before the bedroom; rape culture and the illusion of power

“In rape-crisis training, I learned what makes men rape. And it is not some inbred sexual urge that is just part of man's biology. It is power and privilege. I learned what keeps women silent. It is fear.”

Rape doesn’t start in the bedroom, a dark alley somewhere, or a bathroom at a party. The action of rape is grounded in rape culture, which is perpetuated every time a woman gets told to smile, is denied reproductive healthcare, or is referred to as getting cracked or smashed. It’s a culture that surrounds and placates us largely without our noticing. And while everyone says they care about rape, too many of us are willing to put those moral reservations aside when it comes to the language we use, the media we consume, the people we keep around and even elect into office. To turn a blind eye to rape culture is to completely ignore the root causes of rape and sexual assault. 

Historically male administrations have effectively been committing rape against their female citizens for centuries. They take a woman’s governance over her body and turn it into a political instrument, inadvertently telling its citizens that a woman’s choice is always up for debate. I wouldn’t make the argument that the politicization of female reproductive rights is part of rape culture if it also applied to male reproductive rights, but it doesn’t, and it’s clear why. The seeds of rape culture are planted here because rape has never been about sex– it’s about power. 

It’s not a secret that men have historically had more power and privilege than women, which consequently gave them power over women. Now that women have more rights than ever before, many seem to think that the fight for power is over; women won. But equality of power is about more than having the right to vote or work. For centuries, men have been conditioned to view themselves as superior to women, and it’s going to take more than giving women the right to vote to reverse that. Even if men have less actualized power now, rape will continue as long as they continue to believe in that illusion.

When a man tells a woman to smile, how to dress and speak, or constantly speaks over her, he is acting on the assumption of entitlement that systemic power has given to men. Even in simple interactions with a stranger, men are so conditioned to view women as submissive to them that they are comfortable commanding a random stranger to mold herself to his liking, disregarding her agency completely. It doesn’t matter that he has no relationship to this woman, or any actual power over her decisions. She is perceived not as a person, but as a benefit acquired by privilege. And we as women have in turn been conditioned to adhere to these expectations. We are constantly apologizing, trying to take up less space, killing ourselves to mold our bodies to perfection, and projecting our internalized misogyny onto our friends and daughters. As much as we would like to believe that we put on makeup and shave our armpits for our own aesthetic pleasure, we can’t ignore the fact that those standards wouldn’t exist if a man hadn’t decided at some point that that was what he wanted. In the past, women were considered possessions of men, so men could choose what their women looked like, when they spoke, when and how they had sex. But times have changed; men don’t actually have the power to do that anymore, so why are we still allowing them to believe they do?

The song U.O.E.N.O by Rocko is a great example of how rape culture conditions men to view women. The song has a very clear theme; he spends the first few verses talking about the things that give him status–his money, cars, drugs, thousand dollar shoes. Then he gets to the hook: Put molly all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it. I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain’t even know it. Putting aside the alarmingly casual way rape is depicted, it’s very telling to the way rape culture conditions men to view women. Money and power entitle you access to possessions; symbols of status like jewelry and cars. Rape culture has men believing that women are one of those possessions. 

It might seem trivial to point out but it’s not, because rape culture would also have us believe that rape is not that big of a deal. It wants us to push our limits of what’s acceptable, and that’s accomplished by songs like U.O.E.N.O, which are openly condemned but still manage to go viral on TikTok. It’s accomplished when abusers get to promote their “comebacks” on The Tonight Show, and when a man is found guilty of sexual abuse but gets to continue to sit in the highest office in the country and make televised speeches to half the world. Euphoria, written by a man and one of the most popular shows on TV, shows a fourteen year old who gets statutorily raped but tries to justify the encounter because “she was in control”. We live in a time where we spend most of our time consuming media, whether consciously or not. We underestimate how much it affects our behaviors and the things we deem acceptable. When the media we feed our brains with 24/7 is constantly trivializing rape, dehumanizing women, and platforming rapists, we become slowly become desensitized to rape culture, making ourselves susceptible to its influence.

When a woman is raped by a man, the conversation is often centered around finding a way to blame the woman and justify the man’s actions. What was she wearing? Was she drunk? Did he buy her dinner first? The conversation is still incorrectly assuming that rape is about sex. It doesn’t actually matter what she was wearing or drinking; women get raped whether they’re wearing burkas or bikinis. The instinct to blame the woman is just another consequence of rape culture, because it is easier to blame the individual woman than to address the much larger issues of rape culture and power, and to acknowledge that society has failed women. 

We can resist rape culture. If we are aware of it, we can resist it. We can choose not to conform to patriarchal beauty standards, we can choose to take up space, we can choose to call out tenets of rape culture when we see them. We can remind them that their power is not real. The key to stopping rape is not just teaching women how to defend themselves when the moment comes. The key is stopping rape before it starts. 

Readings:

Primed for Violence: The Role of Gender Inequality in Predicting Internal Conflict on JSTOR 

Rape Culture: It's all around us on JSTOR 

Rape Culture: Media and Message on JSTOR  

From "Ladies First" to "Asking for It": Benevolent Sexism in the Maintenance of Rape Culture on JSTOR 

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