Sexual violence is normalized through global militarization. Institutions permeate trauma to stifles queer, feminist agency.

*TW: This card frequently talks about sensitive issues of sexual assault.

Sexual assault is the language in which girlhood is spoken. Male sexual violence is a near-universal experience for girls growing up, but that does not make it fine, or normal. Sexual violence is not normal - it is normalised, and deliberately, savagely so. This is the trauma that shapes our collective understanding of gender and power, and it doesn't 'get better' as we grow beyond girlhood. This ritual of violence and silence plays out right through every industry and institution of power. There is far more at stake here than simply ending sexual violence, though that would be a start. The rabbit hole of rape culture and misogyny goes deeper than most of us have dared to contemplate. Human beings create outsized monsters so that they don't have to face up to the everyday monstrosity in their homes, their schools, their communities. In the conspiracy theories that cosset conservative culture, there is enormous anxiety about shadowy groups of elites abusing women and children. The women and children targeted by these fictional conspiracies do not exist, and, as such, don't demand anything of their rescuers. The sheer strangeness of these conspiracy theories could only have come from a culture desperate not to face the fact that sexual violence is ordinary, and everyday, and everywhere. In the same way, most women who are raped are raped by someone who is known to them, often a close friend, a partner or a spouse - and yet our cultural and legal understanding of what a rapist looks like still seems to involve a dark alley and a stranger with suspicious facial hair. This frankly freakish othering of rapists and abusers is a crucial pressure-release valve. It allows the rest of us to live more comfortably within economic and social structures that are entirely predicated upon abuse. If rape is a unique crime perpetrated by a few 'bad apples', there's no need to dig up the whole orchard. Sometimes people say the quiet part out loud when protecting predators. Newspapers reacted with surprise and disgust at a ruling passed down by Monmouth County Judge James Troiano on whether to charge a sixteen-year-old boy as an adult in a rape case where a sixteen-year-old girl accused the boy of raping her at a party while she was unconscious. According to media reports, the boy filmed the encounter and shared the video with his friends along with a text message that read, 'When your first time having sex was rape.’ Troiano pointed out that the boy was destined for ‘a good college', was from a 'good family', and was an Eagle Scout. The defendant had no problem understanding his own actions as rape - just not the sort of rape that men like Troiano consider criminal. What had happened to the girl was not a 'traditional case of rape', Troiano said, which typically involved 'two or more generally males involved, either at gunpoint or weapon'. Like all monsters, the imagined rapist is invoked as a warning-not to men, but to women. Don't wear that dress, don't talk too loud, don't want too much. You know what happens to girls who don't follow the rules. There's a reason why this story is so hard to shake. If rapists are monsters, rather than human beings like the rest of us, then knowing someone to be a human being with hopes and dreams and habits and feelings means we can cease to believe that he might also be a rapist. 'He's a good guy' is usually code for 'she must be lying’. This is a comforting fantasy for the frightened, angry child inside every entitled man, desperate to be loved unconditionally; it reassures him that the monsters disappear when you close the book, and that women are unreliable narrators of their own experience. It's not that the dedicated predator, the pathological serial rapist, does not exist. But when he does, he is accommodated quite as often as he is hunted down and stopped. Hundreds of people knew something about what Harvey Weinstein was doing in Hollywood. Weinstein was protected, just as Bill Cosby was protected, just as the pedophile Jimmy Savile was protected by television companies and charities in Britain, because the reputations of powerful men and the networks they build to armour their abuses are usually valued more highly than the safety of women and children. Acknowledging the rapist in the room makes everyone uncomfortable, so collective social comfort is purchased at the cost of women's lives. As society continues to grapple with the stigma attached to sexual assault survivors, those in power have continued to exploit that stigma. In November 2018, a defence lawyer in a Cork rape case passed around the seventeen-year-old complainant's underwear to the jury. The article of clothing proved that the girl was 'open to meeting someone', the lawyer said. ‘You have to look at the way she was dressed. She was wearing a thong with a lace front.’ Only months earlier in Belfast, a nineteen-year-old woman who accused several rugby players of rape was cross-examined for eight days and her underwear was also passed around to the jury. If prosecutors continue to use this line of defence, it's only because it continues to work on juries and judges. Canadian Judge Robin Camp was called out in the press after asking an alleged sexual assault victim why she could not just keep her knees together' or put her 'bottom down into the basin so he couldn't penetrate you?’ Again and again, from courts of law to intimate relationships, those with a stake in the status quo repeat the story that it is not men's responsibility to refrain from rape, but women's responsibility to guard against it, not just physically but by controlling how they behave, how they dress and where they go. The omnipresence of rape is the enforcing mechanism for heteronormative patriarchy as a political system, just as police violence and the carceral justice system is the enforcing mechanism for the political system of white supremacy - and, in many cases, police officers themselves are the disciplinary agents for both. In 2020, Louisville police broke into twenty-six-year-old emergency medical technician Breonna Taylor's home and shot her in her bedroom during a botched raid. At least one of the officers responsible for her death had been accused of sexual assault by multiple women and had twice been investigated for sexual harassment on the job but, like most American law-enforcement officers, faced no substantive consequences. This expectation of impunity is what allowed Daniel Holtzelaw, a police officer in Oklahoma, to systematically target vulnerable African American women and coerce them into sex. When Holtzclaw was finally arrested, it was on thirty-six charges, including multiple counts of rape and sexual battery. In the United States and elsewhere, the idea that cops protect women from rape and sexual assault is often used as an argument against defunding and demilitarising the police. This argument is nonsensical, as the police have never prioritised punishing sexual violence, to the extent that the majority of rapes and sexual assaults still go unreported. The only circumstance in which law enforcement has historically concerned itself with rape is when the accused is a Black man and the alleged victim a white woman - whether or not the allegations are true. In fact, as this book explores in more depth later, the spectre of the 'outsider' rapist - the imagined Black or brown man as a threat to fragile white women, who require protection from white men - has been weaponised for centuries to justify racist violence. This poisonous myth has been central to the narrative of white supremacy, and to the stories white people tell themselves to justify racial inequality. White men, by contrast, can usually count on protection from law enforcement when accused of rape. During the British occupation of India, the rape of Indian women by British army Officers was a routine occurrence - and it is now known thar those officers 'could and did use the term "outrage" rather than "rape" when unruly soldiers raped Indian women,’ according to historian Nancy L. Paxton, who notes that conversely, British judges could, and occasionally did, redefine an incident involving an Indian man who touched an Englishwoman, as "sexual assault".’ Despite this, the popular understanding of rape in British India was of a relentless sexual threat posed to colonising white women by Indian men - and these racist 'rape scripts’ were used to justify the violent suppression of political unrest for generations. In the United States and elsewhere, Black men are still imagined as sexual aggressors, and Black women and girls as promiscuous, wanton and therefore undeserving of respect or protection. These dehumanising stereotypes still serve to justify white violence and minimise white guilt - because throughout American history, it has, in fact, been white men who have sexually terrorised Black and Indigenous women, and not the other way around. Sexual violence is a means of enforcing political and military dominance - and it always has been. During the Second World War, both the Axis and Allied powers used rape as a means of terrorising and subduing enemy civilians.10 Gang rape and complicity with rape by conquering armies are deliberately employed to create a feeling of bonding and cohesion among soldiers, according to researchers like Dara Kay Cohen and Gayatri Spivak. It is not only in the context of wars of invasion that rape is used to oppress civilian groups. In the United States, for many generations after the end of chattel slavery, the rape and assault of Black, brown and Indigenous women by white men was so common and so rarely prosecuted that it was functionally legal. In 1944, in Alabama, twenty-four-year-old Recy Taylor was walking home from church when she was brutally gang-raped by six white men. The campaign to prosecute and punish Taylor's rapists was taken up by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People - a civil rights organisation - and championed by activist Rosa Parks. Taylor and her family received death threats and had to go into hiding when their home was firebombed by racists furious that a Black woman was daring to challenge white male violence, but Parks and Taylor did not back down. The case helped galvanise the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The mere fact that women of colour were refusing to accept sexual subjugation was a profound political statement - and a challenge to a white supremacist culture that believed only white women were worth protecting from violence. It is clear that when we speak of 'rape culture', we are speaking of a form of biopower that is intimately involved with racism and colonial logic. It is just as clear that resistance to rape culture is inseparable from resistance to white supremacy. Challenging rape culture is not just about preventing rape. It is a direct reckoning with power. To refuse to tolerate the assault of women and children within institutions of power is to defy the articles of faith that hold these institutions together: that powerful men make the rules; that the more powerful they are, the more they are allowed to trample gleefully over other people's boundaries; that the reputation of men is worth more than the safety of women and girls; that men are worth more than women and girls, full stop. Her pain is necessary, whoever she is; his discomfort is unbearable, whatever he did. She must make allowances, because she is a girl, and that's what girls are for. He has his whole life ahead of him, or if he is older, he has a brilliant career, or if he is older still, an important legacy, one that cannot and ought not to be analysed in the context of all the lives and legacies damaged along the way. Think about his future. But feminists and queers and radicals aren't the ones who are afraid of the future. When people who are working for a world where more of us can live meaningful lives demand better from men, from sex, from love, from government and from one another, they are thinking about how the future will work for everyone, including for men and boys. The call for a new culture of consent, a new way of treating one another, is the simple, thrilling conviction that there might be lives ahead of all of us, maybe even better ones. Consent is the queer and throbbing core of the new sexual revolution - and consent is not just about sex. It is about power. It is about agency. It is about work, and love, and desire. It is about how much we are prepared to sacrifice to protect the fragile fantasy of masculinity that flattens all human mutuality into featureless transaction or outright violence. An ethos of exploitation is the twisted thread stitching together our relationships to power, to security, to pleasure, and to each other. To talk about building a culture of consent is to speak sincerely about all the ways in which abuse and exploitation are normalised in everyday life - at work, in politics, in our homes and families, and institutions. The opposite of consent is not only rape, but coercion and abuse of all kinds. And coercion is the logic that sustains both patriarchy and state power in oppressive societies.