Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It

by Kate Harding

It’s almost funny—almost—that some of the most popular myths complicate and contradict each other. Look at coverage of any rape case that doesn’t fit the “stranger jumps out of the bushes” stereotype, and you’ll see people arguing strenuously that it never happened and that she asked for it and that he didn’t mean it.

Myth: She asked for it. Fact: It is literally impossible to ask for rape. Rape, by definition, is sex you did not ask for.

It’s a maddening catch-22. If we get assaulted while walking alone in the dark, we’re told we should have used our heads and anticipated the danger. But if we’re honest about the amount of mental real estate we devote to anticipating danger, then we’re told we’re acting like crazy man-haters, jumping at shadows and tarring an entire gender with the brush that rightly belongs to a relatively small number of criminals.

There’s something wrong with acting as though it’s perfectly reasonable to tell women never to drink to excess—and, when drinking to nonexcess, never to let their drinks out of their sight—and not to walk alone at night and definitely not to travel alone, and not to jog with earphones, and not to approach a stoplight without locking the car doors, and not to respond to the sound of a crying baby, and not to get into their cars without checking both the backseat and underneath the car first, and not to get in on the driver’s side if there’s a van parked next to it, and not to pull over for unmarked police cars until they’re in well-lit areas, and, and, and. I just did that off the top of my head, by the way. A bunch of those recommendations are manifestly useless, but they are all in my brain, a full catalog of two and a half decades’ worth of “helpful tips.” Even the ones that are based in some sort of recognizable reality still ultimately send the same message: As a woman, you must live in fear and behave impeccably. If you fail at either charge, you will most likely be raped—maybe even murdered—and it will be at least partly your fault.

“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 feminist author Jessica Valenti in The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women.16 Everyone loses in this scenario—it prevents women from saying “yes” when they want to and men from saying “no.” And it means rape is always, on some level, the woman’s fault.

“Company pride” is an illusion that benefits your corporate overlords, who hope to boost morale without improving anybody’s working conditions or paychecks.