On Friday, the annual SlutWalk took place in Jerusalem with hundreds of scantily clad women marching in protest of a rape culture that does not exist in the country. This is not to say women in Israel are never assaulted for dressing immodestly. In 2013, two ultra-Orthodox men allegedly cornered a young woman near the haredi Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem, called her a shiksa, and spat in her face because she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. When I lived in the city, I heard many stories like this, including one involving grown men who spat in a little girl’s face for wearing a short-sleeved shirt on a bus, also in Mea Shearim. But this is not the nation’s culture.
The SlutWalk rallies are now a global affair that began in April 2011, when a Canadian police officer gave a safety talk to law school students in Toronto, advising them that to not be victimized, “women should avoid dressing like sluts.” Despite his outrageous phrasing and wrong-headed focus on clothing, the point was not entirely incorrect. During the Me Too movement, some claimed it’s problematic to offer women self-defense classes because, the reasoning went, men should simply stop committing rape.
While moral and legal culpability for sexual assault lies entirely with the perpetrator, women still bear some responsibility for their own safety. If a woman takes a vacation to Syria and walks around the streets in a bikini, she is inviting trouble and will not be blameless when she finds it, even if ideally women ought to be able to walk any street in whatever clothing they please.
I decided to write this essay after a reader asked me to comment on rape culture. I believe the prevalence of rape and victim-blaming are problems that demand our attention, but I find claims of rape culture ridiculous and vile, much like claims that America is a white supremacist nation. The term rape culture describes a society in which rape is normalized. But in America, rape is a first-degree felony under the law and our movies, books, magazines, journals, and newspapers depict it as evil.
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