Topic

Radical Feminism  »  Sex-Based Oppression

 Rape Culture 


Robert Jensen

Women are objectified and women's sexuality is commodified. Sex is sexy because men are dominant and women are subordinate; power is eroticized.

The predictable result of this state of affairs is a world in which violence, sexualized violence, sexual violence, and violence-by-sex is so common that it must be considered to be normal—that is, an expression of the sexual norms of the culture, not violations of the norms. That doesn't mean the culture openly endorses rape, but it does endorse a vision of masculinity that makes rape inviting.

The result is a world in which more than half of college women interviewed in one study reported being victims of some level of sexual aggression. More disturbing, only 27 percent of women whose experience met the legal definition of rape labeled themselves as rape victims. And perhaps even more disturbing, 47 percent of the men who had committed rape said they expected to engage in a similar assault in the future, and 88 percent of men who reported having committed an assault that met the legal definition of rape were adamant that they had not committed rape. We live in a culture in which the sex domination nexus is so tight that victim and victimizer alike often do not recognize the violence in acts that the society has deemed violent enough to be illegal. That's a rape culture.

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 Getting Off  

Andrea Dworkin

She says no; he claims it means yes. He names her ignorant, then forbids her education. He does not allow her to use her mind or body rigorously, then names her intuitive and emotional. He defines femininity and when she does not conform he names her deviant, sick, beats her up, slices off her clitoris (repository of pathological masculinity), tears out her womb (source of her personality), lobotomizes or narcotizes her (perverse recognition that she can think, though thinking in a woman is named deviant).

 Pornography  

Andrea Dworkin

Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice. Rape, originally defined as abduction, became marriage by capture.

 Pornography  

Jenna Jameson

When I was barely 16 I was trafficked into stripping. I was told by my handlers to hide in my locker if the authorities came looking for me. This all became so normal to me that I didn’t realize how very wrong it was. After being raped violently over my childhood, it seemed easy.

 Twitter - @jennajameson  

Traci Lords

when I was 10 years old, I was raped by a high school boy that was about 16. And from there, my mother had an older boyfriend that molested me, so my entire childhood was really shaped by these really traumatic sexual experiences, which ultimately led me to the streets of Hollywood and to porn.

 Pornstars