We Need to Talk About the Way We Talk About Sexual Assault

In the Wake of the Weinstein Conviction for Sexual Assault

So much of our culture is inundated with sexual assault and it’s so painfully normalized that I don’t think most people understand why exactly our culture is a rape culture. Men all over America think that women are just dramatizing something that doesn’t need to be dramatized. When I was a teenage boy, I went out on a date with a young woman and, absent any knowledge of what to do (oddly, even after I’d been very forthcoming) and nervous, I put my hand around her back and hugged her. She was made obviously uncomfortable by this. I stopped immediately and we continued the date and laughed, though I’m sure it left her deflated. The fact is, I didn’t know how to approach the situation. She messaged me later with a text message (yes, Facebook messenger wasn’t even invented yet) and notified me that she wasn’t interested). An entire world of emotional despair erupted within me as I didn’t know how to process the fact that I was raised in a culture where sex was so hush-hush, where we weren’t supposed to talk about sex openly, and we men (or, in my case, boys) were urged to “just do it” or “make your move” and seal the deal. All of the advice I’d been hitherto given, all the stupid things I’d seen on comedies like American Pie, all of the emphasis placed on the premiums that are women in the minds of men, all of it was all bullshit. When it came time to actually, uhh, start dating, I had no fucking clue what I was doing. I was painfully inept and I consider that failing to be those of my parents and society at large. I also say that it’s time that we create a new society with a new outlook on male-female relations.

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