Kate Harding > Quotes

“Similarly, he forgot - or never really understood - that we live in a culture where men, as a group, have more power than women.

This isn't a controversial statement, despite the protestations of guys who funnel their frustration that not all extremely young, conventionally attractive women want to sleep with them into and argument that women, as a group, have "all the power." (Bill Maher, repping for his fan base, famously jokes that men have to do all sorts of shit to get laid, but women only have to do "their hair.")

The really great thing about this argument is how the patently nonsensical premise - that some young women's ability to manipulate certain men equals a greater degree of gendered power than say, owning the presidency for 220-odd years - obscures the most chilling part: in this mindset, "all the power" means, simply, the power to withhold consent.

Let that sink in for a minute. If one believes women are more powerful that men because we own practically all of the vaginas, then women's power to withhold consent to sex is the greatest power there is.

Which means the guy who can take away a woman's right to consent is basically a superhero. Right?”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do about It

“Rape culture manifests in a myriad ways…but its most devilish trick is to make the average, noncriminal person identify with the person accused, instead of the person reporting the crime. Rape culture encourages us to scrutinize victims’ stories for any evidence that they brought the violence onto themselves – and always to imagine ourselves in the terrifying role of Good Man, Falsely Accused, before we ‘rush to judgment’.

We're not meant to picture ourselves in the role of drunk teenager at her first college party, thinking 'Wow, he seems to think I'm pretty!' Or the woman who accepts a ride with a 'nice guy,' who's generously offered to see her safely home from the bar. Or the girl who's passed out in a room upstairs, while the party rages on below, so chaotic that her friends don't even notice she's gone.

When it comes to rape, if we're expected to put ourselves in anyone else's shoes at all, it's the accused rapist's. The questions that inevitably come along with 'What was she wearing?' and 'How much did she have to drink?' are, 'What if there was no rape at all? What if she's lying? What happens to this poor slob she's accusing? What if he goes to prison for a crime he didn't commit?”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do about It

“Women are no more important than any other potential victims, but we are the primary targets of the messages and myths that sustain rape culture. We’re the ones asked to change our behavior, limit our movements, and take full responsibility for the prevention of sexual violence in society.”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It

“It’s not a matter of Dad sitting down with his preadolescent son and incorporating 'Don’t be a criminal!' into the 'birds and the bees' talk. (I mean, that couldn’t hurt, probably. But it’s not the point.) It’s about teaching our boys to actively oppose sexual violence.

It’s all well and good to say you’re against rape and would never rape anyone, end of story. But somewhere in that crowd of guys laughing about an unconscious girl getting 'a wang in the butthole, dude'—and the one listening to Daniel Tosh say, 'Wouldn’t it be funny if she got gang-raped right now?' and the one reading an op-ed in the Washington Post that puts 'sexual assault' in quotation marks, as though it exists only in the eye of the beholder—somewhere in all of those crowds is the guy who would rape someone. The guy who will rape someone. The guy who has raped someone.

And could you blame any of those guys for thinking that rape is not a serious crime, or even something to be particularly ashamed of, when so many 'good' guys around them are laughing at the same jokes?”
― Kate Harding

“Making women the sexual gatekeepers and telling men they just can’t help themselves not only drives home the point that women’s sexuality is unnatural, but also sets up a disturbing dynamic in which women are expected to be responsible for men’s sexual behavior,” writes”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It

“Less publicly, women call each other “sluts” and “whores,” doubt each other’s stories, and help perpetuate the myth that if we always dress modestly, drink responsibly, and avoid dark alleys and dangerous-looking men, we’ll be effectively rape-proofed. We are part of the problem.”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It

“For as much as feminists are painted as “man-haters,” we’re not the ones suggesting that boys and men lack the ability to think rationally, control their own behavior, or act kindly toward other human beings—even with a boner. We’re the ones who want all of our children to know about meaningful consent, healthy sexuality, and honoring each other’s bodies and boundaries, instead of teaching them that one gender is responsible for managing the other’s helpless animal lust. That’s what I mean when I say, “We should teach boys not to rape.” We should teach them they’re worth more and capable of more than this narrowly defined caricature”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It

“As long as we see rapists as average men overcome by lust in a particular moment, as opposed to the opportunistic predators they typically are, we will keep giving criminals a pass to commit more violence in our communities.”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do about It

“Or rather, we believe there’s one very specific type of rapist—the kind who wields a weapon, attacks strangers with no warning, and leaves abundant evidence of violence on the victim’s body—but not that some people deliberately rape their friends, girlfriends, wives, children, colleagues, or drunk new acquaintances. We can talk about how that sort of rape exists, and even about how it’s the most common sort, but when pressed, we’re almost never willing to acknowledge that those rapists exist. Not when the accused are people we know, or even just people who remind us of people we know. Not when they remind us of us . Nor”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It

“Boys and men have a natural, biological sex drive, you see, but when girls and women express sexuality, it’s because they’ve been led astray by music videos or vampire movies or something. Never”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It

“Yet the people who cry, “What about the presumption of innocence?” often behave as though there is no objective answer to “Did he do it?” until the trial is over. As though they think people accused of crimes are literally “innocent until proven guilty.” I’m not sure how that would work, exactly—once the verdict comes in, would the accused and the victim travel back in time, so the rape in question could either happen or not happen, based on what the jury decided? If you can’t grasp that any person accused of a crime has already either done it or not done it, regardless of what a future jury has to say, you have a very interesting understanding not only of time and space but of the law. How are police supposed to investigate suspects and make arrests if no one is allowed to draw a reasonable inference that someone is guilty until a jury has officially said so? How are prosecutors supposed to meet their burden of proof, so a jury can officially say so? In reality, lots of people within the justice system—let alone outside it—start to presume guilt after a certain point, because that’s their job”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It

“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, and presents it as the norm.”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do about It

“In any given rape case, the jury is pulled from the same rape culture we all live in. And the defence will trot out every allowable rate myth to create reasonable doubt in the mind of at least one juror. If there's no rock solid physical evidence of video, maybe, or at least severe injuries to the victim, the battle may be simply unwinnable for the prosecution. And prosecutors really don't like that.”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do about It

“The problem wasn’t that we thought an assault was likely, but that as women, we’ve been taught never to rule out the possibility. We’ve”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It

“What specifically makes it a crime? If the real crime of rape is the violation of another person's autonomy, the use of another person's body against their wishes, then it shouldn't matter what the victim was wearing, if she was drinking, how much sexual experience she's had before, or whether she fought hard enough to get bruises on her knuckles and skin under her fingernails. What matters is that the attacker deliberately ignored another person's basic human right to determine what she does with her own body. It's not about sex. It's about power.”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do about It

“Rape and sexual assault are unusual, if not quite unique, in that often, the only real evidence of a crime is the victim's testimony. Physical evidence might demonstrate that a sexual encounter took place between two people, but even cuts and bruises can't definitively prove lack of consent on one person's part. Especially if the accused is the alleged victim's friend, lover or spouse, or someone with whom they freely chose to leave a party. Ultimately, in the absence of photographic or video evidence, it comes down to one person's word against another's. The most obvious tragic result of this fact is that nearly half of rapes are never reported, fewer are prosecuted, and even fewer lead to a felony conviction. Victims wonder what the point of reporting uncorroborated sexual violence is, and they're not wrong.”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do about It

“We tend to imagine rapists, like terrorists, as an omnipresent and often unidentifiable threat, everywhere and nowhere at once. Since we don't know exactly who will strike or when, we agree that the best we can do is try to avoid victimhood. We put pressure on potential targets to volunteer for safety rituals, that create the illusion of security, while quietly eroding our freedom.”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do about It

“The most obvious tragic result of this fact is that nearly half of rapes are never reported, few are prosecuted, and even fewer lead to a felony conviction. Victims”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It

“So the question is, which boulder are you going to choose to roll? The "must lose weight" boulder or the "fuck you I will boldly, defiantly accept the body I've got and LIVE IN IT" boulder?”
― Kate Harding

“Thomas MacAulay Millar argues that our culture offers sexual predators a “social license to operate,” by trivializing and denying their crimes, and reassuring them that they’re unlikely to face any serious consequences. Rape”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It

“A person who reports sexual violence to police, most likely, is not an attention monitoring mandating liars. It is safe and logical and ethical to presume that person is a victim, unless there are specific indications that this is one of the rare false reports.”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do about It

“That hidden economy, which still exists today, is one of love. There is self-interest, certainly, in all of these women's endeavors; for their trouble, they get shelter and food. But you don't do any of that - the mind-numbing care of small children, the endless repetition of cooking and laundry, the indignity of having a mind as fine as any man's and no opportunity to exercise it - without love. Either love for the owners of the dirty underwear and the sticky little hands, or love for people whose survival depends on the pittance you make for doing it.

Almost three hundred years after Dam Smith was born, women still dominate the "caring professions" - teaching, nursing, social work - and are scarce in positions of financial or political power. Married women who work full-time still do substantially more cleaning, food preparation, and child-engagement tasks than their male partners. And when professional women's work becomes too time consuming, the care of children and the household isn't shared more equally with male partners, but outsourced to other women, frequently poor women of color. It is men who are raised to participate in a strict economy of self-interest. Most women could never afford that.”
― Kate Harding, Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump's America

“We’ve been taught that it’s never safe to assume we’ll be perfectly fine, walking around our own neighborhoods after dark, like normal people.”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It

“Let that sink in for a minute. If one believes women are more powerful than men because we own practically all of the vaginas, then women’s power to withhold consent to sex is the greatest power there is . Which means the guy who can take away a woman’s right to consent is basically a superhero. Right?”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It

“Either way, the misguided idea that confirming consent is an automatic boner killer needs to die.”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It

“Like Jay Rosen, I much prefer transparency to pseudo-objectivity, and I hope he's correct that the industry is shifting in that direction. For journalists and laypeople alike, I believe it's better to be up front about your biases than try- inevitably in vain_ to conceal them. And when confronted with the inescapable fact you fucked up, apologizing goes a long way.”
― Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do about It