Rape Culture
When I was in a biology lesson in Year 11, we sat down to discuss hormones in females and males; what they do to the body and the behaviours they influence.
Our teacher divided the board into two sections:
Female hormones:
Mood swings. Periods. Fertility. Emotion.
Male hormones:
Aggression. Muscle growth. Libido.
As she listed the effects on the male side, I noticed something strange. Unlike the female side, the male section explicitly included the word “libido.”
Slightly awkwardly, I raised my hand and asked:
“Why doesn’t the female side mention libido?”
A few boys laughed and whispered amongst themselves. My biology teacher, young, female, and visibly uncomfortable, responded:
“It’s not on the syllabus. The textbook doesn’t recognise libido for women.”
Even then, I knew something about that answer was wrong.
Because this is the problem.
From childhood, women are taught to suppress sexuality while men are taught to expect it from themselves. Female desire becomes invisible, denied, or shameful. Male desire becomes natural, inevitable, even excusable.
And when a society teaches that women are not supposed to want sex, it creates a dangerous idea about how sex happens at all.
From as early as the playground, we begin conditioning boys and girls into roles that quietly feed rape culture.
A six-year-old boy pulls a girl’s hair. He teases her. Pushes her. Makes her cry.
Upset, she goes to an adult because she already understands something simple:
People should not hurt each other.
But instead of being told his behaviour is unacceptable, she hears:
“Sweetie, that just means he likes you.”
He likes you.
In that single sentence, boys are taught to express affection through aggression, and girls are taught to reinterpret discomfort as attention. Violence becomes romanticised before children are even old enough to understand romance.
Girls learn to tolerate mistreatment. Boys learn that causing distress can be flirtation.
By adolescence, these lessons evolve into something more sinister.
Teenage boys absorb ideas about masculinity from the internet, pornography, social media, and “locker room talk.” The language surrounding sex becomes deeply violent.
“Smash.”
“Bang.”
“Crack.”
“Fuck.”
Pay attention to the semantic field: domination, impact, force.
Sex is discussed less like intimacy and more like conquest.
At the same time, pornography increasingly normalises aggression towards women; choking, slapping, tying up, humiliation; often presenting women’s pain as desirable or performative. Repeated exposure can desensitise viewers to female discomfort, teaching them that violence is not only normal during sex, but expected.
Then comes the contradiction boys are handed about women themselves.
They are taught to desire women sexually while simultaneously devaluing women who openly express sexuality.
You see it play out constantly:
“I really like that girl. I’m going to ask her out.”
“Nah bro, I heard she’s easy.”
“Yeah, she’s ran through.”
Easy.
A word used to shame a woman for being as enthusiastic about sex as the men pursuing her.
The woman’s consent is not celebrated; it becomes the problem.
If the object of your desire is not supposed to have desire, then what kind of relationship with women are boys being taught to build?
Girls, meanwhile, are raised on the language of purity.
Virginity. Modesty. Innocence.
Not just as abstract ideas, but as something physical; embodied in concepts like the hymen, as though morality itself can be anatomically measured.
Young women are told to “save themselves” for their future husbands, reinforcing the idea that sex is something women give away. A piece of themselves. Something valuable that can be lost, ruined, or stolen.
Teaching women to self-enforce all their value and tie it to their sexuality.
And if a woman becomes “impure,” society rarely blames the man she had sex with.
It blames her.
So “good” women are taught not to want sex. The women who do express desire are labelled sluts, whores, easy, attention-seeking, damaged.
Then men are simultaneously taught to pursue women sexually while losing respect for the women who say yes.
The result is a deeply warped message:
Men should want sex.
Women should resist it.
Which means sex becomes framed not as something mutually desired, but as something men persuade, pressure, or take from women.
Because if women are not supposed to want sex, then enthusiastic consent stops making sense within the logic society has taught boys.
And that is where rape culture begins.