r-cop

Possible trigger warning.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about rape culture as it relates to women who like to sleep around and women who have sex for money and any other women who have consensual sex outside of monogamous relationships, and I have a small problem with one of the ways this topic is addressed.

One way that I’ve heard many feminists talk about rape culture is to say that people believe women deserve to be raped for being drunk, wearing revealing clothing, being a flirt, whatever. While I agree that in some cases this idea, that a woman deserves to be raped, is widely believed, I think that with women who have a lot of sex with several different people, the reasoning goes a little differently. Take, for example, Amanda Hess’s piece in The Sexist about Hannah, the student at Howard University who was denied a rape kit after clearly being raped. Tito, the bouncer at the party where she was assaulted, said that there was "no way Hannah could have been raped." Since he had already determined that she was sexually promiscuous, he said that "if anything did happen to this girl, she was willing to do it."