Rebecca Solnit writes:

Rape is a crime against democracy in the most immediate sense of equality between individuals and the premise that we’re all endowed with certain inalienable rights. Most rapists operate on the premise that they can not only overpower the victim physically, but can do so socially and legally. They count on a system that discounts the voices of victims and only too often cooperates in silencing them, through shame, intimidation, threats, discrediting, the obscene legal instrument known as a nondisclosure agreement and a system too often run by men for men at the expense of women and children. That is to say, rapists count on getting away with it because of a system that hands them power and steals it from their victims. They count on a silencing system. On profound inequality.

Which is what makes rape such a peculiar crime: it is the ritual enactment of the perpetrator’s power and the victim’s powerlessness, buttressed by the circumstances that puts and keeps each of them in those roles. It’s driven by the desire to use sexuality to cause physical and psychic injury, to dominate, to celebrate the rapist’s power and the victim’s powerlessness, to treat another human being as a person without rights, including the right to set boundaries, to say no and to speak up afterward. A society that perpetuates and protects this desire and arrangement is rape culture, and it’s been our culture throughout most of its existence.

Democracy, in this context, means a society and system in which everyone’s rights matter, everyone’s voice is heard and everyone is equal under the law. Rapists count on this not being true, but is has become more true over the past half century, thanks to feminism, and changed a lot more over the past dozen years, thanks to more feminism. There has been a shift toward equality of of voice, rights and support from the legal system, from arresting officers to investigations, judges and juries (who, thanks to feminism, are no longer exclusively male). It hasn’t changed enough, but it’s changed a lot, which is how a hundred survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s rape club were able to gather with the support of Thomas Massie, a Republican congressperson from Kentucky, and Ro Khanna, a Democratic representative from California, on Wednesday morning to speak to the world about their experiences and demand justice. [Continue reading…]