Thread by @shailjapatel

When you tell women and girls to learn self-defense, or carry weapons against rapists, you're not reducing rape. You're just saying "let him rape someone more vulnerable."

Stop calling for dystopias. Start working to end patriarchy. Make a world BEYOND RAPE.

#Uyinene

Patriarchy wants us to believe that rape has always existed and always will. That rape is intrinsic to masculinity. This myth serves patriarchy by transferring all consequences of rape, including shame and blame, onto victims. Patriarchy stays unaccountable.

#UyineneMrwetyana

Rape culture is how patriarchy sustains the hegemonic myth that rape is a given, an unchangeable condition, of all human societies. So men never have to hold themselves or other men accountable. Rape is a women's issue.

#Uyinene

Rape serves patriarchy by keeping all women scared, ashamed, scrambling for a non-existent safety, and available to men on the most unequal of terms. Patriarchy tells women their best hope of survival lies in being chosen by powerful men who'll protect them.

#Uyinene

So many responses think it's entirely reasonable to expect all women and children, regardless of age, health, disability, life conditions, to be armed and trained for combat 24/7, even in their own homes. But completely unreasonable to imagine and call for a world without rape.

So many responses ignore the reality that men rape their own daughters, granddaughters, nieces. Men rape their wives, in-laws, girlfriends, dates. Their sisters and cousins. Their colleagues and employees, their constituents and congregants. Men rape their domestic workers.

Should women have guns in bed with them, when they sleep with their partners? Should girls take guns to school to shoot rapist teachers? Should women take guns to church for rapist pastors? To work, for their colleagues and bosses? To family gatherings, for creepy relatives?

So many responses ignore the reality that women in militaries, armed and trained to kill, are still raped by their fellow soldiers. That military culture is rape culture on steroids.

chicagotribune.com/opinion/commen…

All men are not rapists, but patriarchy wants to force us to live as if all men *are* rapists. If we treat men as human beings, then the blame's on us if they harm us. What kind of mind says, of #UyineneMrwetyana's terrible death, "if only she'd taken a gun to the post office?"

How patriarchy gaslights women.

1. #NotAllMen
2. "You should be armed and prepared to defend yourself against every man you encounter, including your own family members. If you relax for a moment, if you treat them like people instead of predators, it's all your fault."