Trigger Warning: This is an essay about rape. Many men feel upset when women talk about rape. I get it. It’s hard. If you start to feel angry, defensive or victimized, please take a break and watch some sports or have an energy drink. Take a nap. Just a reminder, though, there are no non-participation trophies for rape. Frowny face. I know the arguments “I never raped anyone” and “Not all men are rapists” are compelling and mature responses to women talking about rape, but please don’t expect a prize. Sad face.
A woman, any woman, says something, anything, online. A man, or men, don’t like it. They get angry. A teenage girl is in her bedroom playing a video game online and she does something, anything, exists, and some man, some boy, doesn’t like it. They get angry. A woman writes about men in a flip way when talking about serious, serious issue that is almost completely their men’s fault and responsibility. And they (me?) will eventually receive a rape threat. Always. Men never disappoint.
Fuck you whore. You deserved to be raped.
Stupid bitch. I hope you get raped.
And of course, of course, of course, the pièce de résistance:
I’m going to come to your house tonight and rape you, cunt.
Women learn at a very early age that rape exists and they are targets. Our parents and teachers don’t say the word rape (even to themselves), but it’s what they mean when we tell them they don’t make them hug people they don’t have to hug people they don’t want to. Schools teach girls not to let anyone touch them on the parts their bathing suits cover. There are bad men who want to hurt kids. If something happens in a crowd, look for a mommy (meaning: not a man) to help you.
We teach this to little girls. Because we need to help them. But if our goal is significantly decrease the success of predators on harming children, we are not making a lot of progress. In the course of each generation, millions of women are raped as children or adults. Few women make it out the door of life without some kind of sexual harm. Ask a woman you love – have you ever had a traumatic sexual encounter with a man as an adult or child?
But we don’t really, do we? We lie to them (and ourselves) that strangers are the thing to fear, which is a boon to rapists, because it draws the attention away from them to the abstract boogeyman. The real child rapists are in minivans, not scruffy white ones with no windows. They prey on their children, their friends’ children, their children’s friends, their relatives, their pupils, their parishioners, the kids on the sports team they coach. Their foster children. Their step children. Their girlfriend’s children.
Women are sometimes raped by strangers, or more commonly, for her to know him. Men rape their daughters. Their friends’ daughters. Their nieces. Their neighbor. The girls they coach. The women they date. Their wives. Rape is everywhere. Any woman with a reasonably-sized social circle knows (even if she doesn’t know) multiple women (and at least one man) who have been raped. Whether he knows it, every man, knows multiple men who have committed rape. With countless rapes, there are countless perpetrators, and we are not immune from coming into contact with them. They drive minivans, not creepy, windowless white ones. The call is coming from in the house.
Rape is also everywhere on television and film. I imagine two writers working together and one says, “What should happen next, I’m stumped.” And his partner says, “Let’s rape her.” There is an entire television series about rape (and other forms of sexual abuse). There’s men who go around luring predators to a fake meeting with a child. There are shows about them. It seems like they all eventually end up arrested for Child Sexual Abuse Material as Child Pornography, we had to rename because pornography implies consent, just like there are no child prostitutes.
I really want to watch Game of Thrones, but I’m jut not up for a rape-fest (when it’s not incest, or probably combined with it, because of course it is). I had a friend whose wife got herself through the scenes of rape by chanting, “It’s not real.” over and over again. I heard one man push back against this complaint, saying, “It’s just being accurate to the time period.” Dude. This is not real. This is fantasy. Oh no, I just winced typing the word fantasy. Yes, it’s a fantasy world. But is it also some men’s fantasy?
Along with teaching women about the threat of rape, showing it to them everywhere and giving them what are mouse-sized sling shots to protect themselves, we also are clear that rape is a woman issue, not a man issue. We aren’t asking why does he beat the shit out of his wife and how do we get him the hell out of there, we’re asking her why does she stay. Rape is not a man problem. It’s not a family, neighborhood, town, county, state, country or world problem. It’s your problem, it is, in fact, your job, not to be raped. It’s like domestic violence, it’s your job not to be hit. We will get mad at you if you get hit. You should have left. Left how and go where is not our problem. Just leave. If Louis CK is masturbating in front of you in a hotel room where you came for a meeting to talk about a script, get your ass out of there. What’s wrong with you letting him do that? What the hell were you doing in a hotel room with him, anyway. Fuck your comedy career. Fuck you.
Carl Jung talked about the collective unconscious, a kind of human mind independent of us that we are not aware of, but that impacts us as we impact it. He also talked about the shadow, the collection of dark traits and instincts we spend a lot of time an energy trying to ignore and hide. I think there is an Energy of Rape in the shadow part of the collective unconscious.
It speaks to the male feeling of ownership of women, of control, of disgust, of rage. And it has existed throughout history. It is strong. It is vast.
And women having their own voices, controlling their own narratives, speaking out about harms, is not helping this darkness, the darkness feeds on it. Instead of moving towards the light of reality, men delve deeper into the shadows. They still feed on and reinforce the deep, dark rage of rape.
Not all men, men yell when they are grouped together as one. We can talk about women as a group or Black men or children, or old people, but don’t you dare talk about men as a collective. They won’t stand for it. Talking like this threatens their individually.
When white people heard, “Black lives matter,” they put an only in the front of it instead of a too after it. They equated Black lives mattering with white lives mattering less and they felt like Black people were being mean. Or making us feel bad about bad shit that happened forever ago. Frowny face. I taught sociology for years at the college and when cranky white men would say, “I don’t own any slaves,” I would respond with, “But you would have.” When whiny white women would say, “Not everything is about race!” I would reply, “tell me something that isn’t. Twenty-five years and counting.
So yes, all men do not rape or hit women and children. But how do you tell if a specific man belongs to the “not all men” category? The chance of him being violent is small, of course, but it’s not zero. You have to treat every man like a loaded gun, a friend’s father told her when she was little.
I thought about this a lot while reading about the history of concentration camps and the holocaust. The vast majority of citizens did not kill Jews. But they knew about it. My mother-in-law, who was Czechoslovakia, was brought to Germany by the Nazis after a sweep at her one-room schoolhouse. She eventually escaped from the farmer who she had been “given to” for forced labor. She slept in a ditch in the barn. And of course, he raped her.
But she knew, like everyone knew, that the trains seen or heard in the distance were on a dark mission. Almost everyone stood by. Some helped. Many more took the houses and belongs of those taken. Some people treated the victims who survived to liberation like lepers.
People think there is no action in inaction. But inaction is a choice. It is a decision that results in a behavior, which means an action. Why do the “not all” men feel no responsibility in helping, confronting these men, pointing them out, calling them out at a party. Willfully not knowing you can ask any adult woman “tell me about a bad sexual experience you had” and she will have an answer. It’s not enough to fight rape energy by not raping. How are you helping? How are you bearing witness? What is your role? You are a man, after all.
Unfortunatly, The stranger danger model reinforces our sense of safety from the darkness. We believe evil people look evil. That we can tell. We also believe that children who has been raped shows it in their demeaner, their behavior. That we know our child isn’t being harmed, because we don’t see any evidence of it. And of course all the parents of abused children thought that, too. And they didn’t.
There is a saying: Rape is about power, not sex. But I think rape is about ownership. You belong to me. That, that thing between your legs, is mine. I own it and men own it collectively. Your body, my choice. The ownership is so righteous, they don’t need to know anything about it the thing they own. Show them a diagram of the female reproduction system and they are lost. Dudes, there are three openings down there, not two. It’s just theirs. And their dick is theirs. And they own it and it has rights, especially the right to stand tall and proud. Hello, Viagra.
I think the collective darkness is much more about ownership and, pardon the pun, denial of entry. That’s mine, bitch. I think this shows up more clearly in the recording of Donald Trump on a live version of Access Hollywood with Billy Bush (who is, of course he is, part of the Bush family and surely a meritocracy hire).
In the video, Trump described his attempt to seduce a married woman and indicated he might start kissing a woman that he and Bush were about to meet. He added, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.
That shit is mine. And thanks to my power and privilege I get to grab it. We’d all like to be able to do it, but sadly we can’t. But I can, because I’m a STAR. And because I’M A STAR, they let me do it (his words, not mine). He’s 100% clear he knows it’s wrong, but he can do wrong, can’t he, because… well, you know.
Rape energy, ownership energy has it’s own influences, one of the superstars being Jordan Peterson. He’s kind of like a social Ayn Rand. (The same Ayn Rand whose organization applied for, and got, PPE loans during COVID.) Here’s a helpful quote:
A harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control.
It would take me a week to unpack this, but let’s just say I think he’s an idiot. I don’t think most men would agree with this and I don’t think it’s true of most men. I’m probably wrong, but give me a little hope. I admit when I first read it, it really resonated, again a lot to unpack. But then I read it again.
Two things (among many) he conveys here:
- Harmless men are weak and therefore not dangerous.
- Oh fuck it, I can’t keep going. I hate this guy so much. I hope he gets raped by Andrew Tate while Joe Rogan runs the camera.
I don’t think most men are actively using their mental muscles to stop themselves from raping women. But something is going on, you only have to look at the role rape plays in war. Rape energy is unleashed during war. Not are susceptible, but a lot are. Things they would never do in their normal lives flourish. I think all taboos lower during war. But the rape taboo slips away fast. Part of it, I think, is because rape becomes a collective activity rather than a solitary one. We are much more likely to feel something is OK if we see someone else doing it.
I think it still comes back to this idea of ownership. That’s mine. I’m going to take it and do with it what I want. You are not a person, you are a delivery system. During the Rape of Nanking, many women tried to escape notice by dressing as men. The Japanese figured this out and so if you went through a checkpoint dressed as a man, they would grab your crotch to make sure. They would literally grab women by the pussy. The Nazi’s did a version of it to find Jews posing as non-Jews by making the men take their pants off.
The tens of thousands of rapes committed by the Japanese against Chinese women often included inserting things into their victim’s vaginas either as a part of the rape, after the rape, or after they’d killed the woman they raped. They also raped in groups. They also raped groups of women at one time. But that wasn’t enough, they had to add horror by raping a man in front of his wife, make a brother rape his sister. Shoot a priest who won’t rape a child.
The clearest connection between rape and ownership is in slavery. The women were literally owned. If someone else raped one of your slaves they legally committed a crime against you. I watched a National Geographic show recently where they use DNA and family trees to help solve old crimes or mysteries. It is much more difficult, of course, because slaves were property (I went on ancestry.com one time and I was in England 1700s England in two seconds). These folks used a bill of sale of a slave to help trace the family history. Names were more common on those than on the census. And don’t get me started on the “breaking” of enslaved men by raping them in front of the community.
This idea of dark energy that can be unleashed given the right person, people or group, or culture, or nation, firsts showed up when I was watching Kid Rock blowing up cases of Bud Light with a rifle. He was protesting Bud Light’s collaboration with Dylan Mulvaney, a influencer on Instagram (1.5 million followers right now) who is a trans woman. She’s incredibly perky and sweet. In the video she’s dressed as Audrey Hepburn, down to the black gloves and pearls. In the 30 second video, she has a six pack of Bud Light on a table in front of her and a fabric curtain behind her. That’s all that’s in the frame.
You could then use this term as the proper name for this force: This eruption of mass violence is a direct manifestation of what I term The Entitlement to Defile, an archetypal force residing in the collective shadow…
the entitlement and compulsion to defile
Dylan was being paid by Bud Light to bring attention to a contest they were having in the sprit of March Madness. She starts out by saying that apparently March Madness has something to with sports, ha ha. She then says she’s celebrating her 365 days of womanhood and that Bud Light had done the most amazing thing and sent her a can with her face on it. She shows the can. It looks like Kid Rock was the graphic designer. Sorry, Dylan. She then talks about the beer a bit and says goodbye, waving her black-gloved hand.
The response was, to me, a bold unleashing of the rape energy. But this only came to me in time. In the beginning I was both riveted and confused about what everyone was going crazy about (see: Cracker Barrell logo change – forcing crackers to literally say to take away my cracker.)
The rage was so deep. And instead of dark, it appeared as bright, bright, white (people). The rape energy is enraged by the idea of, or appearance of, trans women. It makes Jordon Peterson’s good men loose control and show us who they really are. And if it’s one things I’ve learned in life, when people show you who they really are, it’s never good. I know (from experience!) the same thing about a crisis – a crisis shows you who people are. It’s never good.
Before Kid Rock, BKR, I knew there was something huge that was being triggered in white people, especially men. As Gabor Mate says, you can’t be triggered if there isn’t ammunition. The first thing, I think, they share with conservatives: I don’t like what you’re doing so you should stop. Drag shows. Protests. Books. Abortions. Being Black. Whatever. So, people don’t like the idea of trans people so they need to be stopped.
Another part of the energy is the simplification of complex issues. See: the only true rape victim is a white, Christian, virgin dressed in Amish clothing, walking to church to teach Sunday school, who gets pulled into an alley by a Black man, because we all know Black men are sexually dangerous, among other dangerous things. And so trans women are gross, disgusting, weak men. Perverted freaks who want to cut their dicks off so they can rape (?) kids in bathrooms, cheat at sports and do deviant sex stuff.
The ick factor. God knows in the rape energy, women are pretty gross. Their periods are super gross. No idea how they actually work, but yuk. Women’s vaginas smell like fish, or look like roast beef (Hello, incels! I once read about the different translations of the word abomination as it’s used in the bible. One of the translations is “eww.” Which is pretty funny when you hear Jesus say a man shall not lie down with another man, eww. I think there’s a big ick factor. Trans men, ewww.
Another conservative addition to this realm is: my religion’s God says that’s wrong so I condemn you and want to force you to stop, but I do the same thing in secret. See: abortion – how many mistresses have had abortions? See: sex work, not a word in the dictionary for this level of hypocrisy. See: trans women. There is lots of data about searches for different kinds of porn. One of them is “trans porn.” Guess what color the states are that do the most searching? Guess what happens in the incidence of the search the more conservative the county. And just for fun, there’s plenty of rape porn out there. And millions of images/videos of children being sexually abused.
I could do a million more.
But, I started to see the issue of control and the focus on the vagina and a sense of violation. The idea of trans women is disruptive to rape culture. What does it mean when a man has a vagina? How is that possible? Vaginas belong to me. Is he/she the rapist or the rape-ee now? And how can a man call himself a woman. Who would want that? It’s an abomination. Where’s Kid Rock?
Not done.
“The Crawlers”, 1877. ‘The Crawlers’ were the lowest of the British poor. This elderly widow is sitting outside a tailor’s shop, holding a baby while its mother works. She was given a cup of tea and a slice of bread daily in return.
The photograph titled “The Crawlers” was taken in 1877 and captures one of the harshest realities of Victorian poverty in London. The term “crawlers” referred to some of the most destitute people in society — often the elderly, widowed, or disabled, who were too frail to work and forced to rely on scraps of charity to survive. They were called “crawlers” because many were so weakened by hunger, disease, or age that they could only move slowly, often crawling or dragging themselves along the streets.
In this haunting image, an elderly widow sits outside a tailor’s shop, cradling an infant. The baby’s mother, likely a working-class woman struggling to make ends meet, left her child in the widow’s care while she labored inside. The widow’s payment for this exhausting responsibility was meager: a cup of tea and a slice of bread a day. Such arrangements were common, as survival for the poorest relied on fragile networks of mutual aid and the charity of others.
This photograph is more than a snapshot, it is a window into the crushing inequalities of Victorian society. While industrial Britain was generating immense wealth, many of its citizens were trapped in cycles of poverty, living day to day on the edge of survival.
Fun Fact: Social reformers later used photographs like this as evidence to push for changes in housing, sanitation, and welfare laws, laying the groundwork for Britain’s eventual social safety nets.
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“I term this force ‘The Entitlement to Defile.’ This archetype is a dangerous fusion of a primal compulsion—a dark, driven energy from the deepest layers of the shadow—and a conscious attitude of entitlement—a constructed belief system that asserts ownership and the right to violate. The compulsion provides the fuel; the entitlement provides the justification. Together, they form a psychic blueprint for sexual violence that can lie dormant within the collective unconscious until circumstances allow it to erupt.”
And rape is just part of it. There’s also sexual assault, physical assault, sexual harassment, catcalling, domestic violence, and objectification. There is living with the threat of all of it. We also get to enjoy seeing these things everywhere in the entertainment media. Movies, television shows, books, everywhere you look there is rape (and other forms of violence and degradation). It’s everywhere. Not sure what to next in your movie plot – let’s rape someone.
I heard one man push back against this complaint, saying, “It’s just being accurate to the time period.” Dude. This is not real. This is fantasy. Even typing that word made me wince. Fantasy. Shit. I talked to a man who told me his wife chants, “This is not real, This is not real,” over and over to able to watch the rapes on the show. I’m not sure this is right. I’m not sure we should be showing this. I’m not sure. I’m not trying to stop anyone, but I’m not sure.
And at the same time, women are supposed to look and act sexy, but not too sexy, and “have sex with me the man says, but not with that other man, whore.” And men are, of course, owed sex, it is a human right, and their currant deprival of this human (male) right to it is a national crisis. Hello incels.
