Let's Rethink Rape So We Can Stop It
Through Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will and Edwin Schur's Labelling Women Deviant, and the forty-year history of feminist thought on rape.
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When someone tells me it’s too hard for them to talk about rape, I think to myself: well, isn’t that’s nice for you? What a privilege, to be so far removed from the realities of rape and the realities of the harsh world we live in that someone can avoid it by demanding it not be mentioned.
Rape is the ticker tape that underlies every interaction and every moment of my life. The hundreds of stories of rape I’ve heard, the women behind each story, her dreams, hopes, her very life dashed and divided. So many women who are desperate to tell their stories and make sense of something that will never make sense. They want to be heard in a world that demands their silence and shame1. I reassure them it is not them, it’s not them who is crazy but the world is. Their stories follow patterns; some stories more complicated, some violence more extreme, but so similar that I recognize the commonalities in each.
It’s a strang…