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16. The rape culture hits home

While researching the rape culture, I was surprised at how fiercely many people deny its existence in our world. Two youtubers, whom I respect and admire, reject the idea. One says the rape culture is a myth invented by feminists. The other debunks it on the basis that, for example, the study bringing up the statistics that 1 in 4 women will suffer rape or sexual assault in their lifetime is fallacious: when asked if they had ever been raped, the study subjects have responded yes because that question led them to give an affirmative answer whereas many of them might have just regretted having sex on a given occasion and said they were raped in order to feel better. I find that highly unlikely. In my opinion, that reasoning is fallacious, not the question in the aforementioned study.

To me it's undeniable that there is a rape culture in place, that women are the main victims and men the main perpetrators. That is not to say that only women are victims and only men impose sexual abuse. In the case of male rape victims, it's hard to track them because they report the violence far less than women. On the other hand, so far I haven't come across any case of women gang-raping a man, or of a girl rendering a guy unconscious in order to touch his private parts, stick things inside him, write insults on his body and post photos of her feat on social media, ruining his life while she is praised by her peers and — perhaps — receives a slap on the wrist.

Many people reject the idea of a rape culture and argue that the law takes care of rape and sexual assault. But how many times is justice served in those cases? Usually rape cases are mostly referred to as "alleged" and, if they can't be denied due to blatant proof such as video footage, the punishment tends to be mild if not laughable when it involves aggressors coming from wealthy or influential spheres. Writing this series made me reflect on my own experience and that of people close to me, including readers who confided me their own stories and struggles. I decided to share some of them here, as those stories corroborate what I have researched about the rape culture so far.

Starting with myself, I have been fortunate enough not to be raped until now, even though facts demonstrate that I may still be raped even in my nineties. I didn't escape molestation though. Besides being groped by strangers while out on the streets at least a dozen times during my teen years, both at nighttime and daytime, I was molested 3 times by people close to my family. In the first occurrence, a good friend of my father called me when he was peeing in the bathroom and told me to touch his dick, showing me the loose skin on the tip and saying it was "sick." I didn't have the courage to say no and touched it lightly with the tip of my finger before running away in disgust. I was seven and didn't know a thing about sex, but I felt that was wrong and it left me with revulsion and anger. I didn't tell anything to my parents, though, because I was embarrassed and felt that as a child what I had to say didn't matter.

I have been molested again when I was twelve and another friend of my father touched my breast on a couple of occasions. He did it "playfully" by pushing it up. I didn't say anything to my parents because, again, I felt whatever I said didn't matter, but I did want to punch him in the face and from them on kept my distance from him. Luckily I only saw him a few times as he lived abroad. The third sexual molestation happened when I was fourteen and my mother's boyfriend tried to kiss me (my father had passed away years before). I pushed him away with a slap and told my mother what happened. She not only didn't believe me but accused me of lying. She only believed he was a scumbag after he tried to kiss my aunt and my aunt told her.

Those are my unpleasant memories, none as unpleasant as those confided to me by friends and readers. I'm from a generation when sexual assault and rape weren't as common as today, or maybe people were less likely to report them? I don't know, but I suspect even though rape is nothing new, our culture today is quite lenient about it, which encourages it. Throughout my years in college, I remember hearing about only one or two cases of rape on campus. It was that rare. Today female students march against rape on that same campus. It's the usual scenario: guys get them drunk or drug their drinks in parties in order to violate them. That never happened during my time at the university, and for the record, I partied a lot. Until then, the only rape victims I knew personally were two friends of mine from high school who took a ride with strangers, so that didn't come as a surprise, even though it certainly doesn't justify them being raped.