Feminist confuses Faux News host by suggesting that we teach men not to rape. Of course, that host was Sean Hannity, who probably gets confused when he tries to figure out how the cream gets inside of a Twinkie.
His solution to rape is that women should be armed at all times. If that’s the best defense against rape, why is rape an “accepted job hazard” in the US military? That means that if you’re a woman and you join up, you’re basically told “Oh, bee tee dubs, you’re probably gonna get raped at some point. No suing!” That aside, this is what feminists are talking about when we talk about “rape culture”: that instead of telling women to constantly pack heat, or never drink in bars, or never walk after sunset except in packs of a dozen, or wear a burqa, or basically NEVER LEAVE THEIR HOUSE, we should instead be telling men “It’s not cool to rape women, regardless of the context”. The onus of rape shouldn’t be on what the victim was doing, or wearing, or drinking. It should be on the rapist.
If you are a man and you already know this, then congrats, you are a wonderful and enlightened person and “teach men not to rape” doesn’t apply to you. But you are still part of the problem if you refuse to accept that hundreds of thousands of men in this country alone don’t know those things, because we live in a rape culture that is not invested in teaching them. You are still part of the problem when you scoff at the phrase “rape culture” and pretend it’s a paranoid invention of hairy-legged man-hating feminists, instead of a thing that exists. You are still part of the problem when you pretend “teach men not to rape” translates to “all men are violent animals who would jump out of bushes and assault random female passers-by unless women smacked them with a rolled-up newspaper when they tried to do it”.
What “teach men not to rape” actually means is that we need to repeat, over and over and over again, until EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THIS WORLD ACTUALLY GETS IT, that skirt length does not determine the level of a woman’s culpability in her own assault. That having sex with a woman too drunk consent is in fact rape. That terms like “date rape” and “grey rape” and “acquaintance rape vs. stranger rape” are meaningless prevarications. That just because you didn’t knock a woman down and hold a knife to her throat, you could still be guilty of rape. It means a hundred different things, and none of those things is “all men would rape if they could get away with it”.
And I think most of the men making this accusation know it, on some level. Believe me, I get privilege. I’ve identified as white my entire life (recent revelations about my ancestry aside), and I’m familiar with the gut lurch that comes with being told that you are benefiting at someone else’s expense. You need to get over it and accept that people who belong to other genders or racial groups probably know what it’s like to be a member of that gender or racial group more than you do. You need to listen to their experiences and not dismiss them because they make you uncomfortable.
And the people scoffing that something so simple could never work: rape in Canada dropped 10% soon after that country began its “Don’t be that guy” ad campaign. Teaching men not to rape–fighting back against rape culture–does work. It’s the ONLY thing that’s been proven to work.
A California Yankee in King Cake's Court 