No more moments of silence: How do we get from ‘Take Back the Night’ to ‘Taking Down Rape Culture’?
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The era of focusing on victims needs to come to an end. It doesn’t work. We can talk all day about how the culture of rape and violence has affected our lives, we can share individual stories and we can cite statistics and while this may be informative and therapeutic it is not going to get us where we need to get. It is not strategic.
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The best way we can honor victims of these human rights abuses is to change the way we talk about perpetrators. The efforts to put a human face on the victims of crimes against women has been a success —how could it not be when so many of the fallen are connected to our own lives. But for somereason we have a hard time talking about perpetrators, their lives, where they come from, who raised them, what they learned. We know that people from all walks of life are raped. But few like to discuss how people from all walks of life are rapists. We know about the one in five who are raped or survive attempted rape, but what about the potentially one in 17 who rape?
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Let us not be fooled. It is in no way progress to be granted basic human rights. To believe so is to think from the rapist’s perspective, from the misogynist’s perspective. To be brainwashed enough to do their work for them. I think Malcolm X explained this tricky relationship to the idea of “progress” best. When asked if he thought if progress had been made in the struggle for civil rights, he said, “If you stick a knife into my back 9 inches and then you pull out 3 inches, that’s not progress.”
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I will say it again. The freedoms we foughtfor and won are not progress but corrections of massive injustice perpetrated against half the human population and still occurring across the globe. As long as there are laws and cultural practices that restrict human rights for women we are all at risk. As long as we are still fundamentally portrayed as existing for the pleasure of men we are all at risk.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
I think we've gone too far down the rabbit hole. The culture is infused with it. The conditioning is so strong that people don't even see it. Too many women don't even see it. I think the only hope is taking down the entire patriarchy, but I don't have a clue how to do that.
I just finished two books, one non-fiction, the other fiction. Both generated thoughts of the patriarchy & how we got here. I've thought about writing more & posting, but DU is not safe for that kind of stuff. Yesterday's Playboy post with the cartoon of the non-consenting woman on one side of the chair & two consenting men on the other side & the denial of some posters to see that as promoting rape was boggling. 
The one poster went on how the cartoonist was a great family man. Hey, maybe he was, but can we admit that this time his work was over the top?
It's too bad forum posts land on the Latest page. That's my least favorite thing about DU3.
