It’s time for men to rise up against the rape culture

You meet your friend in town. You haven’t seen them in a while. You chat for a little bit, and then decide that you should meet up next week. They can come over. You’ll hang out and have some tea.

Your friend comes over. You have a great time reminiscing. The afternoon wears on and you feel like there’s a frisson in the air, a something there that you think might lead somewhere else. So you offer them some tea. They, shyly, accept.

You set out the tea on a beautiful platter. You make sure there’s cream, sugar, and cloves, which you know they like. You bring out the platter proudly, teapot and cups standing tall. They see the cloves, and their face changes. You ask what the problem is. They say they don’t like cloves anymore, and they don’t want tea either. You’re confused, but you can’t really force someone to take tea if they don’t want to, can you? They say thank you for the afternoon. They leave.

You’re at a socially distanced event the next day. You spot someone from across the lawn that the event is taking place on. You smile at them, and they smile back. You walk over for a little banter. They’re very attractive. You decide that you want to have tea with them, and invite them over to your house to experience your beautiful tea platter. They say they would rather not have tea so quickly, but you can definitely exchange numbers and talk about tea later. You’re open to that, so you give your number out, go back to your group of friends and enjoy the event.

Now, replace tea with sex.

This tea analogy is often bandied about as a representation of what consent looks like, across various scenarios. Someone can come over to your house, for sex, and then change their mind in the middle, and leave. If a guest came to your house, and wanted to have some tea, and then changed their mind, you wouldn’t force feed them, would you? If you met someone who you wanted to serve some tea, and they refused, you would start beating them up on the spot…would you?

For people who don’t understand consent, this can be an introduction to the course, especially considering everything that has been going on in the news lately with violence against women. There’s a part of me that has been unable to engage with the sheer brutality of these stories – because it is truly horrific. It feels like analogies like these have been used time and time again to break down to men why they aren’t entitled to women’s bodies, or sex – and yet these horrors still happen.

In my opinion, women, and the analogies, and the different ways to explain consent, are no longer the problem. The problem is the men who are refusing to listen to women. It doesn’t make sense for someone to throw you off the 12^th floor of a building because you refused to have sex with them. It doesn’t make sense to take someone to a hotel room, and then violently rape them, to the extent that you break their spine and kill them, simply because they were on a date with you. No one who goes on a date is hoping for that.

But then again, women already know this. Women have been doing their best to not get attacked since they were three as they are told to close their legs and not sit on Uncle Nani’s knee. The real catastrophe here is Uncle Nani, not the little girl.

Men, it’s time for you to take up the mantle. We’ve screamed and cried and protested and written about it until our voices are hoarse. You know your friends who are weird and abusive and rapey. Your silence is telling, because if you were doing something about it, like talking to them or checking them or stopping them when they’re reaching to grab something that does not belong to them in the club, women wouldn’t still be in so much danger.

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