If there is one thing that shakes me to the core is the prevalent rape culture that permeates in America. Let me make it frank: there is a rape culture in our nation. Rape culture is a concept that links rape and sexual violence to the culture of a society, and in which prevalent attitudes and practices normalize, excuse, tolerate, and even condone rape [1]. Looking at that definition, there really is no argument. In short, rape culture is prevalent in America and it is a problem.

Oh, and for the non-believers, I have some examples for you.

Rape Culture As It Exists

There have been plenty of instances in which rape culture has been promoted ad naseum within the “land of the free”. Shannon Ridgway wrote this extensive, and informative, list of rape culture examples that included the following:

• Journalists who substitute the word “sex” for “rape” – as if they’re the same thing.

• Politicians distinguishing “legitimate rape” and stating that rape is “something that God intended to happen,” among other horrendous claims.

• Mothers who blame girls for posting sexy selfies and leading their sons into sin, instead of talking with their sons about their responsibility for their own sexual expression. [2]

There were many other examples (about 22 more), but I will leave that up to the reader to examine. Yet, we should note that 31 states have it where convicted rapists can sue for custody [3]. Therefore, if a person does not believe rape culture exists then they have been living under a rock.

And I am not talking about a pebble. I’m talking about an Easter Island statue sized rock.

Rape Culture in Black America

With all of these statistics ever present in America, it is no wonder that rape culture firmly exists within the throngs of Black America. Is it all of Black America? I hope not. However, there are some keen examples of hit existing in hip hop music. Ironically, the music I love has artists that promote a culture that I readily loathe.

This, in all shapes and forms, is pure bullshit.

When it comes to rape culture, there are some artists that actually promote said foolishness. It is bad enough that Rick Ross made the “molly statement of the year” in 2013 off of Rocko’s “U.O.E.N.O”. Meanwhile, Lil Reese was caught on tape beating up a woman a year or so ago. Added with the madness of the visuals shown in plenty of videos that are, but should not be, watched by young men AND women, and you have issues at hand. America is synonymous with baseball, apple pie, and the objectification of female sexuality; hip hop music can sometimes exacerbate this fact.

The problem with this is that much of this music is listened to/financially supported by women. This has help harness something author Kirsten West Savali has noted:

Violent words — hit, bang, beat, cut, smash – have been re-appropriated to refer to pleasurable, consensual sexual activity. It is not surprising, then, that sixty percent of Black girls have experienced sexual abuse before the age of eighteen. The Beat Bang Theory (double entendre intended) dictates that masculinity be defined by the authority — indeed, the right — to objectify, dehumanize, violate and destroy women, all while rocking a microphone. [4]

Do all rap artists do this? Naw. However, plenty of them do. And the ones that do this seems to be, at times, the most popular artists out right now. And these popular artists fill the clubs,Beats by Dre headphones, and car stereos of not only men but women as well.

Then, there are the thoughts of King Noble, a Youtube troll that advocates the raping of black women as some sort of “revolutionary act against capitalism” (I can’t make this stuff up).

Rape Culture Needs to Be Eradicated

The rap culture that exists in America has made it logical and “acceptable” for the Elliot Rodger of the world to make manifestos of sexual entitlement filled with a lack of maturity and conscience. Even worse, it has infiltrated Black America and made the objectification ofBlack women a common place cultural aspect. If this continues, then there won’t be any turning back. Rape culture has evolved into something too sinister, and illogical, to allow continuance. It has been past time to protect our mothers, sisters, nieces, daughters, and significant others from this societal succubus.

‘Nuff Said and ‘Nuff Respect!!!

The post Rape Culture in Black America appeared first on Madness & Reality.

Eve Ensler is a feminist, activist playwright, performer and award-winning author of The Vagina Monologues. She the founder of V-Day a worldwide movement to end violence against girls and women, and also the founder of One Billion Rising, a campaign to encourage survivors of interpersonal violence to report rapes and assaults to the authorities. The latter movement is – according to the website – a call for survivors to “break the silence and release their stories – politically, spiritually, outrageously – through art, dance, marches, ritual, song, spoken word, testimonies and whatever way feels right.”

Did I mention she’s a white female feminist? Yea. That’s important in this topic.

It would make sense from an artist’s point of view to express his or her pain through artistic mediums like painting, sculpting  or writing. And being active would likely call for people – other creative types – to express their struggles in a aesthetic way through inspiration.

However, Eve Ensler’s One Billion Rising campaign was inspired in a way that would reopen conversations about cultural appropriation, the white savior industrial complex and overall insensitivity to the plight of women of color to appear center stage in an attempt to speak on their “behalf” without full knowledge of the issue she’s focused on. It is illustrated in full view in her gross undermining of Congolese women in her article entitled The Congo Stigmata. I must warn you that what you will read is stomach turning.

But instead of seeing their struggle with an open and advanced lens, Ensler’s only solution to the women in that area is to dance their way to freedom!

Natalie Gyte at the Huffington Post explains:

I recently listened to a Congolese woman talk in a speak-easy setting of radical grassroots feminists. She was radiantly and beautifully powerful in her unfiltered anger towards the One Billion Rising movement, as she used the words “insulting” and “neo-colonial”. She used the analogy of past crimes against humanity, asking us if we could imagine people turning up at the scenes of atrocities and taking pictures or filming for the purposes of “telling their story to the rest of the world”. Take it one step further and try to imagine a white, middle class, educated, American women turning up on the scene to tell survivors to ‘rise’ above the violence they have seen and experienced by…wait for it…dancing. “Imagine someone doing that to holocaust survivors”, she said.

Prison Culture takes it a step further taking some info from bell hooks’ analysis of mainstream culture’s lust to “eat” or commodify the other, something that is very common here in the West. It deviates from the reality that indigenous women have been vocal and rebelled against gender violence without the means of white saviors:

She is also not unique in centering herself within other people’s struggles…Ensler’s language basically masks a Western Liberal project of “giving voice” to the oppressed. But as Arundhati Roy has said, “We know of course there’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.” Millions of women across the Globe are and have been organizing for their own liberation. They’ve used their voices for that. Even if the formulation of ‘giving voice’ wasn’t problematic on its face, we should be troubled that Ensler et al. seek to ‘give voice’ to incarcerated women, for example, without offering a substantive critique of the prison itself as violence.

And gender violence is way more complicated than just promoting prisons as both the problem and inevitability as Prison Culture continues:

Even within a supposed critique of prisons as sites of sexual and physical violence, the prison is still positioned by Ensler as inevitable and immutable. There is no acknowledgement that prisons are violence in and of themselves. There’s no mention in the campaign recently promoted that women who use violence against their perpetrators often find themselves trapped within these same prisons. It’s as if they are invisible in the campaign…

When I read this, I think about one woman in particular who’s in this predicament, Marissa Alexander. I wonder if the campaign knows who she is. I wonder if they know her situation, that she’s serving 20 years in prison for firing a gun in the ceiling as a warning shot to protect herself against her abusive husband. She’s currently released on bond while her case is pending, Still, she has a tough road ahead along will countless other women, including women of color, who are in the same boat.

The core of the issue of Eve Ensler’s campaign is her desire to “save” women of color by overlooking their humanity in the process due to Western standards to not consider women of color as “real” women. Women of color face gender violence worldwide. But mainstream feminism doesn’t seem to fully recognize the problem. That is, unless a white woman tells it.

The post One Billion Rising: Eve Ensler’s White Feminist Low Blow appeared first on Madness & Reality.