This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.
Warning: this post has graphic quotes from and links to mainstream media accounts of rape culture and imagery, and sexual violence.
One of the profoundly disturbing aspects of rape culture discussions—and this won’t surprise readers here—is the way that they reveal the confident assumption that there are rapists, who are evil and other and unresponsive to any form of social control, and then there are the rest of us, who can be exposed to any number of conflicting messages about rape—sexy rape, not-rape rape, that-type-of-girl rape, he’s-such-a-good-fellow rape—and emerge with our anti-rape moral compass intact.
There is no single place in my own experiences that taught me that this is wrong more thoroughly and dramatically than university residential college.
Continue reading “University colleges: nurturing a rape culture”