January 2025
Renee Gerlich
This was originally posted on the The First Task Substack and is shared with permission.
Read about Renee Gerlich here.
Rape is the quintessential violation, connected to mass shootings, militarism, environmental destruction and hunger worldwide. To imagine our problems resolved is to imagine a world without rape.
Fuck.
We use the word all the time. When we’re annoyed, drop our phone in the sink, or see the damage to our car after someone backed into it. When the money runs out. When we watch the news.
That four-letter word is the most economical way to express invasion and damage. When something is broken, it’s fucked. Being tricked or conned is a ‘mindfuck’: someone got into your head so they could take what they want or use you. We are ‘fucked off’ – that’s the best way to convey it. It explodes from the mouth and hits.
Yes, the word is also used casually to mean sex, but it clearly does not mean making love. To fuck is to seek physical gratification, not relational intimacy. It is crude, one-sided, insensitive, and leaves a wake of destruction. In short, fuck means rape. The fact that we use it to express violation of all kinds, from how we are “f—ing up the planet”, to destroying cities and populations in war, to how we are treated at work (employers “f— us over”), reveals something. Rape is the quintessential violation, and we know it. Rape is all our problems summarised and condensed. Rape is our problem. To imagine our problems resolved is to imagine a world without rape.
We may concede this in everyday speech, but in public or political discourse, rape is not treated as a fundamental social problem. It is not handled with the urgency of a war, natural disaster or pandemic. On the contrary: in our capitalist system, widespread rape is treated as an expression of market demand. Pimps, pornographers and even advertisers of all kinds leverage the notion that women are sex objects, for profit. Rape is commercialised in the ‘sex’ industry and filmed to make porn. We largely accept this – never mind that prostitution is the deadliest situation a woman can be in, where the death rate for women and girls is 40 times higher than the average.
Today, close to one-third of all internet downloads in the US are from a porn site. Online porn gets more traffic than Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn combined. ‘Softcore porn’ – images that sexually objectify women – pervade media, advertising, and the urban landscape. Rappers sing about rape. Comedians joke about it. Television shows dramatise it. Film and music producers sell it as entertainment. Rape red flags are all around us, yet as legendary feminist Andrea Dworkin wrote, feminists “use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist.” Rape is so commonplace it is happening somewhere in the world every second of the day. And it is clearly on our minds, or we wouldn’t constantly spit it back out with that one potent four-letter word. But we do not seem to want to address it.
We need to. Rape is not only devastating and dehumanising in itself, it is a major factor in all humanity’s major crises, from mass killings to militarism, environmental destruction to hunger. It is beyond analogous to those forms of violence – it fuels them.
Charles Manson, notorious cult leader convicted for conspiracy to murder seven people in 1971, would deny that. “Pornography?” he once said, “I’ve been looking at it all my life and it hasn’t affected me anything.” Ted Bundy, who raped and murdered at least 30 girls and women, would beg to differ. The day before his execution in 1989, he gave an extraordinary interview warning of the harms of porn:
I’ve lived in prison for a long time now, and I’ve met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence. Without exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography – deeply consumed by the addiction. The FBI’s own study on serial homicide shows that the most common interest among serial killers is pornography. It’s true.
Porn functions like any other addiction – the user gets hooked on the ‘hit’ but becomes habituated. Over time, they require more degradation and brutality to get the same sexual reward. Bundy explained:
Once you become addicted to it, and I look at this as a kind of addiction, you look for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Like an addiction, you keep craving something which is harder and gives you a greater sense of excitement, until you reach the point where the pornography only goes so far – that jumping off point where you begin to think maybe actually doing it will give you that which is just beyond reading about it and looking at it.
The porn industry is comprised of countless records of rape broadcast as entertainment. If users could once ejaculate while watching anal penetration, they now need to see ‘rosebudding’, when a woman suffers rectal prolapse. That is the trajectory of a porn addiction, and the industry at large. As men require more and more brutality, those acts are carried out on women’s bodies.
What a person looks at and thinks about during sexual arousal and orgasm has an influence that is powerful beyond comparison. When a boy or a man learns to associate orgasm with domination, sexual excitement with aggression, degradation with thrill, it changes him. Violation becomes tantalising and “brutality leads to arousal.”
Nature did not design the penis as a weapon. It is a reproductive organ. Pornography transforms it into a weapon by offering boys and men sexual rewards for being bystanders to female violation.
When a man sees his penis as a weapon, he is more likely to get interested in other kinds of weapons with which he can dominate. Between January 1 and June 30, 2024, 302 mass shootings took place in the US. Mass murderers go on killing sprees so regularly, at bars, festivals, theatres, shopping malls, and schools, using guns, bombs, knives, or weaponised vehicles, they can hardly be considered ‘lone wolves’ taking advantage of lenient gun laws. Mass killing is more than an anomaly, it is a pattern, and we need to ask what cultural conditions are fuelling the pattern. Why do so many men get off on planning and executing extreme acts of violence? What are the cultural conditions?
As author Charles Eisenstein writes: “It is a mistake to blame psychopaths for our present condition; they are a result, not a cause.” It is not just that the US has a greater number of firearms than adults – a porn habit and history of sex abuse is normal among mass killers and criminally violent men. Our culture freely broadcasts that porn, then consumes murder as entertainment in countless television and Netflix shows played after 6 o’clock news reports of killing, which we act powerless to do anything about.
That passivity applies not just to the cultural conditions that fuel violence, but to the signs it is happening in our family or to our neighbours. According to the UN, the most dangerous place for a woman is her home. About six women are killed per hour worldwide, nearly 50 thousand a year on average. In 2017, 87,000 women were killed by men, more than half by partners or family members. Violence expert Gavin de Becker points out that for the 137 women who will be killed before this time tomorrow, in almost every case, the violence preceding the murder will have been “a secret kept by several people.” Though spousal violence is the easiest to predict, “people are reluctant to predict it.”
A significant proportion of men who murder women employ overkill, where the violence used far exceeds what is necessary to cause death – and “women’s bodies are often used and marked in very grotesque and sexualised ways when they are killed.” In New Zealand in 2018, strangulation became recognised as a standalone offence, because men who strangle their partners are likely go on to kill them. Where does this pattern of strangulation come from? Look no further than pornography, in which strangulation and torture are common. Pornography enacts, teaches and spreads this sexualised brutality.
It is not only the connections we ignore, but the facts. As filmmaker Elle Kamihira says: “We have whole media genres dedicated to telling the stories of male violence, much of it featuring murdered women – but when it comes to tallying the actual lives taken of women and girls, most countries in the world just don’t do it.” The female death toll estimates above are each considered a “severe undercount,” since governments largely do not collect data on the murder of women. In the US, tens of thousands of rape kits sit in police and crime lab storage facilities, untested. Governments tend to leave the rape crisis to underfunded refuge services. Few sexual abuse cases result in a conviction – in New Zealand, it is 13%. Such inaction often means many women do not report rape. It seems like the pointless re-exposure of a wound.
Our passivity harms and it backfires. The same porn use, violence and abuse that can be used to predict and prevent the murder of women constitute pre-incident indicators for other forms of violence, like mass killings.
It is also no coincidence that conquest is both a military and a sexual term. In 1983, Dworkin gave a speech to an audience of 500 men, called ‘I Want a Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape’. She talked about the emergence of support groups for men to recover from the impact of patriarchal conditioning and its militaristic conceptions of manhood. Men gather to talk, reconnect to their emotions, vulnerability, and ability to bond and to grieve. She said if they were serious about getting their humanity back they would have to get invested in ending rape:
Rape and war are not so different. And what the pimps do and the warmongers do is that they make you so proud of being men who can get it up and give it hard. And they take that acculturated sexuality and they put you in little uniforms and they send you out to kill and to die …I think that if you want to look at what this system does to you, then that is where you should start looking: the sexual politics of aggression; the sexual politics of militarism.
Rape and war have always been inextricable. In war, rape is deliberately used to terrorise, demoralise and humiliate civilians. And many men will not stay in the military if they cannot have ready sexual access to women – so brothels are and have always been present near military bases. Militaries also make use of the way rape, prostitution and porn break down men’s resistance to violence, and encourage them to bond over degradation. Porn use and production are normal in war zones, militaries and among so-called wartime ‘peacekeepers’.
In turn this violence and desensitisation is transferred to the planet. In The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism (2009) Barry Sanders points out that “the greatest single assault on the environment, on all of us around the globe, comes from one agency ... the Armed Forces of the United States.” US military aircraft consume close to two million reported gallons of oil every day. Though environmentalists do not frequently speak about militarism, shooting, firing, exploding and incinerating, chemical attacks, cluster bombs, cannon rounds, jet fuel, napalm and depleted uranium are as devastating to the planet as to ourselves.
As Dworkin said, there is a sexual aspect to aggression, a “sexual politics of militarism.” That military violence is inflicted on the planet as well as ourselves.
Militarism also means hunger. The people in the world left to starve largely live in war zones. The hungriest areas in the world are in Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The DRC suffers the world’s largest hunger crisis, fuelled by over 25 years of conflict, and it has also been dubbed the world’s “rape capital”. Rape victims in the DRC have said war is being waged “on their bodies.” The cause of hunger is not overall food scarcity – globally, we waste at least 1 billion tonnes of food each year. It is the inhumanity and violence at the core of which is rape.
You may argue that food scarcity is still an issue, since our population of 8 billion exceeds the planet’s carrying capacity for humans. Yet the solution remains the same: female sexual sovereignty. Women have fewer children when they are emancipated, have access to education, and are not sold into marriage or otherwise treated as sexual or domestic chattel. Rape and female subordination drive overpopulation, for which female sexual sovereignty – the end of rape – is the only peaceful solution.
Where I live, in New Zealand, many people pepper their sentences with that word fuck, treating it like the words ‘very’, or ‘like’, with more spice. This communicates something important. When people do it, they are regurgitating a pervasive cultural input that has shaped their thinking and expression. They are mirroring the culture not just with a word, but its meaning: to seek gratification through violation. Constant casual references to that mode of relating come from saturation, from being immersed in a culture that encourages it.
Imagine who we would be without that programming.
That is the vision feminists and spiritual teachers alike have carried through history. We will continue to explore it in essays to come.
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