Inside rape culture’s strong grip

CNN

By Zoe Sottile, CNN

(CNN) — Tarana Burke thinks those asking if anything has changed since MeToo are posing the wrong question.

The political organizer, who in 2006 started the hashtag that would take off in 2017 amid a mass reckoning with sexual violence, has seen it before. A high-profile episode sparks a new media cycle, new outrage, new pleas for change. Then comes the fatigue — and the question of whether, after all the protests, all the public recountings of harm, anything is better.

Nine years after the explosion of MeToo, an alleged gang rape at a fraternity at Cornell University has roiled the world of higher education and beyond.

For Burke, the question isn’t how much has changed since MeToo, but how much has changed in the decades-long fight against sexual violence. To her, it’s clear that “absolutely, things have changed.” She cited as an example lookback laws passed in several states that grant survivors of sexual abuse more time to file legal claims.

Those involved in the Cornell case are part of what Burke called the “MeToo generation,” growing up amid battles for public accountability against powerful men accused of abuse. Jane Doe, 20 at the time of the incident in 2024, would have been around 13 when MeToo first went mainstream.

The fact that episodes of sexual violence like the gang rape that Doe alleged in her lawsuit still occur is “disheartening,” Burke said, but it’s the response to the Cornell case that shows how much has changed. “The hashtag was never going to be the end-all, be-all for the kind of difference we need to see around sexual and gender-based violence in this country,” she said. “Watching the response to Jane Doe and the Cornell case is really indicative of what MeToo has made possible.” Without MeToo, “would it be this big? Would we be having a sustained national conversation around it? Would people be this bold and responsive to it? Had not we had this movement, I don’t know that we can say that.”

Call it by its name

Rape culture is the idea that the world we live in— the jokes, the movies, the power dynamics, the traditions — creates an atmosphere in which women are devalued and sexual violence normalized. The concept seeks to explain why even though society broadly agrees that “rape” is a crime and “rapists” are serious criminals, many or most acts of rape go unpunished or unacknowledged.

The idea took a long time to take hold. In 1957, a study called “Male Sex Aggression on a University Campus,” published by researchers at Indiana University, revealed just how prevalent acts of “erotic aggressiveness” were. In one sign of the times, the study said that girls offended by acts of sexual aggression might be “extremely prudish.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, women’s rights activists worked to change the public conception of rape. Sexual violence wasn’t just a crime committed by strangers against unsuspecting women. It was committed by husbands, fathers, friends, against women in particular (though research also raised awareness of male victims). “Marital rape” was legal in the US until some states began banning it in the 1970s, the same decade that activists opened the country’s first rape crisis centers to provide services for survivors.

A 1975 film called “Rape Culture” popularized the term. Released the same year as Susan Brownmiller’s influential book “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape,” the documentary featured interviews with survivors and feminist scholars, as well as men who admitted to raping women, juxtaposed with clips from popular films that romanticize or normalize scenes of sexual violence and coercion. It presents sexual violence as something far from an aberration, but rather the product of a society that treats women as “something to be used and abused,” as one inmate in a group called “Prisoners Against Rape” says in the film. That same year, a Cornell instructor named Lin Farley coined the term “sexual harassment,” inspired by the case of a Cornell administrative assistant harassed by the physics professor who employed her. The term would later reach the Supreme Court and be declared a violation of women’s civil rights.

Rape culture is “this whole set of behaviors and beliefs that erases women’s experience of sexual violence and makes it her fault,” said Sally Kenney, a professor of political science at Tulane University who teaches a course on the politics of rape. “It’s a whole set of structures, of ideas, legal practices, and assumptions that are very intractable.”

Today, “America is steeped in rape culture, and it’s so insidious that we don’t even recognize it,” said Burke. “It’s in our art. It’s in our entertainment. It’s in our books. It’s in our magazines. It’s in our commercials. It’s everywhere.”

One of Burke’s often-cited examples is the hit fantasy TV show “Game of Thrones,” which features dragons, witchcraft and copious scenes of sexual violence. “We can imagine a world with dragons, but we can’t imagine a world without rape,” she said.

You can also see rape culture in the political ascension of those who have been accused of sexual violence, said Burke.

“There’s not a far line between ‘grabbing by the pussy’ and ‘free pussy,’” she said, referencing the 2005 comments by Donald Trump before he became president and a comment made in a Snapchat groupchat by members of the fraternity accused in the alleged Cornell assault. “If people can’t see that, I mean, to me, that’s just like, a hammer over the head, right?”

‘Normal men’

The feminist concept of rape culture developed at the same time as a body of research showed that sexual violence was shockingly common.

A 1985 report about gang rape on college campuses, part of the Association of American College’s Project on the Status and Education of Women, recorded more than 50 incidents that took place at colleges big and small, private and public. What the authors named “acquaintance gang rape,” they said, was “not isolated or rare” but rather surprisingly common. The incidents often included similar elements: drugs and alcohol, fraternities and victims who knew the men they say assaulted them. They also noted that “most stranger rapists appear to be normal men from all ethnic groups, all socio-economic levels, all professions” — a contrast to the myth, they wrote, that all “rapists are insane.”

Two years after that campus gang rape report, the first national study on rape among college students was published. Instead of asking respondents if they had been raped, the study asked in plainer language if they had experienced acts of nonconsensual sex. The findings were astounding. One in four female college students had been raped, even if they didn’t use the term themselves, a phenomenon psychologist Mary P. Koss dubbed “the unacknowledged rape.”

Still, despite these reckonings over the widespread nature of sexual violence on college campuses and beyond, it took a while for colleges to see it as their responsibility. In 1972, the federal government enacted Title IX, the landmark federal civil rights law that prohibited sex-based discrimination in schools or educational programs that receive federal funding. But it wasn’t until around 1980 that the law became “seen as relevant to sexual harassment, and even then, at that point, it was understood mostly as relevant to faculty-on-student,” said Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who studies sexual violence and higher education.

The law only became deployed as a vehicle for students to pursue claims of violence or harassment against other students in the 2000s, Armstrong said. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights under the Obama administration released what became known as the “Dear Colleague Letter,” a document that explicitly named preventing sexual violence as part of universities’ responsibilities under Title IX.

It was “a major, major historical turning point where universities had to really start paying attention,” said Armstrong. Universities started enacting trainings about consent and bystander intervention. Many, Cornell among them, adopted affirmative consent codes that stipulate consensual sex requires a clear “yes,” not just the absence of a “no.”

‘Cumulation of rage’

The 2017 MeToo movement was one intense arc of media attention and legislative furor that seemed to break the surface, puncturing the otherwise mundane backdrop of sexual violence in the US and driving calls for real accountability. But in the years since, men accused of sexual violence have rejoined the public sphere, the manosphere has exploded and the Jeffrey Epstein investigation has revealed acceptance of or participation in sexual exploitation at the highest levels of society. And Title IX, under Trump’s administration, was defanged, with Obama-era guidelines rewritten.

For women and survivors of sexual assault, the ever-repeating cycle of scandals over sexual violence without meaningful change is painful and exhausting.

“There’s that kind of cumulation of rage,” said Kenney. After “all of this work that’s gone into legal reform and training the police and educating people, it’s very frustrating when it appears to not move the needle.”

Burke sees it differently. That backlash itself is a sign that something is working.

“Backlash to me is always a signal that there’s movement,” she said. “They’re responding to something.”

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