Rape Culture And Rape Culture

731 Words2 Pages

Rape culture, a term created by feminists in the 1970’s has some serious connotations behind it. Essentially this phrase explicitly states that within our society due to sexism women are blamed for their sexual abuse. This belief, that a woman is to blame for the harm caused to her is not only believed socially but enforces politically. Men are one of the most dominant groups in society. Thus, in this particular case men are the bourgeois and women and the proletarians. These men in power are able to control what civilians read, hear and see everyday meaning they are able to push a cultural hegemony, cultural hegemony is the domination of society by a ruling class that purposely influences the thoughts and beliefs of society for their benefit. …show more content…

The person who creates the media will unknowingly and knowingly encode messages into them. Because most people are so heavily controlled by the ruling society many of their messages resemble those of the bourgeois. However, sometimes this is not the case. How a person interprets the media is not always how the person who created it wanted it to be interpreted. The oppositional position is a subsection of decoding, decoding is how the views received the message. When the viewer understands what the creator of the message is attempting to show but disagrees with their thoughts they are considered to be in an oppositional position. In some cases, activist tries to speak out against rape culture and are met with people who oppose their views not because they don’t understand rape culture but because they don’t deem it …show more content…

A subculture is a cultural group within another usually more dominant cultural group. People who actively rally against rape culture and patriarchal beliefs are a subculture within society. The people who participate in these subcultures are condemned and demeaned by people who still agree with the dominant cultural. The whole purpose of activist and subcultures is form and project new ideologies. An ideology, in its most basic sense, is a belief system that usually forms a political theory. This creates chaos within the normally easily run culturally hegemony especially within the 21st century because these activist have to same tools that the dominant society has. The most important one being media, this use of media is how Walter Benjamin believed media should be used, for political

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