Rape culture is something that has been in the news, online, and in the media pretty regularly lately, but what is rape culture? In order to understand it we first have to define it. When you think of culture, what do you picture in your mind? For most of us it is a group of people or a society. That is not what a culture is. Culture is defined by Merriam-Webster as, “The act of developing the intellectual and moral faculties especially by education.” That means that culture is a learned set of behaviors.
When you pair the word “culture” with another word like “rape”, the connotations are horrendous. Rape has been defined as, “Unlawful sexual activity and usually sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against the …show more content…
“32,000 women get pregnant from rape in the United States each year.” (Williams1) In cases where the woman did get pregnant her rapist can now obtain custodial rights to the child, even if he was convicted of the rape. Our culture has begun to place more importance with the parentage of a child than the safety of the child and the mother. "If it 's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that thing down." (Akin)
The last category is by far the worst. Enjoyable rape is the notion that if a person is going to be raped, then they should lay back and enjoy it. Clayton Williams stated, "Rape is kinda like the weather. If it 's inevitable, relax and enjoy it." and Rick Santorum stated, "Rape victims should make the best of a bad situation." The fact is that rape is a physical assault and results in physical and even psychological damage to the victim. Changing the wording or the way a person thinks about it doesn’t change the definition of the …show more content…
In the episode titled, “The Pointy End” in season one, episode eight, there is a brief scene in which a Dothraki soldier is angry because Daenerys, the queen of the Dothraki, has stopped him from rapping a woman from the village they had just conquered. The soldier in question believed it to be his right to do what he pleased with the women of the village as they were the spoils of war. This is just one example of rape in the show. The show also shows women who have accepted rape as part of life and in some cases it is men being raped. While we understand that this is a fictional world that takes place in a time period that predates electricity, human psychology suggests that we, as humans, tend to emulate the characters that we find to be interesting or exciting.
The media is no longer afraid of crossing the line into rape culture. We also see examples of rape culture in music. Often we hear artists glorifying one night stands and multiple partners as if the physical act of intimacy is anything less than important. Media has made rape into a marketable controversy that will attract viewers and
When you pair the word “culture” with another word like “rape”, the connotations are horrendous. Rape has been defined as, “Unlawful sexual activity and usually sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against the …show more content…
“32,000 women get pregnant from rape in the United States each year.” (Williams1) In cases where the woman did get pregnant her rapist can now obtain custodial rights to the child, even if he was convicted of the rape. Our culture has begun to place more importance with the parentage of a child than the safety of the child and the mother. "If it 's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that thing down." (Akin)
The last category is by far the worst. Enjoyable rape is the notion that if a person is going to be raped, then they should lay back and enjoy it. Clayton Williams stated, "Rape is kinda like the weather. If it 's inevitable, relax and enjoy it." and Rick Santorum stated, "Rape victims should make the best of a bad situation." The fact is that rape is a physical assault and results in physical and even psychological damage to the victim. Changing the wording or the way a person thinks about it doesn’t change the definition of the …show more content…
In the episode titled, “The Pointy End” in season one, episode eight, there is a brief scene in which a Dothraki soldier is angry because Daenerys, the queen of the Dothraki, has stopped him from rapping a woman from the village they had just conquered. The soldier in question believed it to be his right to do what he pleased with the women of the village as they were the spoils of war. This is just one example of rape in the show. The show also shows women who have accepted rape as part of life and in some cases it is men being raped. While we understand that this is a fictional world that takes place in a time period that predates electricity, human psychology suggests that we, as humans, tend to emulate the characters that we find to be interesting or exciting.
The media is no longer afraid of crossing the line into rape culture. We also see examples of rape culture in music. Often we hear artists glorifying one night stands and multiple partners as if the physical act of intimacy is anything less than important. Media has made rape into a marketable controversy that will attract viewers and