Essay Sample on Rape Culture: Believing Violence is Sexy and Sexy is Violent

Introduction

Rape culture, according to Rentschler (2014), refers to the complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women. It is a society where violence is deemed sexy and sexuality as violent. Women undergo harassment perpetrated by men on a daily basis ranging from simple objectification in a sexual manner that can be through staring to even serious abuse such as rape. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as a tradition.

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Women and young girls find themselves, victims of this culture, either physically or by the use of technology. When the authorities fail to take action against the perpetrators, the young feminists take the issue to the social media seeking to get justice by holding them accountable. However, apart from the social media actions, the justice system in the U.S.A has tried to deal with the rape culture by detaining those responsible. Steubenville, OH trial is a perfect example where reports about the conviction of high school football players Ma'lik Richmond and Tyler May by Judge Thomas Tyler. A crime blogger Alexandria Goddard collects evidence on the young men and women involved in the rape form tweets, Facebook, and Instagram posts (Rentschler, 2014). Instances of young girls being sexually assaulted and cyberbullied are so common that they make the news. Social media is an essential tool and has been predominantly used to report and investigate instances of sexual assault by anti-rape activists. According to one of the bloggers Amanda Marcotte (2013), the Steubenville OH case has made it difficult to prove that rape culture exists. Tweets surrounding this case show that the youths have a culture of sharing provocative, explicitly sexual, and misogynistic thoughts that legitimate rape (Rentschler, 2014). However, feminist bloggers claim that this culture still exists, and it is a significant problem.

Feminists have shown their ability to deal with this problem, according to Rentschler (2014). The capacity to respond to others is the response-ability; subjectivity is grounded in the capacity to react and be responded. Based on olive's definition, young women s deployment of social media responses to street harassment and sexual violence constitute a networked activist subjectivity.

Development of a new mobile phone application ''Not your baby'', which suggests a verbal response to different sexual harassment situations, is one of the most recent moves to curb the rape culture. In addition to the app, there are other tools such as photography which are used to identify the attackers. They have made it easy for women to develop cases against those harassing them. Hollaback and other social media platforms provide a platform where both young and aged women have embraced the culture of supporting victims of different levels of sexual assault through sharing stories. This results in promoting site visitors' capacities for responding and reporting sexual assault. The Steubenville Rape Case, 2013, made Traci Lords and Tabatha Southey come out about their experiences with sexual assault as teenagers which fosters the culture of sharing for all girls including those ashamed to speak.

Conclusion

Sexual assault is more painful to handle when you do not talk about it or when friends and families do not believe you. Hollaback provides an online testimonial and response in one of the posts a 15 years old girl discusses her difficulty in coming to terms with being raped. In another post, another girl feared to tell her friend who had just been raped that she, too, had survived sexual assault.

Reference

Rentschler, C.A., (2014). Rape Culture and the Feminist Politics on Social Media. Girlhood Studies,7(1),65-82