselves raping young women. And why not? Their friends will defend them, as they did in Steubenville, tweeting that the young woman was “asking for it” and that the boys were being unfairly targeted.

Women and girls are the ones expected to carry the shame of the sexual crimes perpetrated against them. And that shame is a tremendous load to bear, because once you’re labeled a slut, empathy and compassion go out the window. The word is more than a slur—it’s a designation.

274 notes

To refer to a ‘rape culture’ means to acknowledge a social system that has slowly normalised rape and sexual assault through the bombardment of images, language, laws and social attitudes. At best, it views such violations as an inevitable part of life and therefore considers all efforts to try and stop it futile. At worst, it’s a culture in which victim-blaming is not just present but common, and standard caveats are invoked to excuse perpetrators for being unable to help themselves. It’s one that has media personalities calling women ‘strays’ on national television or saying that you don’t go home with someone at 3am for a cup of milo. It’s a culture that sexualises rape in the movies and it’s also one in which elected representatives can apply qualifying descriptors to describe the kind of rape they feel more comfortable with acknowledging.

46 notes

The idea that men cannot control their sexuality is dehumanizing. Men do not face systematic oppression simply for being men. But our cultural myth that men are always precariously on the edge of raping a woman, or that we cannot expect otherwise is hateful toward men, and something I will never object to being labeled misandry.

767 notes

Eradicating rape may very well be impossible. But as long as we continue to view it as a crime committed by an individual against another individual, absent of any social context, we will have little success in combating it. Women must feel fully entitled to public engagement and consensual sex - and if conservative and anti-feminist men [people] continue to argue that women’s very public presence enables men to assault them, then perhaps they’re the ones who should be pressured to stay home.

542 notes

In the same way, the anti-feminists in the atheist community claim that because the feminists object to non-consensual flirting, that means they must be against all flirting, despite the easily obtained evidence that feminists flirt and date and have all sorts of fun. You know, just consensually. Some anti-feminists, when confronted with this evidence, simply accuse feminists of “hypocrisy”, which only makes sense if you believe that a willingness to flirt with one man means an obligation to flirt with all. This argument, taken to its logical conclusion, has resulted in many rapists getting away from the charges by arguing that the victim was no virgin.

426 notes

Words are being used to dictate what women wear, how much they drink, what hours of the night they are allowed to travel in. It is more than 20 years since Paul Bernardo’s gruesome Scarborough attacks, and the conversation still hinges on what women should do to protect themselves. It has become tedium, this multiple-decade standard hum of complete disregard for a woman’s reality. When police “encourage women to be vigilant,” they fail to recognize that women are already living in a constant state of vigilance that is no way to live, under the ceaseless threat of violation, by a stranger or by someone they know. All these years and words and we have failed to learn that no amount of prescribed costume changing or behavioural policing will ever change that.