Apparently, you can be “raped by rape culture.”

[Valin]

National Review:

Apparently, you can be “raped by rape culture.”

Katherine Timpf

May 4, 2015

 

When it comes to consent, it’s not enough to teach that “no means no” or even that only “yes means yes” — because sometimes “yes” can actually mean “no.”

 

At least that’s the point of view expressed in an op-ed written by Jordan Bosiljevac for Claremont McKenna College’s student newspaper, the Forum.

 

In the piece, Bosiljevac explains that she and her friends even came up with a phrase to describe someone having sex with you who you didn’t want to have sex with even though you told him that you did, which they apparently consider a form of rape:

 

 

“We coined the term ‘raped by rape culture’ to describe what it was like to say yes, coerced by the culture that had raised us and the systems of power that worked on us, and to still want ‘no,’” she writes in the April 30 article, titled “Why Yes Can Mean No.”

 

“We coined the term ‘raped by rape culture’”

 

Bosiljevac writes that she’s been dealing with the oppression of this culture her whole life — beginning with having to endure relatives kissing her cheeks “even as I winced and turned away” — and that it continues to influence her sexual decision-making abilities, almost to the point where she doesn’t seem to think she really has any ability to make those decisions at all.

 

She describes one incident in particular in which she had hooked up with a guy who had asked her outright if she was okay with what was happening and she had told him “yes” — explaining that even though she had said “yes,” she had really meant “no,” and it wasn’t really entirely her fault that she couldn’t just say what she wanted:

 

(Snip)