A cartoon about rape culture and risk

[thucythucy]

185. I'm sorry to say I think most men then

and many men now were and are absolutely clueless about "the elaborate calculations" that women make to avoid being raped, and the experiences so many have had surviving rape, assault, and harassment.

I'm getting on in years, but even though, during my adolescence and young adulthood, rape and sexual violence were Taboo subjects, almost never discussed, I was aware, even back then of:

one family where a young girl was being raped by her older brother (father was a devout Christian, big mucky muck in their church, therefore no one dared bring it up out loud);

two teenaged girls I knew who were raped hitch hiking, consensus was: it's their own damn fault;

one good friend raped on a date;

another good friend raped by a college professor after she was invited into his office after class....

another friend raped in a parking lot after someone put something in her drink.

And those are only the stories people told me. I'm sure there were lots of girls and women (and some boys and men) who told no one, for all the obvious reasons.

Since then I've only heard many more stories.

Most women, in my experience, don't talk about this around men because men, especially back then, almost invariably got defensive or angry. Defensive as in "it can't possibly be that bad" or "men have it tough too you know" (and look up thread to see what I mean). Angry as in: "If I ever see that guy I'll cut his balls off" or "how could you have been so stupid?" (Have heard both responses to women disclosing about rape). There was also the "spoiled goods" interpretation of rape, not to mention, "that only happens to THOSE kind of girls."

So I think your last paragraph has it right. No one, or very few people, talked about what was "really going on back then." Lots of times it wasn't even recognized as rape (often still isn't--"legitimate" vs. "not really rape&quot . It was just accepted as the normal background noise of a culture where men were encouraged "to score" as much as they could, and where "no means no" wasn't even a slogan, much less accepted as a rule to live by.

Which is why Susan Brownmiller had to write her book, why the women's anti-rape movement had to start as a grassroots effort, why rape crisis centers started as volunteer organizations keeping themselves arms length from the (male dominated) police.

Have you read Brownmiller's book? People grouse about various aspects of it, but it's really an excellent primer on how rape has been treated through the ages. It had quite the impact when it was first published--because finally someone was actually writing about "what was really going on."

Best wishes.