Can we finally admit that rape culture exists? [View all]

Can we finally admit that rape culture exists?
CNN’s "rape academy" exposé spotlights the role of sexual humiliation in male bonding

By Andi Zeisler
Senior Writer
Published April 22, 2026 12:00PM (EDT)


(Salon) Several years ago, the world was shocked to learn that Gisèle Pelicot, a 72-year-old woman living in a small town in the south of France, had for a decade been drugged by her husband and raped by at least 70 men that he recruited online. It was, by almost all measures, a uniquely horrifying case. But less than two years after Pelicot’s husband and his accomplices were found guilty, we are now finding out how not-unique crimes like his are. A blockbuster CNN exposé published last month investigated the international network of websites, chat rooms and Telegram channels on which men trade tips and offer advice to one another about how best to render their wives and partners unconscious — and on which they document themselves, often via livestream, raping them.

The men who do this are threading an unnervingly specific needle: They don’t want the women they drug and assault to know that they are being drugged and assaulted, which is why they often use the waking hours following assaults to gaslight their victims: One of the women who spoke to CNN spoke of waking up while her husband assaulted her; he insisted that she was on too much medication and had imagined it.

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In Camille Paglia’s first book, “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson,” she wrote floridly of the importance of honoring maleness in its natural state of savage, brutal beauty: “Men, bonding together, invented culture as a defense against female nature. Sky-cult was the most sophisticated step in this process, for its switch of the creative locus from earth to sky is a shift from belly-magic to head-magic. And from this defensive head-magic has come the spectacular glory of male civilization, which has lifted woman with it.” Refusing to honor the ungovernable, animalistic essence of maleness, Paglia claimed, was bad for society. For culture. For civilization. And feminism was such a boner-killer, she wrote, given that it “does not see what is for men the eroticism or fun element in rape, especially the wild, infectious delirium of gang rape.”

Over the years, this quote has echoed in my mind. I was reminded of it when the high-school football players in Steubenville, Ohio, documented themselves raping a passed-out classmate, joking about her, jeering at her. Steubenville was the first truly mediated rape case to play out on a national stage: The way it was reported, discussed and processed by the residents of Steubenville made it a case study of rape culture, a concept that until then had been mostly isolated within academic writing. And the use of the phrase “rape culture” was, it turned out, what was required to make mainstream media outlets see that its history of sympathizing with young male perpetrators with bright futures was no longer acceptable. ..............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/04/22/can-we-finally-admit-that-rape-culture-exists/