I’ve been deliberating about whether or not I should write this article, but in all honestly, I feel like it’s extremely needed. In our culture, there is a stigma for people to refuse what rape actually is – we put different factors in that victim blame or we try to deny it all we want, to normalize such a horrible event. But we can’t keep doing this. We can’t keep normalizing or giving excuses to or even belittling what rape actually is – it’s unhealthy to support such views, and it’s damaging to victims.
One of my friends from a long time ago ended up getting extremely drunk and had sex with some guy in, what I heard, was a garage floor. So, let me tell you something – the next day, no one said anything about the guy, the ‘ladies’ man’ who raped her; no, everyone was talking about my friend and how she ‘hooked up’ with him. No one talked about how she was drunk, no one talked about whether or not she remembered it or if she could consent or if she liked it. It was just social gossip.
My roommate, who identifies as Jewish, told me about a story she found on the internet where a Jewish woman found out that the man she’s been seeing for a few weeks is a Nazi, and had asked people in a chat group how to deal with the trauma that it caused. At first, I didn’t think this was rape, but when you really think about it, if this woman had known that this man was a Nazi before she started sleeping with him, she never would have! And that, I may add, is “rape by omission” – lying to someone by withholding information, to get someone to sleep with you. Are you HIV positive, and don’t tell your new partner before you sleep with them? That’s rape my omission. You wake up thinking that it’s your boyfriend having sex with you, but it’s really someone else? That’s fraudulent rape. You find out that the person you’ve been having sex with is a Nazi, a person if wishes your “grandparents had been gassed” (as the woman in the chat stated”? That’s rape by omission.
And, of course, many of us can think about the Brock Turner case that blew up on the internet last summer. A woman, who had a boyfriend, went to a party with her sister, and ended up on her back behind a dumpster, while Brock Turner raped her and left her there while he tried to run. When this case was still being discussed, so many people kept pointing out different factors – well, she was drunk, and do we know what kind of clothes she was wearing? Was she wearing makeup? Was her boyfriend there? Did she lead him on? The answer is: it doesn’t matter.
No one asks to get shot. No one asks to get stabbed or run over by a car or beaten. No one asks for rape. Emily Doe, the woman who was raped by turner, says in her famous letter to him in court, that “I don’t want my body anymore. I was terrified of it, I didn’t know what had been in it, if it had been contaminated, who had touched it. I wanted to take off my body like a jacket and leave it at the hospital with everything else.” No one wants to feel like this. No one asks for this. Emily was not asking for it.
A lot of people try to smack “wellll, they’re on of my friends so it’s different” or “but I really really liked him, so it was okay!” Well, let me tell you, it’s not okay. It’s not okay to be unable to give conscious consent. It’s not okay to have sex and to wake up the next day and not remember it. If you are both drunk, as far as my understanding goes, it may be interpreted as rape by both parties, but it is still rape. If you rape unable to make a conscious and clear consent to have sex with someone, if you say “stop” and they still continue touching you or make you feel unsafe or uncomfortable in any way, it’s rape.
Do not normalize these attitudes. do not support rape culture (GOD, why do I even HAVE to say that?!). Do not support the idea that all people ever want is sex. Do no beleive Robin fucking Thicke when he says that women want it. Do not promote the thinking that only strangers rape people, because on average, because you know what?
300,000 women are raped ever year.
54% of rapes go unreported (that is, if the victim identifies the action as rape).
31 states allow rapists to sue for custody of their victim’s children.
97% of rapists never serve jail time.
Because there is a 0 in 32 billion chance that a woman’s body can “shut down” to avoid getting pregnant after being raped.
Rape is not black and white. Rape is not something that a third party can decide. Rape is “a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse or other forms of sexual penetration perpetrated against a person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or against a person who is incapable of giving valid consent, such as one who is unconscious, incapacitated, has an intellectual disability or is below the legal age of consent”
