"The easiest way to talk about” rape culture, Ariel Levy says on this
week’s Political Scene podcast, “is in action as opposed to in abstract
definition. Rape culture in action simply means taking a situation
where a woman—by virtue of the progress that our society has made over
the last hundred years—where a woman is in a situation where something
has nothing to do with sex and where sex is forced upon her.” In the
latest issue of the magazine,
Levy writes about
the presence and role of rape culture in the Steubenville High School
case, but, as she and Ryan Lizza discuss with host Dorothy Wickenden,
it’s not restricted to such places—in fact, sexual violence has retained
a stubborn hold on the U.S. military that is only now finally being
addressed as a political matter.
“What’s different now about what could happen
in the wake of this Pentagon report about the huge increase in sexual
assaults is you now have twenty women in the U.S. Senate, and you
actually have five women on the Senate Armed Services Committee,” Lizza
notes, saying that the increased presence of women has prompted “a
pretty robust debate about what to do about this.” That debate, Levy
says, ought to extend beyond the military: “Some of it has to start …
with comprehensive sexual education for boys and girls.”
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Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Matthew McKnight
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