We shouldn’t tolerate the commonness of rape anymore

Trigger warning — what I have to say this week is on the subject of rape and sexual violence.

One of the big eye-openers for me in the last few years has been realizing how many women I know have been raped. Either date rape, or sexual abuse when they were younger, or random acts of sexual violence.

Perhaps women started to talk about it more after the Me Too movement, so naive men like me only recently realized quite how pervasive and common sexual violence against women is.

You see the effects up close when it’s a friend or girlfriend, the pain it causes. And yet you also see the incredible strength and resilience of women, who carry on. Most times, you would never guess something like that had happened to them.

Data suggests that around one in six women are raped in the US. Women aged 16–24 are most at risk. Men get raped too — but it’s one in 33 people.

It is a deep injustice that the accident of being born female means you’re much more likely to be raped, not to mention exposed to the other forms of male violence and oppression.

If you have a son and a daughter, it is incredibly unfair that the daughter is much more exposed to that danger. Or your sister, mother, best friend, girlfriend, wife.

(Boys, by contrast, are more likely to be recruited into gangs, and more likely to be murdered. This is another tragedy.)

I don’t think men can imagine what it must be like being a woman, being constantly exposed to the unwanted sexual advances of men, wondering if you are in danger at any moment, not even being able to tell a man to piss off, in case that angers them and makes them more dangerous.

I can’t say if rape has become less common in the UK but I think so. Violence against women has become less tolerated.

In the early 19th century, when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the Vindication of the Rights of Women, British women barely had any legal rights at all.

A woman’s property and children were the property of their husband, divorce was impossible, and if they dared to leave their husband they had to desert their children in the process and become an outlaw. Marital rape was legal, and probably frequent. The only provision to protect women was a law, introduced in 1782, that said a man should beat his wife with a stick no wider than his thumb (hence the phrase ‘rule of thumb’).

The idea that rape can take place in a marriage was only introduced as a legal idea in the last few years. And we’ve only taken seriously the idea of clear sexual consent since the 1990s.

My Costa Rican girlfriend laughed at me when I asked if she would like to have sex. It seemed very formal to her, very English. (Costa Rica, by the by, has one of the highest incidences of rape in the world).

But I would rather a moment of awkwardness than a rape trial. In some countries around the world, if you don’t receive a clear, non-intoxicated, verbal consent to sex, it’s rape.

I’m not trying to present myself as the good guy. Us men need to recognize our own capacity for violence and for causing harm. I worry that when I was younger I didn’t always seek clear consent –was there an occasion when the woman felt she ‘ought’ to have sex without really wanting to?

I went to an all-boy’s school, where we weren’t given any sex education, and no guidance in how to ask for consent.

Instead, we raised ourselves, in a somewhat toxic culture of boys’ bravado. You tried to get as far as you could with a girl, then you boasted to your friends.

Movies taught us to see forcefulness and insistence as winning courtship practices, rather than law cases waiting to happen.

Are there instances now where young men are falsely accused of rape? I’m sure it happens. So men should not put themselves at risk. Get consent. If necessary, get written or recorded consent.

Does this sort of legalization of the bedroom take all the danger and power dynamics out of sex — and isn’t that half the fun?

Partners can decide whatever power dynamic they want in a relationship, and in the bedroom. They can be as weird and kinky as they like. They can live in a theocratic patriarchy or a polyamorous anarchy for all I care. As long as the rules are agreed.

I’ve probably got a lot wrong in this article. Like I said, my eyes were only opened to the ubiquity of this issue quite recently.

But it seems to me that, at the moment, your daughter or sister or friend or lover is far more at risk of rape, simply because they happened to be born female. Collectively, we can’t accept this anymore.