It’s true that “rape culture” - the idea that we might live in a world that actually facilitates rape, particularly men raping women, so that the threat of rape can be used to keep all women in line - sounds flat-out dystopian at first.It’s also so embedded in the culture that it’s nearly impossible to spot: You don’t notice rape culture, like you don’t notice oxygen or gravity, in part because you’ve probably never gone without it. … Isn’t such overblown terminology the kind of thing that makes people call feminists “humorless” and “strident” and accuse us of holing up in our ivory towers, theorizing about human behavior without ever witnessing much of it? It sounds so extreme at first that I confess even I, a proud feminist, initially balked at the term. It’s lingering, ever-present fear: Fear of where you go, what you do, how you look, who you talk to, what you say. It isn’t just the appalling treatment of the victims of that violence.
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