"Quotes"

A great place to start is recognizing your own responsibility and recognizing that despite the fact that you find rape abhorrent, you have likely done it without knowing.

Recognizing that is a good first step.

I remember having this same conversation with my husband years ago and seeing how disgusted he felt with himself when he realized that pestering his highschool girlfriend until her "not right now" turned into a "sure okay" was, in fact, rape.

Realizing that good people are capable of rape, and that we are human, and that consent matters above all else is a place to start.

Realizing that even when a woman says "asking for consent ruins the mood" that she is internalizing rape culture and that it doesn't mean you should stop asking tor consent is a place to start.

Fuck, I used to say that when I was young and stupid, and I realize now that I was wrong and absolutely internalized rape culture. I now think asking for consent is very sexy now that it's recontextualized.

A good place to start is reflecting and recognizing all the ways you have perpetuated rape culture in your life.

Do not assume that you haven't, because you have. You may not have intended to, but we all have perpetuated it.

You are not exempt from this and assuming we are innocent is what keeps us from progress.

Cool, refer to the sources I listed above. Yes, you are expected to fucking confront other men when you see them contributing to rape culture. If you're so disgusted by sexual violence, that should not be an issue for you.

I have to confront them all the time just to defend myself, I'm sure you could handle it.

Edit: Refer below, this guy kindly volunteered to demonstrate the exact kind of problematic behaviour I've spoken about. This is what dangerous men sound like, so be conscious that even people who are saying they don't want to do harm -- whether they mean that or not -- are still fully capable of doing harm. If someone's main concern is dissuading any liability, they're likely not very concerned about the fact that they've harmed someone.

We also know that men who are more likely to be perpetrators of sexual violence are typically more misogynistic and anxious about their position in a perceived hierarchy (rape is not about sex, it's about power). So, yes, being perceived as less of a man for perpetrating or at the very least, not challenging sexual violence, is actually an effective deterrent.

A major problem is what you just described, which is that most men are actually quite insecure about challenging other men, and therefore often participate in social groups where that kind of deterrent is punished. There's two men in this thread already who were angered by the suggestion that they have to risk their social standing to contribute to sexual violence prevention, when they thought not being rapists themselves was all they had to do. It's also important to remember that this doesn't mean they haven't also committed some form of gender based and sexual violence, since they typically don't know what qualifies as that beyond overt sexual assault.

My brother in Christ, the President of the United States of America is a convicted rapist pedophile part of an international human trafficking ring. Rape culture is not just a term that refers to "when you rape someone and other men don't stop you," it describes cultural norms that facilitate gender based and sexual violence, like slut-shaming, victim blaming, objectifying women at all, devaluing women's sexual pleasure. It also includes what is recognized as sexual violence. So, you mentioned someone grabbing a woman's ass, which positions sexual assault in a workplace; probably the most common setting in our cultural imagination besides somewhere random by a stranger. Sexual violence is more likely to come from someone you know closely, like a friend, family member, or romantic/sexual partner. Your assumption of what rape culture is is itself an example of how it contributes to misunderstandings of what sexual violence is and therefore helps facilitate it through that misunderstanding. I think it'd be a tremendous lapse in awareness to suggest those are not normal things in this culture just because a handful of libs say they don't like it that much anymore without doing anything to actually change that. Did you forget about fuggin' Gamergate?

Since a lot of sexual violence prevention curricula are designed with student bodies in mind, as in a high school or university setting, much of the research conducted to educate on sexual violence prevention is therefore dedicated to getting men to fucking stop doing it, because they are overwhelmingly responsible for perpetration of sexual violence and reproduction of that culture.

Some basic sources to educate yourself and any others who come across this:

Sills, Sophie, Chelsea Pickens, Karishma Beach, et al. 2016. “Rape Culture and Social Media: Young Critics and a Feminist Counterpublic.” Feminist Media Studies (Abingdon) 16 (6): 935–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2015.1137962.

Henry, Nicola, and Anastasia Powell, eds. 2014. Preventing Sexual Violence : Interdisciplinary Approaches to Overcoming a Rape Culture. Palgrave Macmillan.

Fanghanel, Alexandra, and Alexandra Fanghanel. 2018. “How to Break a Rape Culture: Gendered Fear of Crime and the Myth of the Stranger-Rapist.” In The Routledge International Handbook on Fear of Crime, 1st ed., edited by Murray Lee and Gabe Mythen. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315651781-29.

You need to understand just how pervasive it is, to the point that most men you know over a certain age (let's say 25) have absolutely raped someone by accident, with the word rape being defined as sex without explicit and enthusiastic consent.

Most rape is not ugly, most rape is not violent, most rape is clumsy and grey-area because someone pushed boundaries and the other person didn't communicate them or didn't feel safe saying "stop". Most men who have raped are not bad men, they were not properly educated on consent, hence the huuuge focus on teaching people about consent at a very young age. When everyone understands consent, we are able to prevent these situations.

Like fuck, there are still so many people out there who will say asking for consent "ruins the mood", which is something they were taught to feel by popular culture (movies, etc.), and this is how rape culture is perpetuated. We are all complicit until we are all serious about learning about rape culture and how it invades our media, and calling out our friends when they make stupid jokes that also perpetuate rape culture. Treating rape like it's all violent is also perpetuating rape culture, because it ignores all the times it is not violent, which is most rapes.

Rape culture is so much less obvious than the examples you've listed.

Keep doing it.

You think no one gives a shit what you think? They care more what you think than what women think, so push through the discomfort and keep doing it.

I don't know what the "endgame" is, but that discomfort is literally how rape culture is perpetuated. It's too uncomfy to call them out so they think nobody minds, and if you keep associating with them and not calling them out, they'll think you agree with them. Do you want that?

They dig their heels in when called out because they feel uncomfortable when called out, and they fucking should feel uncomfortable, so keep doing it.