When I think about death, I think about women’s deaths, and of femicide in particular. I think of the violent ways in which women die at the hands of those who perceive them not as people but as objects of desire, people whose rights are rendered void the moment they fail to conform to that desire.
Femicide has a beginning and an end. The beginning is culture, practice, precedent, and what is collectively accepted. It does not begin with rape, sexual violence, or death. These acts do not live in a vacuum. There is a thread with a discernible origin, a thread that normalises misogynistic treatment of women long before it culminates in murder. This thread is rape culture. It has a silent presence in all the rooms we occupy, and all the spaces we move through. It is the web of shared attitudes, assumptions, and unspoken permissions that makes sexual violence seem ordinary, held together by rape myths and persistent gender norms. Together with the surrounding conditions it sustains, it renders sexual violence and femicide possible, and, more perniciously, excusable. People tell jokes that trivialise assault, invent myths about false accusations, uphold gendered expectations, and maintain practices that determine which victims are believed and which aren’t. Understanding rape culture matters because rape, sexual violence, and femicide are not incidental to it; they grow out of it and are sustained by it. They emerge within environments that have already decided what counts as consent, which women are considered violable, and whose accounts deserve belief.
The concept of consent is addressed in both public discourse and formal pedagogical settings. The most basic definition of consent is the affirmation that a certain act is acceptable. However, despite its presence in daily conversation, rape culture allows individuals to bypass consent through coercion, the use of relationship status, non-consensual condom removal/stealthing, and deception. In many contemporary conversations, consent has been framed as something “sexy” and “cool.” This minimises the gravity of consent and contributes to the frivolity with which rape culture treats sexual assault. Consent is bodily autonomy, and treating it as casual erases the fact that it is a human right, one that has been and can be violated in life-altering ways. This framing re-situates consent within the culture it was meant to challenge, reducing a fundamental right of every person to say no and to be heard to a light conversation. In “The Limits of Consent: Sexual Assault and Affirmative Consent,” Lisa Featherstone cautions that slogans such as “consent is sexy” are, at most, a starting point for younger generations, and that meaningful education must look past messaging to examine how power, silence, and coercion actually operate. Consent is not cool; it is a right, and the distance between those two framings is precisely where rape culture continues to do its work.
One of the most violent aspects of rape culture is acceptance: adherence to false views about sexual assault, survivors, and perpetrators. These claims include the claims that victims invite assault and harm through their clothing or drug and alcohol consumption, that “real” rape conforms to a narrow understanding of violence coming from a certain type of individual, and that women fabricate allegations out of spite or anger. These beliefs persist because they are useful to a large part of society: they transfer responsibility from perpetrators to victims, which is exactly what a rape-supportive culture requires. The links between propagating these myths and assigning blame are clear as day. Rape culture is also maintained by gender norms, particularly those that view masculinity as dominance and power. Social norms state that men must be sexually assertive and that women must be subordinate. Men who objectify women are rarely challenged by their peers, because objectification has never been and still is not a deviation from the norm. These patterns are structural, not unique. Rape myth acceptance is, in this sense, a representation of gender inequality. Those who advocate for and endorse gender hierarchies blame victims more, excuse perpetrators, and more often than not, justify sexual violence.
The criminal justice system offers the clearest public window into rape culture. Decay is its defining feature. Victims report at low rates, and even reported cases rarely lead to conviction. Reporting is deterred by social stigma, fear of judgement, accusations of fabrication, distrust in the system itself, and the psychological burden of being a victim. For victims who do report, secondary victimisation, harm inflicted by the institutions and individuals charged with helping, is a known issue. Many rape victims describe their treatment by law enforcement as upsetting and frustrating. Police officers have told women they deserved it, laughed in their faces, or dismissed them completely. Advocates and scholars describe a pattern in which survivors are met with disbelief, interrogated over and over, kept at the margins of their own cases, and made to endure intrusive evidence-gathering. A culture that doubts victims reproduces itself through the systems designed to deliver justice, a cycle of silence and institutional distrust that becomes self-reinforcing.
Rape culture is sustained by attitudes, and attitudes can shift. The lesson is not that norms are unchangeable but that they change slowly, sometimes incongruously, and through sustained engagement, organising and learning. Cultural transmission is a two-way street. The same channels that circulate misogynistic language and normalise misogynistic treatment of women can just as easily circulate alternatives and dismantle it. Rape culture persists because it is built of ordinary things. Ordinary things that quietly shape who we become: our beliefs, our morals, our silences. Ordinary things that conjure violence, that manufacture perpetrators and, in turn, victims. More bodies carried, more grief, more lives altered. None of it is trivial, and none of it is simple. These behaviours decide who runs toward a woman when she cries “rape,” and who turns away. They decide how we respond when a friend is named as a perpetrator. They seep into the texture of our days. And like death, and the taxes we cannot escape, misogyny will remain woven into the ordinary fabric of our lives unless we dismantle rape culture entirely. Rape culture is a human construction, and what human hands have built, human hands, with discipline, can undo.
Death, Taxes, Misogyny
When I think about death, I think about women’s deaths, and of femicide in particular. I think of the violent ways in which women die at the hands of those who perceive them not as people but as objects of desire, people whose rights are rendered void the moment they fail to conform to that desire.
Femicide has a beginning and an end. The beginning is culture, practice, precedent, and what is collectively accepted. It does not begin with rape, sexual violence, or death. These acts do not live in a vacuum. There is a thread with a discernible origin, a thread that normalises misogynistic treatment of women long before it culminates in murder. This thread is rape culture. It has a silent presence in all the rooms we occupy, and all the spaces we move through. It is the web of shared attitudes, assumptions, and unspoken permissions that makes sexual violence seem ordinary, held together by rape myths and persistent gender norms. Together with the surrounding conditions it sustains, it renders sexual violence and femicide possible, and, more perniciously, excusable. People tell jokes that trivialise assault, invent myths about false accusations, uphold gendered expectations, and maintain practices that determine which victims are believed and which aren’t. Understanding rape culture matters because rape, sexual violence, and femicide are not incidental to it; they grow out of it and are sustained by it. They emerge within environments that have already decided what counts as consent, which women are considered violable, and whose accounts deserve belief.
The concept of consent is addressed in both public discourse and formal pedagogical settings. The most basic definition of consent is the affirmation that a certain act is acceptable. However, despite its presence in daily conversation, rape culture allows individuals to bypass consent through coercion, the use of relationship status, non-consensual condom removal/stealthing, and deception. In many contemporary conversations, consent has been framed as something “sexy” and “cool.” This minimises the gravity of consent and contributes to the frivolity with which rape culture treats sexual assault. Consent is bodily autonomy, and treating it as casual erases the fact that it is a human right, one that has been and can be violated in life-altering ways. This framing re-situates consent within the culture it was meant to challenge, reducing a fundamental right of every person to say no and to be heard to a light conversation. In “The Limits of Consent: Sexual Assault and Affirmative Consent,” Lisa Featherstone cautions that slogans such as “consent is sexy” are, at most, a starting point for younger generations, and that meaningful education must look past messaging to examine how power, silence, and coercion actually operate. Consent is not cool; it is a right, and the distance between those two framings is precisely where rape culture continues to do its work.
One of the most violent aspects of rape culture is acceptance: adherence to false views about sexual assault, survivors, and perpetrators. These claims include the claims that victims invite assault and harm through their clothing or drug and alcohol consumption, that “real” rape conforms to a narrow understanding of violence coming from a certain type of individual, and that women fabricate allegations out of spite or anger. These beliefs persist because they are useful to a large part of society: they transfer responsibility from perpetrators to victims, which is exactly what a rape-supportive culture requires. The links between propagating these myths and assigning blame are clear as day. Rape culture is also maintained by gender norms, particularly those that view masculinity as dominance and power. Social norms state that men must be sexually assertive and that women must be subordinate. Men who objectify women are rarely challenged by their peers, because objectification has never been and still is not a deviation from the norm. These patterns are structural, not unique. Rape myth acceptance is, in this sense, a representation of gender inequality. Those who advocate for and endorse gender hierarchies blame victims more, excuse perpetrators, and more often than not, justify sexual violence.
The criminal justice system offers the clearest public window into rape culture. Decay is its defining feature. Victims report at low rates, and even reported cases rarely lead to conviction. Reporting is deterred by social stigma, fear of judgement, accusations of fabrication, distrust in the system itself, and the psychological burden of being a victim. For victims who do report, secondary victimisation, harm inflicted by the institutions and individuals charged with helping, is a known issue. Many rape victims describe their treatment by law enforcement as upsetting and frustrating. Police officers have told women they deserved it, laughed in their faces, or dismissed them completely. Advocates and scholars describe a pattern in which survivors are met with disbelief, interrogated over and over, kept at the margins of their own cases, and made to endure intrusive evidence-gathering. A culture that doubts victims reproduces itself through the systems designed to deliver justice, a cycle of silence and institutional distrust that becomes self-reinforcing.
Rape culture is sustained by attitudes, and attitudes can shift. The lesson is not that norms are unchangeable but that they change slowly, sometimes incongruously, and through sustained engagement, organising and learning. Cultural transmission is a two-way street. The same channels that circulate misogynistic language and normalise misogynistic treatment of women can just as easily circulate alternatives and dismantle it. Rape culture persists because it is built of ordinary things. Ordinary things that quietly shape who we become: our beliefs, our morals, our silences. Ordinary things that conjure violence, that manufacture perpetrators and, in turn, victims. More bodies carried, more grief, more lives altered. None of it is trivial, and none of it is simple. These behaviours decide who runs toward a woman when she cries “rape,” and who turns away. They decide how we respond when a friend is named as a perpetrator. They seep into the texture of our days. And like death, and the taxes we cannot escape, misogyny will remain woven into the ordinary fabric of our lives unless we dismantle rape culture entirely. Rape culture is a human construction, and what human hands have built, human hands, with discipline, can undo.
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