all good men benefit from patriarchy and the actions of bad men and one clear example of this is the way rape is portrayed — as a creepy male stranger hiding in an alleyway, ready to opportunistically rape a woman
yet, in reality, we know that most rapes involve men raping women they know — their girlfriends, their wives, a female friend or a woman they’ve just started dating
and in the absence of outright physical coercion, it involve tactics such as subtly or explicitly pressuring women into sex, the concept of “maintenance sex”, dubiously obtaining consent through alcohol and drugs, ignoring her “no” to sex until you wear her down and she “gives in”, manipulating a woman into sex, etc.
many “good” men are guilty of the latter, but the idea of rape as a violent activity solely carried out in alleyways by creepy men benefits all men
“it’s not that deep” or “it can’t be rape” if it’s a male partner you trust pressuring you into sex, if you didn’t scream and if he didn’t pin you down, if you eventually gave in to sex, etc.
rape survivors are accused of watering down the meaning of rape if she acknowledges what happened to her at the hands of someone she trusted. feminists are accused of demonising every man as a sexual abuser, when the reality is that a large chunk of heterosexual sexually active women have been pressured into unwanted sex at some point
men can get away with “less physically severe” forms of rape and then gaslight women by saying “at least it’s not rape. look, you consented” when in reality anything less than a woman’s enthusiastic consent is rape
