GRSJ224/rape-culture

Rape Culture

11th Principle: Consent!'s Pyramid explaining the multiple levels of rape culture and how it manifests in different ways, with more extreme cases at the top and less extreme ones at the bottom.

Rape culture is defined as a "complex set of beliefs that encourage male sexual aggression and supports violence against women." It is used to describe a culture that normalizes and excuses sexual violence through media, prevalent attitudes and beliefs, and practices. Behaviors that are described under the terms of rape culture include victim blaming, trivializing sexual assault, making and maintaining the popularity of sexually explicit jokes, and inflating statistics of false accusations of rape, along with many other actions surrounding social pressures for both men and women.

Rape culture includes normalizing seemingly harmless offenses, for example rape joes or catcalling, as well as justifying extremely violent criminal acts such as rape and drugging. These actions and behaviors lead people to believe that rape is inevitable, instead of treating it as a problem to change.

According to Meredith Minister, rape culture as a construct to restrict individuals into the binary of male and female. She argues that it polices gender nonconformity by first assuming that all humans are either male or female and second assuming that all females have to submit to males. She acknowledges that is also brings about sex-based violence and crimes.

Origins of the Term Rape Culture

The WAVAW Rape Crisis Centre defines rape culture as “a term that was coined by feminists in the United States in the 1970s. It was designed to show the ways in which society blamed victims of sexual assault and normalized sexual violence”. Much of the same definition is true for modern-day rape culture, as was described in the 1970s. However, there have been a few changes to the face of rape culture today, that is mainly due to the presence of social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook which facilitates the idea of sharing opinions without consequences because in some cases, social media presences can be anonymous.

An alternative definition for rape culture is as following; "it is “a complex set of beliefs that encourage male sexual aggression and supports violence against women. It is a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent. In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as the norm . . . In a rape culture both men and women assume that sexual violence is a fact of life, inevitable”.

Components

Rape Myths

Rape myths are false beliefs about sexual violence and those involved in it that create and perpetuate biased attitudes and behaviors regarding assault and victims of assault. Rape myths are typically used to justify male sexual aggression and sexual assault on the whole. Some myths include that men cannot be raped, what a victim is wearing can invite rape, people lie about rape, and romantic partners cannot commit rape. They also include believing that rape is not planned and is usually committed by strangers. In reality, up to 75% of rapes are premeditated and most are committed by someone known to the victim.

The effects of rape culture are simply that they uphold several rape myths that erase women's autonomy and choice. Myths such as "no means yes", that women could resist rape if they really tried, and that women falsely report rape in order to 'get back' at their perpetrator all devalue a woman's choice and ability to act. They paint women in a particular way that justifies their victimhood.

Rape myths are so prevalent in our culture because they act to reinforce beliefs about rape and perpetrators of rape. Researchers argue that language in a patriarchal society is created and formulated by men and that this language defines the roles of others. In this case, when men are in positions of power, they are able create narratives of how women are perceived in the media and how women begin to perceive themselves. This leads to the effect of women often being silenced in their own rape cases and disregarded as unreliable sources when providing their accusations. In this way, rape myths act as methods to reinforce rape culture and the silencing of women.

Sexual Objectification

Sexual objectification is the process of treating a person as an object of sexual desire. It creates an image of the person as something to be used for a single purpose and then to be discarded once finished. It occurs when a woman's body is separated from herself and becomes the primary focus of her value, creating her into an object. In Western Cultures, women are seen as sexual objects created for the pleasure of the man. Sexual objectification perpetuates the idea that men have the right to a woman's body and justifies violence against them. The normalization of a hyper-sexualized image of women is seen in TV, media, advertisements, and in pornographic content. This type of portrayal of women contributes to aggression towards them, especially in a sexual manner.

Research has shown that sexual objectification can influence women's mental health. The objectification theory posits that women come to internalize sexual objectification and begin to self-objectify. This then leads to emphasis placed on physical appearance, which leads to anxiety about their body, about body shaming, and eventually about their own safety. The amalgamation of anxieties is then thought to develop into other disorders, such as depression, sexual dysfunction and eating disorders.

Rape Culture on Campus

Article on Turner's light sentencing.

Researchers and theorists argue that college campuses foster a rape-accepting culture due to the several extracurricular areas of campus-life that are sex-segregated. In Burnett's study about communication and rape on college campus, she postulates that men's athletic teams especially foster this type of culture in that they praise physical dominance and are more accepting of violence. Furthermore, being a member of these teams can be protective if one commits the crime of rape as universities work very hard to uphold a particular positive image of their athletics teams in order to maintain sponsorships. As in the case of Brock Turner, who violently raped an unconscious girl in 2016 and at the time of the trial was first identified as a "Stanford student athlete" instead of an alleged rapist. This time of media bias is common in such cases, framing the perpetrator of rape in as positive as a light as possible in order to distract from their violent crime. Furthermore, the leniency of Turner's sentencing displays a common protection against perpetrators of rape on college campuses.

Burnett and others also argue that fraternities perpetuate rape culture. Researchers argue that men within these fraternities foster narratives about women that are especially degrading and particularly different than men who are not associated with fraternities.Bleecker and Murnen found that fraternity men had significantly higher scores on the rape supportive attitudes (RSA) scale when compared to non-affiliated men. These attitudes are supportive of rape myths and may be the result of the nature of hyper-masculinity and male sexual aggressiveness that is so common in these environments.

Rape Chants

Many news articles in the past few years have shed light on the misogynistic nature of some fraternities historic chants and songs. For example, the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity at Yale University recently faced scrutiny for chanting the slogan "No means yes! Yes means anal!" while walking across campus in 2010. A similar chant was reported to be chanted by men at St. Mary's University, Nova Scotia: "SMU boys, we like them young. Y is for your sister. O is for oh so tight. U is for underage. N is for no consent. G is for grab that ass." These types of chants that are fostered in male-focused groups such as fraternities on campus perpetuate rape culture and convince these young men that they are entitled to sex with whatever women they please. Fostering these rape-accepting attitudes is especially dangerous on college campuses, where a woman's chance of being a victim of rape is 4x higher than any other age group.

Rape Culture in Cinema

There have been many critiques of the movie industry perpetuating rape culture in order to make more money at the box office. Hollywood has had a history of creating roles for women in movies with exemplify damsels in distress. In today's day and age, it seems important that women and girls have the ability to seen strong, independent and powerful female characters on the screen. Ones that can inspire them instead of making them fearful of a world creating upon the screen that makes life as a women somewhat unsafe and dangerous.

Many Hollywood actresses have become activist upon this issue. Of recent, Keira Knightly made a statement about the portrayal of Rape Culture in Cinema. "The portrayal of women being subjected to sexual violence in modern films is the reason she prefers doing period dramas". In the modern age, with the growing support for feminism and feminist movements, the portrayal or lack there of, of strong female characters is a disservice to the movie industry. ""I don't know about films as much. I don't really do films set in the modern day because the female characters nearly always get raped. I always find something distasteful in the way women are portrayed, whereas I've always found very inspiring characters offered to me in historical pieces," Knightley told Variety.".

The number of movies which portray the themes of rape culture and sexual violence against women seems to be increasing at an alarming rate. "In the just-released thriller Red Sparrow, Jennifer Lawrence plays Dominika Egorova, a young Russian woman sent to train at an elite spy school. There, she is taught to identify the one thing that a human target desires – and to become that thing to extract information. In one particularly gruelling exercise, Dominika is forced to confront a male student who earlier attempted to rape her, and instructed to 'give him what he wants'”. The promotion of acts such as this due to prior actions does not support the work of anti-rape and women's rights organizations. The article goes on to states that "it’s a perspective on sexual violence that has gained unprecedented mainstream awareness over the past few months. Though men can and do leverage their power and influence in order to elicit consensual sex with women, they also deliberately develop strategies for taking advantage of women through coercion. This clearly isn’t about sex, it is about power; men who assault women are not typically horror-movie monsters, but simply people who want to have power and control over women".

Rape Culture and the Media

Rape Culture in the News

Given the prevalence of sexual assault and rape in today's world, it is no surprising that is a constance source of scrutiny in the news media outlets. Given the level at which the people of highest governmental power in the US have made comments concerning and surrounding sexual assault. It is no surprise that there is an abundance of news stories surrounding this issue emerging. "After several years of scraping data from newspapers and other data sets, they published their findings in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science this August—the first-ever long-term study of rape culture, a set of societal attitudes that normalize sexual violence". The findings of the study included the fact that “We find that where there is more rape culture in the press, there is more rape,” write the authors. The study examines how rape is covered by the news media, which the researchers say reflect local community norms, and finds a correlation between media coverage and incidence of sexual assault. To be clear, the study does not suggest that news coverage “causes” rape, but that it reflects local norms toward sexual assault. The level of rape culture in the media predicts both the frequency of rape and how it’s handled by local criminal justice systems".