It's Time to Stop Denying Rape Culture Exists

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year y’all! The one day that acts to provide women a hassle-free space to occupy and chill without pandering to the normative patriarchy that seeps into our everyday lives. A day that instills a much-needed sense of power and righteous frenzy (and probably visions of frothing menstrual blood like our very own “just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water”) for confounded dudes everywhere.

And confounded dudes are everywhere.

There’s a real ominous hesitation when writing a piece like this because of the looming, noxious cloud that comes in the form of the knee-jerk, responsive aggression in our mainly male commenters. This isn’t a disclaimer, I’m aware of the skew embedded in the VICE audience, I work here. It’s more of an appeal to suspend your thinking for a second to expand beyond the preliminary reaction of othering an experience, just because it isn’t, and has never been, your own. If you could do that for a moment here—or for the day in question—then that would be tight.

Rape culture as a term has been used a lot in the media this week, following the accusations leveled against the University of Ottawa’s hockey team. Rape culture as a thing? Well that has been around for-fucking-ever. That’s why I couldn’t turn a blind eye to the apparent blind eyes that have been vocalizing their very real dismay at this term entering their lives.

Ignorance is scary. It’s scary because it can take so many forms and ignorance, at its core, is unapologetic and thereby immune to reasoning. Ignorance as a motivator is by far the most terrifying, because it so quickly can lead to outright aggression while serving as a binding agent to groups of people too afraid to address their own lack of knowledge. The ignorant choose to willfully ignore and rationalize that not knowing something, and not caring to know, is a shield that can be wielded at pretty much anything.

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Vocalizing that you don’t understand something, if in fact you do not understand something, seems like a no-brainer. It automatically opens up a willing dialogue and means to a feel-good end for everybody, even if you don’t end up agreeing. But of course that all hinges on whether or not you’re speaking to assholes. Vocalizing that you don’t understand something as paramount and all-encompassing as rape culture might seem overwhelming if you really don’t know, but it seems fucking baffling when it’s existence in our culture is everywhere and reinforced daily.

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Rape culture is: reporting rape victims as being “impaired” when they were drugged, rape culture is rape justifiable as a form of punishment, where so little is thought of the victim that they are then nearly thrown overboard from a cruise ship after being raped, like they were disposable. Rape culture is the continual and relentless affront on First Nations women, rape culture is when it takes a more “white looking” indigenous woman turning up at the side of the highway to only begin to address the nearly 600 missing aboriginal women in a mere two decades.

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Rape culture is sentencing that isn’t concurrent with the crime, and the obliviousness of those doling out the sentences. Rape culture is a judge citing a 14-year-old rape victim as being "probably as much in control of the situation as was the [49-year-old] defendant.” Rape culture is the continual willful ignorance of the hierarchy of power against victims in cases like Steubenville, Maryville, FSU and let’s not excuse ourselves, U of O.

Rape culture is the willful ignorance of the victim hierarchy in which homeless women are deemed disposable—and the narrative that sex workers can’t be raped, when we need a “top court” to decide whether or not poking holes in condoms is sexual assault (hint: IT IS). Rape culture is when perpetrators of rape culture threaten to sue their target for straight-up calling them out for being perpetrators of rape culture. If you haven’t caught on by now, rape culture, in many ways, is just “our culture”, and therein lies the problem with such dangerous obliviousness.

So I guess if you want to “subscribe” to rape culture you just need to open a fucking newspaper once in your life—or if that seems difficult then go on the internet and google “rape”. And if a rape convention is more up your alley, then heck, why not try walking alone down any street most likely at night (but not always, conventions take place in broad daylight in public places, too!) and if you don’t enjoy your time at the convention be prepared to be told it was probably because you were unfamiliar with your own neighbourhood, or your shoes weren’t right for running away, or there was too much crap in your purse weighing you down. Even if you just stay home, chances are good the rape convention will come to you.

The notion that rape culture is perpetrated only by the most nefarious in our society is damaging and dumb—and to feign idiocy because an issue is complex to you is the biggest cop-out of all. Feeling powerless because you don’t understand something can be easily remedied, but feeling powerless because those in positions of power don’t feel your situation deems remedy, or even recognizes it as a situation at all, is to exist, at best, as an afterthought.

Group mentality works both ways, and can be a great form to give agency to people who feel they have none, but it can just as quickly turn and refute basic comprehension and become an aggressor. Aggression is a conversation-ender, aggression is violence, even in something that seems as innocuous as clicking “Like” on something that you should have reconsidered, but your ego compelled you to continue.

Put simply: Men who don’t understand rape culture have a responsibility to give it a fucking shot, and I promise that when you do honestly attempt to give it a willful try, you’re not going be met with provocation. Rape culture is a big fucking convention, filled with a lot of loud-mouths foaming at each other under spotlights pointed at themselves—they’re not gonna notice if you leave the room. Even if one day (please) it’s just one chump in there listening to his own tiresome garbage, self-congratulating so hard he circle-jerks himself aloft and into the heavens, he’ll never know you left. @wtevs