The term helped us stop pretending that rapes are anomalies, that they have nothing to do with the culture at large or are even antithetical to its values. If they were, a fifth of all American women (and one in seventy-one men) wouldn’t be rape survivors; if they were, 19 percent of female college students wouldn’t have to cope with sexual assault; if they were, the military wouldn’t be stumbling through an epidemic of sexual violence. The term “rape culture” lets us begin to address the roots of the problem in the culture as a whole.
