cracking wise

"What unites creepshots, the Middleton photographs, the revenge porn websites, is that they all feature the same fetishisation of non-consensual sexual activity with women who either you don’t have any access to, or have been denied future access to. And it’s really this product of rage and entitlement."

"Boys are told from a young age that whatever they do will be excused under the “boys will be boys” mantra, and that “boys will be boys” mentality leads to what I call the “boiling frog” problem of women’s sexual boundaries. I call it that because if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump right out, but if you put a frog into a pot of room-temperature water and slowly heat it to a boil, the frog will acclimate as it heats and never jump out, eventually boiling to death. Similarly, when we learn as young girls to tolerate “low-level” boundary violations like the ones we often are forced to suffer in silence at school, at home and on the street – bra-snapping, boob-grabbing, ass pinching, catcalling, dick flashing “all in good fun” relentless violations that adults and authorities routinely ignore – it makes it harder for us to notice when even greater boundaries are being violated, eventually leading to the reality that many women who are raped just freeze and fall silent, because that’s what they’ve been taught to do over and over since day one. You tell me what’s more infantilizing: repeatedly letting boys (and grown men) off the hook for their behavior because “boys will be boys” and we can’t ever expect any differently, or creating a consent standard in which all partners take active responsibility for their partner’s safety, and which acknowledges the truly diseased sexual culture we’re soaking in every day."

"It was feminists, after all, who decided that a better standard of sexual morality wasn’t “does it fit the arbitrary rules laid down by our god that just so happen to reinforce male dominance over women”. It was feminists who decided that pleasure, consent, and real world harm were better standards. Moreover, it was feminists who pointed out that a system of male domination over women and children encouraged rape. The fact that we went from a culture that was hush-hush about child rape to one where school children are instructed to tell on any adult who touches them inappropriately is because feminists spoke out about rape. And then they saw the connection between rape of women and rape of children. And they insisted that children be taught to respect their own health and well-being over the patriarchal pecking order that child rapists like these priests exploit. Without feminism, you have prevailing attitudes like Donohue’s, where protecting male authority is so important that you squabble with rape victims over how raped they should feel."