Personal Experiences with Rape Culture

This post has been a long time coming and it’s taken me awhile to get to mostly because it’s just not an easy answer.  I tend to be a believer in the idea that if you can’t explain something simply then you don’t understand it well enough to be explaining it and since it’s difficult for me to explain this simply I feel that I need to understand things better.  I’ve decided it’s time to give it a shot and I’ll just update it as greater understanding comes along.

I think the simplest way I can define rape culture is any society in which certain norms work together in such a way that it creates a culture in which rape and other forms of sexual assaults/violations are easy to commit.  It works differently in different cultures based on the specific social norms involved.  Rape culture works differently in, say, China than it does in India than it does in America than it does in Ireland than it does in Egypt than it does in Canada and so on and so forth.  The unifying threads, though, are always some form of misogyny and/or androcentrism and I honestly don’t think there’s a single society on the whole of Earth that is utterly devoid of rape culture.  Of course, I could be wrong here, there might be societies that are untouched but this horrible thing.  There definitely have been societies within human history on this planet that haven’t involved rape culture, that have even been decidedly anti-rape culture and perchance the threads of those societies still exist somewhere in our world today so strongly that they’re able to combat all the rape culture influences out there but I have a hard time believing that such a thing is possible in today’s world.  Imperialism and Colonialism are such massive forces in the world in which we all live and the Western cultures out there colonizing the spaces and minds of everyone on the planet through imperialist notions are all steeped in rape culture, filled to the brim with misogyny and androcentrism.  As such it’s hard for me to imagine that such influences are escapable by even the strongest most self-possessed societies out there.  I’d love to be wrong here…

There are thousands if not millions of issues that contribute to rape culture and I think that analyzing all of them would just be too much for a blog post, that’s the kind of thing that could take up a book.  So instead I’m just going to note some of what I think are the most salient contributors to rape culture in the US

• Dehumanizing and devaluing of people through things like Racism, Sexism, etc…
• Normative Bullying and Policing
• Victim Blaming
• Slut Shaming
• A society that doesn’t value consent
• A society that doesn’t value bodily autonomy/integrity as important rights for ALL people.
• A society that doesn’t recognize non-physical forms of abuse as abuse and/or doesn’t take non-physical forms of abuse seriously.
• A society that doesn’t recognize all the various forms of coercion that exist, doesn’t take coercion seriously, and doesn’t understand that coerced consent is not consent at all.
• A society that doesn’t respect the agency of certain people and actively denies and seeks to destroy the agency of those people.
• There’s definitely more but I think these are the most obvious, overt, and impactful issues.  Anyone who’s interested in suggesting additions is more than welcome to submit something.