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Rape Culture And Sexual Oppression

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Rape Culture And Sexual Oppression
Halie Hunter
Trudy Bartow
Honors English 1 B (EOC 20)
3 May 2016 Rape Culture

You may have heard the terms rape culture, victim blaming, and sexual oppression before, but what exactly do those terms mean? Victim blaming, sexual objectification, and societies expectations about gender, power, and sexuality are factors that promote rape culture. In the following paper I will explain to you what all of these terms mean. I will also tell you why rape culture, victim blaming, sexual objectification, and sexual oppression are wrong.

Rape culture is a term that feminists in the US during the 1970’s came up with. It was designed to show the ways society blames the victims and normalizes sexual violence. Rape culture includes TV shows, movies, …show more content…
Objectification means treating a person as a commodity or an object without regard to their personality or dignity. Instead of looking at a person as a human being they are seen as a body, a person to have sex with, nothing more than sex. (Sexual objectification) “A trend that is developing in entertainment media today is the objectification of women in society. Specifically, in movies, music videos, music, and television, there is a strong focus on women as sexual objects rather than women. This is detrimental to society because the media is creating social stereotypes for both men and women that can result in unhealthy social and physical habits.” (Objectification of Women In media) What is meant by this is that women’s bodies are being used to get you to buy products, watch movies, and listen to songs about sexual violence and using …show more content…
An example of that would be an advertisement for the same shirt, but on different sexes. The male is dressed appropriately and has hardly any skin showing. While the female advertisement is bent over a chair and isn’t wearing any pants at all. This happens very often in advertising and the constant confrontation with images of women as sexual objects have an effect on the minds of people who buy the products, who then can contribute this view towards women in real life. This causes women to be seen as objects, instead of well-rounded, complex people. (Real life examples Of Rape Culture In Our Society) “This objectification of women reduces women to their bodies and makes their bodies available for visual consumption. It’s easy to see why so many people objectify women’s bodies when it’s so normalized in our media. But when people transfer this objectification to real women in their lives, they are seen as objects available for their purposes, regardless of how the women feel. This can easily lead to ignoring the agency that is required for women to consent to sex.” (Five Ways rape culture exists unnoticed) The sexual objectification of women in media may cause rapists to think that it is okay to rape because in their minds women are for sex. Nothing else. There are countless examples and stories of how sexual objectification contribute to rape
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