What is Rape Culture?

[jimhines]

Last night, I posted the following on Facebook and Tumblr:

It’s not that Ken Hoinsky ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund his book, “A Guide to Getting Awesome with Women,” filled with advice for aspiring rapists, like “Physically pick her up and sit her on your lap. Don’t ask for permission. Be dominant.”

It’s that 732 people backed his project on

Comments

[temporus]

I don't think its always intentional. And I get the cognitive dissonance. I've been there. And to be honest, it's far easier to see news reports of the horrors happening in some far off country. Where there's war, and you hear of local bands of armed "revolutionaries" going through a small village on some other continent, and raping all the women at gunpoint who are of a different ethnicity/tribe from them as a punishment, and think to yourself: well *THAT's* a rape culture for sure. So if I'm not out there doing that, I'm not in a rape culture.

Unfortunately that's the easy thought process. That's the easy stuff to point and say: that's bad. People shouldn't do that. (Even though we hear stories from our OWN miliary culture that promotes abuse and assault too.)

It's much harder to admit the evidence of a society right in front of us that tells men it's okay to behave wrong, and women that this behavior is normal/typical. Not just in big ways (although sometimes you hear the old "Well...boys will be boys...they didn't mean nothing by it.") but in lots of little ways that add up.

Gah, I keep feeling like I'm going off on a tangent.

I think I'll just point to your last line, because it sums up how I felt when I read that person talk about the phrase "Rape culture" as a dog whistle phrase:

"And when men respond to these conversations by trying to reframe them as a personal attack or accusation, it takes the focus off of the problem of rape and derails the conversation."