The PP described as an act of “extreme seriousness” the imputation made to its bench by the Minister of Equality, Irene Montero, and demanded that President Pedro Sánchez terminate it withering. “You promote rape culture,” Montero had said. Due to the reaction of the president of the Congress, Meritxell Batet, she also appreciated in the expression of the Minister of Equality the allusion to an incitement to crime, a slanderous attribution.
However, from Podemos and sectors of feminist activism, the reaction was immediate, clarifying that the phrase in question is a term that has been frequently used and has been widely used for more than half a century by the feminist movement and philosophy – to the point that it appears in the State pact–: the term, of American origin, alludes to the poisonous normalization of rape and all forms of violence against women in traditional patriarchal societies, as undesirable but daily events.
This position, which assumes the understanding that this violence cannot be eradicated, thus places the responsibility of protecting herself on women, which, first of all, criminalizes their behaviors –which would be the trigger for the crime– and thus avoids focusing on the macho aggressor and the crime itself.
The most common and widespread interpretation of the term defines behaviors such as blaming the victim, the moral denigration of prostitutes, the sexual objectification of women, the trivialization of rape or the underestimation of the damage as part of rape culture. caused by sexual violence, among others.
In this sense, the phrase operates in the same way as the use of other conceptual constructions habitually used by anthropology, history or the social sciences, in which it alludes to times or nations where a “culture of war” prevails -the history of Western Europe between the 16th and 20th centuries, for example–, that is, a collective common sense that normalizes war as an undesirable but daily event in which all generations, in this case, of men, would be condemned to participate.
Montero alluded to this sense of the term “rape culture”, since he expressly endorsed campaigns against gender violence promoted by the Community of Madrid and the Xunta de Galiza -both governed by the PP- and whose advertisements were directed expressly targeting women, pointing out their eventual risky behaviors (treating them almost as incitement) –such as playing sports in tights or drinking alcohol in nightclubs without monitoring how and who serves the drink–, instead of turning the focus towards responsibility for the act punishable in the figure of the eventual rapist, a male. Strictly speaking, and according to how this concept is used by feminist sociology, both campaigns, indeed, drink from the culture of rape.
