By Elli Wilson
Trigger Warning
Another day, another dozen stories about violence against women and girls. Often complete with sensationalised headline and a hyper-sexualised photo of an objectified female body. The forms this violence takes are myriad – sexual harassment, rape, sexual assault, FGM, childhood sexual abuse, ‘honour’ crimes – but it is all rooted in a deep societal misogyny that people are loathe to confront on an individual and an institutional level. For myself, and countless others, these stories are not just statistics or isolated incidents that can be forgotten by turning the page and shrugging off the uncomfortable thoughts that they provoke. This is our lived experience. It’s the guy groping you in a club, or harassing you when you dare to go out and be a woman in public. It’s the boyfriend who doesn’t think no means no, and the pupils at your school who shove their hands down your tights and then laugh.
And then suddenly it’s the advert making a joke of the sexual violence that you have suffered. Whether it is the coffee company using groping to sell their product or the female model surrounded by men in what looks suspiciously like a ‘fashionable’ gang rape, for a survivor of sexual violence, it is repulsive to see it used as a tool to maximise profit. This is capitalist misogyny at its extreme; women’s bodies are used to sell products and so is their abuse. This is what rape culture looks like and it has got to stop.
