Why Rape Is Not About The Victim

There are two parties to a rape: the perpetrator and the victim. The perpetrator performs the act of rape on the victim; this means, that the rapist forces the victim to have an act of sexual congress without their tacit assent, or having withdrawn previous assent. It is, short of murder, one of the more horrifying crimes in the world, because at the end, the victim has something taken from her (or him) that they cannot so easily get back: their dignity and sense of whole self. The shame and humiliation that come with being raped, however, are mainly a function of society, not the rape victim. Society, throughout history, has deemed rape a form of "victim-less crime," through the tired and absurd idea that "she was asking for it." This perplexing idea, that simply by the way a woman dresses or acts, she completely unhinges a man's sensibilities to the point of forcing her to have sex, is as baseless as other discredited ideas, such as the flatness of the Earth or the Sun and planets revolving around our home, or the universe being made of crystal spheres.