Rape Culture is REAL: except as how it's portrayed.

The thing I've been hearing lately is the debate over whether or not Rape Culture is actually a thing. I contend that it IS a thing, just not in the way it's being portrayed. When reading an article on the American Humanist Association's website (found here), I happened upon a few comments underneath, most of which were rebuttals of the existence of rape culture in its current iteration. And with some of the comments, I agree... the AHA's article was entirely one-sided and left out an ENTIRE GENDER'S WORTH of people who experience rape. I was awestruck how terribly narrow the feminist scope of rape culture was. My comment was the following:

"Rape culture DOES exist, but this article systematically leaves out an ENTIRE gender that experiences rape - and it's just as trivialized, just as acceptable, just as yuk-yuk-yuk worthy. If my husband went into a police station and told them I raped him, he wouldn't be asked what he was wearing, because it wouldn't get that far; he'd be laughed out of the police station. THAT is rape culture.  

The fact that BOTH SEXES, all gender expressions, and all accounts of rape are so thoroughly scrutinized (or ignored entirely, depending on the plumbing of the victim), and the abusers are excused for their crimes is insane. 

If my house was broken into, and I was asked why there wasn't a forced entry - so I admitted to having left the door unlocked, the assailant wouldn't be denied criminal charges. They would still be convicted. Because that's a question of invitation, someone enters the threshold of my home, uninvited - they are automatically charged with a crime. If they enter the threshold of my vagina, uninvited, they are charged with a crime only under certain conditions. Invitation, not access, is the "consent" of both situations - but in practice, this is not true for rape. THAT is rape culture.

This is NOT and SHOULD NOT BE an issue for feminists, it should be an issue for ALL proponents of a peaceful society wherein sexual crimes are held in seriousness, as they would a home invasion, regardless of sex, gender expression, orientation, anything. If you don't have a right to bodily autonomy, under all circumstances, you don't have any freedom whatsoever."

And I absolutely stand by my comment. Male on male rape is another example, the "trope" of altar boy jokes and other sorts of justifications, excuses, and minimizing of the magnitude of sex crimes is rampant. Sex is almost never a crime unless it's a man in the bushes hiding to get a woman. But is it a crime when it's a sexually repressed priest entrusted with the care of young boys, or an angry housewife manually stimulating her husband's genitals against his will? What if the female teacher is hot? What if the lady was just baby-crazy? How often is rape downplayed as an inevitable result of the culmination of factors, rather than met with horror and punishment? THAT is rape culture, ladies and gentleman.

Where women may feel as if they're weighed down by a barrage of body-image issues thrown at us from every conceivable direction, objectified, and treated as sex toys - men may also feel compelled to be emotionless tools for society to use. For every "she could lose some weight" you hear "he sucks at oral sex" - and for every "god, what a slut" you hear "be a man and do it." Men are not easily allowed the ability to be creatures of empathy, vulnerability, compassion, communication. They are told at every turn to "man up" and "deal with it" and that their emotions will scare women off because they will hate the idea of "mothering" their boyfriend. Despite the fact that they are also expected to listen to a battery of feelings from their girlfriends, conveniently without that idiotic "fathering" counterpart. Men are disposable army guys, stoic heroes, protectors of everyone who isn't male - and they can't ask for help. If a man is ever raped, the question of whether or not you can rape someone who is "always willing" comes up. Men are PURELY sexual creatures, right? Always wanting sex from everything, even apple pies! Uhh, if that's not rape culture, nothing is.

So, in essence, you cannot view rape simply in the scope of male-on-female-at-gunpoint, complaining about misogyny and objectification, without taking into account that this sort of thing happens to men as well - otherwise you're just pitting the sexes against each other. You're saying "YOU MEN ARE AT FAULT, AND WOMEN COULD NEVER RAPE," and that isn't helping anyone. Rape culture is not blind to genitals, and that is the problem. If we could all work together for a more gentle society, wherein rape is looked at as a heinous crime NO MATTER THE TERMS (other than lack of consent), perhaps rape culture could become a thing of the past.