Origins and Usage
During the early 1970s, feminists began to engage in consciousness-raising efforts to educate the public about the reality of rape. Until then, rape was rarely discussed or acknowledged: "Until the 1970s, most Americans assumed that rape, incest, and wife-beating rarely happened." The idea of rape culture was one result of these efforts. According to the 2004 Encyclopedia of Rape, "The term 'rape culture' originated in the 1970s during the 2nd wave feminist movement and is often used by feminists to describe contemporary American culture as a whole." The concept appeared in multiple forms of media during the mid 1970s:
The term was used 1974 in Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women, edited by Noreen Connell and Cassandra Wilson for the New York Radical Feminists. It was one of the first books to include first-person accounts of rape, which were one reason for rape entering the public view. In the book, the group stated that "our ultimate goal is to eliminate rape and that goal cannot be achieved without a revolutionary transformation of our society."
The 1975 documentary film Rape Culture, produced and directed by Margaret Lazarus and Renner Wunderlich for Cambridge Documentary Films, discussed prison rape in the context of a larger cultural normalization of rape. In 2000, Lazarus stated that she believed the movie was the first use of the term. The film featured the work of the DC Rape Crisis Centre in co-operation with Prisoners Against Rape Inc. It included interviews with rapists and victims as well prominent anti-rape activists like feminist philosopher and theologian Mary Daly and author and artist Emily Culpepper. The film also explored the mass media, how film-makers, song writers, writers and magazines perpetuated attitudes towards rape.
In a 1992 paper in the Journal of Social Issues entitled "A Feminist Redefinition of Rape and Sexual Assault: Historical Foundations and Change," Patricia Donat and John D'Emilio suggested that the term originated as "rape-supportive culture" in Susan Brownmiller's 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. Brownmiller, a member of the New York Radical Feminists, showed how both academia and the general public ignored the existence of rape. The book is considered a "landmark" work on feminism and sexual violence and one of the pillars of modern rape studies.
Read more about this topic: Rape Culture
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