The Culture of Rape
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There is a reason Obsession became a global phenomenon.
The viewers were struck by how familiar the villain felt. Women across the world immediately recognised this kind of a man, the one who believes he is entitled to access to a woman simply by the virtue of his desires, a man who mistakes obsession for love. Likewise, the recent popularity of Backrooms-style horror taps into a related anxiety. The endless corridors, lack of exits, the constant surveillance, and the feeling that danger could emerge from anywhere at any moment. While not explicitly about gendered violence, it resonates with an experience many women know intimately: navigating a world where vigilance feels necessary for survival.
These stories succeeded because they are not entirely fiction. Most women can recall the first time they were made aware that their bodies were public property. A hand that lingered too long. A stranger's comment. A relative who ignored boundaries. A teacher, colleague, boyfriend, or friend who treated discomfort as negotiable. In my work as a therapist, I have yet to meet a woman who has not experienced some form of sexual harassment, coercion, violation, or unwanted sexual attention. The details might vary, but it is entirely ubiquitous. And despite how common these experiences are, we continue to treat them as isolated incidents rather than symptoms of a broader culture.
Researchers use the term rape culture to describe a social environment in which sexual violence is normalized, minimized, excused, or rendered invisible. It is not simply about rape. It is about the countless messages that teach people, especially women, that their boundaries are flexible, that their discomfort is negotiable, and that their safety is their own responsibility, despite the existence of predators all around them. Rape culture is rarely sustained by overt support for sexual violence. It is a culture of small permissions: "harmless" jokes about harassment, the parent who tells their child to hug the uncle who makes them feel uncomfortable, a mother who slut shames her daughter for wearing a skirt to the party. To the courtroom that scrutinises whether the woman's vagina produces wetness to prevent injury as evidence of consent, to the institutions that reproduce systemic gendered violence by protecting their reputation before protecting their people. We live in a world in which sexual violence is becoming increasingly easier to commit and harder to recover from.
And the mental health consequences of this culture extend far beyond the individuals who experience assault.
The Trauma We Count, and the Trauma We Don't
When people think about trauma, they often imagine a single catastrophic event. I think as women, we experience a lifetime of small and large violations that accumulate over the years. Catcalling on the streets and unwanted touching on crowded buses begin concerningly early. The pressure to be polite overrides instincts to leave unsafe situations. It is not uncommon for me to come across women in my work who have felt obliged to give in to a friend who refuses to accept a no, or be worn down by a boyfriend who sulks until she complies, or give a tight-lipped laugh when the boss "complimented" her. I do not say this lightly when I say that, collectively, these incidents create a psychological landscape organised around vigilance. Women and fem-presenting folks simply cannot afford not to be careful.
Research consistently shows that sexual assault produces some of the highest rates of PTSD among all traumatic experiences. Dworkin and colleagues found that approximately 81% of survivors reported clinically significant post-traumatic stress symptoms in the immediate aftermath of sexual assault, with many continuing to experience symptoms a year later. And recorded PTSD diagnoses are not even half of the story. Women are repeatedly exposed to situations in which their bodily autonomy is ignored and overridden. This aligns closely with what is clinically called Complex PTSD, often causing symptoms like hypervigilance, exaggerated startle responses, emotional dysregulation, chronic shame, relational instability due to lack of trust, and a persistent sense of unsafety.
She is often not overreacting. She just has a nervous system adapting to repeated violations.
The Myth of the Crazy Woman
Every culture has archetypes. One of rape culture's most enduring archetypes is the "crazy woman." A woman who is too emotional, sensitive, dramatic, angry, suspicious, and needy. She remembers every slight, struggles to trust, and seeks reassurance about her safety. She becomes distressed when people violate her boundaries. She looks remarkably similar to someone living with trauma.
Historically, women's suffering has been pathologised. From the diagnosis of "hysteria" in the nineteenth century to contemporary stereotypes about "borderline" women, there has been a tendency to interpret distress as evidence of female irrationality rather than a response to lived experiences. This is not an argument against Borderline Personality Disorder as a diagnosis. BPD is a legitimate and often profoundly painful condition. However, many researchers have noted significant overlap between BPD symptoms and trauma responses, particularly among women with histories of chronic interpersonal victimisation. I think it is important to ask why cluster B personality disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder and Histrionic Personality Disorder have gendered assumptions.
The Body Keeps the Score, Quite Literally.
The consequences of living under chronic threat do not stop at the mind. A growing body of evidence links trauma exposure to higher rates of autoimmune diseases, chronic pain conditions, gastrointestinal disorders, cardiovascular disease, and other inflammatory illnesses. Studies have found elevated rates of autoimmune disorders among individuals with histories of PTSD and chronic trauma, suggesting that prolonged activation of the body's stress response may have consequences that extend far beyond emotional distress. This does not mean trauma "causes" autoimmune disease simply or directly. Autoimmune illnesses are complex, involving genetic, hormonal, environmental, and immunological factors. But it does challenge the notion that experiences of violation remain neatly contained within memory.
Women already constitute the majority of people living with autoimmune diseases. At the same time, women disproportionately experience sexual violence, harassment, coercion, and chronic relational trauma. These facts do not automatically imply causation, but they should make us curious about the cumulative impact of living in a state of chronic vigilance. What happens to a body that spends years preparing for danger? What happens when "being careful" becomes a lifelong physiological state? When we speak about rape culture, we are not only speaking about what happens to women's minds. We are speaking about what happens to women's bodies when an entire culture repeatedly teaches them that their boundaries are negotiable.
Consent Would Be Sexy if We Understood It
Perhaps nowhere is rape culture more apparent than in our confusion about consent. I am appalled by the number of women I have come across who think consent is a grey area. I am profoundly heartbroken and pained when I have to tell them that it is not. Consent is informed. Consent is specific. Consent is enthusiastic. Consent can be withdrawn at any point in time without any ifs or buts. Consent obtained through fear, coercion, manipulation, pressure, obligation, or exhaustion is simply NOT consent. Yet countless people grow up receiving contradictory messages. They are taught that persistence is romantic, that resistance is flirtation, and that a person's boundaries are obstacles to overcome rather than information to respect. These cultural narratives create psychological confusion for survivors. Many spend years wondering whether what happened to them "counts." The fact that so many survivors struggle to identify coercion as coercion is not evidence that the harm was minor. It is evidence that rape culture has successfully blurred the language needed to name it.
And sexual harm often does not end at just that. Women who report sexual assault undergo extreme stigma and shame. Psychologist Rebecca Campbell's work on "secondary victimisation" demonstrates that negative responses from police, healthcare providers, loved ones, and institutions can significantly worsen trauma outcomes. Many victims describe the aftermath as more psychologically devastating than the event itself. Rape culture teaches women that not only do their boundaries not matter, but neither does their pain.
Love, Control, and Other Fictions
I come back to where I started: to films. There is a reason so many contemporary films keep returning to the same story. A man wants a woman. Not a real woman, with boundaries and contradictions and competing desires. That is too much work. But a woman who exists primarily as an extension of his needs.
Whether it is the unsettling intimacy of You, the manufactured perfection of Don't Worry Darling, the artificial companionship of Her, or the ownership dynamics at the heart of Ex Machina and Companion, the central conflict is about entitlement, not love. It is about what happens when another person's autonomy disrupts the fantasy that desire should grant access. These stories resonate because they expose something many women encounter long before they have the language to describe it: the belief that wanting access to another person's body, attention, affection, or sexuality somehow creates a claim upon it. This is one of the defining psychological features of rape culture.
Perhaps nowhere is this more visible than in the rapid rise of AI companions. The popularity of AI girlfriends reveals something fascinating about contemporary ideas of intimacy. Many of these applications are marketed as solutions to male loneliness, but they are also built around a particular fantasy. The idealised companion is endlessly available, endlessly patient, endlessly affirming. She does not challenge. She does not withdraw. She does not have needs that conflict with her user's own. Her primary function is accommodation. To be clear, loneliness is real and human connection matters. Many people use AI companions for reasons that have little to do with misogyny. But culturally, the appeal of customisable, compliant, predominantly feminised digital partners raises important questions.
Healthy intimacy requires us to encounter another person's subjectivity. Their ability to disagree. Their ability to leave. Their ability to say no. Consent matters precisely because another person is free. A relationship in which refusal is impossible is not a relationship. It is a simulation of ownership.
The same old patterns of gendered violence have been re-emerging in new technological spaces. In 2021, reports emerged from Meta's virtual reality platform Horizon Worlds describing incidents in which women experienced unwanted sexual contact, harassment, and simulated sexual assault by other users' avatars. One researcher studying user interactions reported being surrounded by male avatars and subjected to a coordinated virtual assault within hours of entering the platform. The details sparked debates about whether such experiences should be considered "real" harm.
Yet from a psychological perspective, that debate misses the point. The significance of these incidents is not whether physical contact occurred. It did not. The significance is that when people were given the opportunity to build entirely new worlds, many of them immediately recreated some of the oldest power dynamics in human history. The same entitlement. The same disregard for consent. The same assumption that another body exists for someone else's use. This is what makes rape culture so psychologically insidious. It is a worldview with a set of assumptions about who gets access, who gets believed, whose comfort matters, and whose boundaries are expected to bend. And so women learn to anticipate danger before it arrives. They become hypervigilant. They monitor exits, routes home, text messages, facial expressions, alcohol consumption, clothing choices, and the emotional states of the men around them. Their nervous systems adapt to a world in which safety can never be entirely assumed.
- Rajrupa Bhattacharjee, Therapist, Feel Fuzzy
Looking for support?
This piece was written by Rajrupa Bhattacharjee, therapist at Feel Fuzzy. Rajrupa is a trauma-informed, relational, and queer-affirmative therapist with a social justice and intersectional lens. She works with survivors of sexual violence, gendered trauma, identity, grief, and relationships, and brings both clinical rigour and deep compassion to her work.
If this piece has brought up anything for you, or if you are looking for a space to process your experiences without judgement, you can learn more about working with Rajrupa here.
References
- Brownmiller, S. (1975). Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. Simon & Schuster.
- Campbell, R. (2008). The psychological impact of rape victims' experiences with the legal, medical, and mental health systems. American Psychologist, 63(8), 702-717.
- Dworkin, E. R., Menon, S. V., Bystrynski, J., & Allen, N. E. (2017). Sexual assault victimization and psychopathology: A review and meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 56, 65-81.
- Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books.
- Showalter, E. (1987). The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830-1980. Virago Press.