I gone did a photoshoot

(Trying to shake off the ickys and the silent rage). The lack of empathy and compassion among many men disgusts me and cries of 'not all men' are frustrating and detract from the heart-wrenching issue which is the common stories of trauma from so, so many women. Every year (4 years) that I have been on an anti-rape march in one town in New Zealand (where 1 in 4 women is a survivor) there is at least one different man who shows up to yell 'we love rape!', call women on the march 'sluts' or try and have a serious argument with the organisers over women's reponsibility for rape (in front of multiple survivors of rape!). This year has been no different. Although I am not a survivor myself, the accumulation of years of casual groping, rape threats and verbal abuse from men and boys has the effect of producing enough anxiety to have me triggered by the actions of these men. Imagine what it is like for a woman living every day with the trauma of rape and who has had to find immense courage to join a march to scream loudly for her rights. Let me be clear: men abusing women at an anti-rape march is rape culture in action. It is the obvious intimidation these men feel from women's energetic and furious calls for a world free of violence that indicates that they identify on some level with the men we are protesting against. Whether or not they are actually rapists, the compulsion they feel to abuse women or debate our right to safety is symptomatic of how far we have still to go. Although we know that only a minority of men actively abuse and harass women, these men are extremely vocal, such that it feels like they are everywhere. The majority of men, however, are silent and it is this silence which encourages other men to believe that they are supported and valid in their contempt for women. I think the reason why many men are silent in the face of their peer's casual sexism is that they do not connect their friend's sexist attitudes with women's lived experiences of multiple violations by men. They are not mutually exclusive and anyone with a working knowledge of the sexual violence sector knows the role that attitudes play in encouraging sexual violence. Mainly through indirectly normalising and condoning violence against women. Jokes and the attitudes they harbour are manifestations of a culture lacking empathy for survivors, this in turn feeds into the resistance to change that feminist activists encounter. This is acutely obvious on the internet, where men make denigrating and dismissive trolling replies to women sharing stories of abuse. Suggesting they do not have a clue or a care as to the workings of trauma and the prevalence of it. I want to finish by saying that feminist anger is directly proportional to the denial and resistance from misogynist men, not to our hatred of all men. The necessity of being an annoying, vocal radical feminist is to match the violent resistance we encounter by speaking out about women's experiences.