And so when a woman is sexually assaulted—no matter what she’s doing—it’s easy for the culture at large to insist that she’s done something out of the ordinary to bring it upon herself. Because women’s lives are out of the “ordinary.” Because heterosexual cisgender men are born with the privilege of not being systematically targeted as victims of sexual assault. When you say that women who wear too-short skirts, or too-high heels, or too much make up are not sufficiently protecting themselves against rape, what you are really saying is that women who act too much like women deserve to be raped. When you say that women who drink with the boys, or have casual sex like the boys, or walk alone like the boys are not sufficiently protecting themselves against rape, what you are really saying is that women who don’t act enough like women deserve to be raped. And what you are really saying is that women deserve to be raped because they’re women. In a culture where women’s behavior is viewed as alien, it is this attitude that qualifies as “normal.”→
Rape Analogy: The “Walking in a Bad Neighborhood” Theory
Amanda Hess, the Sexist
