The Word They Hate Is Culture
Everyone knows a woman with a story. Somehow, nobody knows the men in them.

In 2023, my best friend and I were travelling through Mexico when we got talking to two British men at the hostel bar. I cannot remember how the conversation began, although according to the furious messages I sent my sister afterwards there had been a dare to jump naked into a pool. My friend pointed out that this was a slightly more logistically demanding proposition for women, given that men had one obvious thing to cover while we had several. One of the men responded, apparently delighted with himself, that women wanted to ‘free the nipple’ but then refused to get their tits out. It was not an especially promising start.

Somehow we started talking about school. My friend and I grew up in London, and we started describing what it had been like being teenage girls there: the sexual harassment that was so ordinary we barely had language for it at the time. Boys knowing where to stand beneath a particular staircase to look up girls’ skirts. Boys sending a list into a group chat - with the girls themselves in it - ranking every girl out of 100 according to attractiveness. Someone pretending to be a boy from my school and trying to blackmail fifteen year old me into sending nude photographs by threatening to leak my friend’s. Boys sexually assaulting girls at parties and then arguing that you could not be forced to perform oral sex because you were ‘literally the one doing it’.

We used the phrase rape culture to sum up what we were describing. This, more than anything we actually described, was what offended them.

They wanted us to justify it. So we gave them examples. Those were individual incidents. We gave them more. Those were not normal. Misogyny was much better now than it had been in the 1980s, one of them explained, and certainly better than in countries in the Middle East, as though the reasonable benchmark for the treatment of fourteen year old girls at British schools was whether it could conceivably be worse elsewhere. When we suggested there was something particularly rancid about the culture in certain private schools, they took that personally too. They had, they told us, been on a lot of buses in London and ‘seen some things’, and those people definitely went to state schools. Durkheim could rest easy.

Eventually they arrived at what they seemed to consider a concession. The things we were describing might be misogyny, perhaps. But rape culture? That was unfair.

We left shortly afterwards, mostly because they were awful company, and at the time I thought the disagreement had been about the scale of sexual violence. I have since come to think it was something slightly different. Neither man needed us to prove that rape existed. They were prepared to accept that horrible things had happened to women, including the women sitting directly in front of them. They were even willing to accept that some men behaved badly. What they objected to was the suggestion that this might be connected - that the rapist was not an inexplicable aberration who emerged from nowhere, but a person formed and protected by the same world the rest of us inhabit.

A rapist can comfortably be someone else, but a culture is harder to stand outside.

A few bad men

I first properly understood the phrase rape culture through Soma Sara and Everyone’s Invited. Sara started the platform in 2020 after sharing experiences of sexual violence and misogyny, and by the following year testimonies were pouring in from girls and young women describing harassment, coercion, assault, rape and image-based abuse at schools and universities across the country. By June 2021, 2,962 UK schools had been named in testimonies submitted to the platform.

The scale was horrific. But alongside the shock came a strange anxiety about what these testimonies might do to the boys. Were schools being unfairly branded? Were pupils being made to feel responsible for acts they had not committed? Was it really right to talk about the culture of an institution when only some people within it had behaved badly?

It was the Mexico argument but multiplied across thousands of schools. Each testimony could be accepted individually without being allowed to alter our understanding of the whole. This boy had behaved appallingly, that school had failed to respond, another group of friends had laughed when they should not have, another girl had been assaulted. All terrible, obviously, but separate. A series of unfortunate and apparently unrelated encounters with unusually bad people.

There is a point at which the explanation becomes more fantastical than the thing it is trying to avoid. Nearly three thousand schools do not independently develop versions of the same problem because Britain happens to contain an astonishing number of isolated misogynists who have never encountered one another’s ideas. Behaviour reproduces itself because people learn what is acceptable from other people: what gets laughed at, what gets challenged, who gets believed, whose embarrassment becomes a social emergency and whose is treated as collateral damage. Culture is not a mysterious fog that descends over an institution. It is simply what enough people repeatedly permit.

This is why the insistence that ‘not all men’ has always seemed to me to answer a question nobody was asking. Rape culture does not mean every man is a rapist any more than drinking culture means every British person has cirrhosis. It describes the conditions around the act: the beliefs that make coercion legible as persistence, the jokes that turn humiliation into entertainment, the friendships in which loyalty means not asking too many questions and the institutions more frightened of reputational damage than of what produced it. The rape is the most extreme expression of the culture, not its only constituent part.

The missing men

There is, meanwhile, an obvious mathematical problem in the way we talk about sexual violence. I know women who have been raped, sexually assaulted, woken up unsure of what happened the night before, frozen, said no and been ignored, or decided it would be easier to endure something than risk what might happen if they resisted. I have my own experience. I struggle, genuinely, to think of a woman I know who has never had something happen that forced her to recalculate how safe she was around a man.

This produces a strange social phenomenon. Women seem able to locate victims everywhere, but men who perpetrate sexual violence remain almost impossible to find. Men know women who have been raped, sisters who have been assaulted, girlfriends who have been harassed, friends with stories about men who frightened them. Yet remarkably few seem to know the men in those stories.

Part of the explanation, I think, is the construction of rapist as such a useful category of person: monstrous enough to be immediately recognisable and different enough from an ordinary man that ordinary men need never examine the border too closely. He attacks strangers and uses obvious violence. This version of the rapist is comforting because he bears so little resemblance to your boyfriend, your colleague, your flatmate, the funny one in the group chat, or you.

He leaves a much larger territory unmarked. The man who has sex with someone too drunk to meaningfully participate can locate a worse man and feel reassured. The boyfriend who keeps asking until ‘no’ becomes exhausted into ‘fine’ does not recognise himself in the word. The friend who hears a troubling story and starts assembling the defence - she was really into him, she is a bit intense, their relationship was toxic, there are always two sides - has not assaulted anybody at all. He can therefore regard himself as entirely outside the question.

That distance is doing an enormous amount of work. If sexual violence is committed only by a small caste of recognisable monsters, then the rest of male social life becomes irrelevant to understanding it. Nobody needs to wonder what gets said in the group chat, why one friend feels comfortable telling another what he did, or why another hears it and decides it is none of his business. The perpetrator remains an individual moral failure and everyone around him remains scenery.

Cornell

This is why I found the current case at Cornell University so difficult to stop thinking about. A former student has filed a civil lawsuit alleging that, in 2024, when she was twenty, she was drugged and sexually assaulted by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity. The accused men dispute the allegations, and there has been no criminal finding of guilt. But what has emerged around the case extends beyond the question of what seven individual men are alleged to have done. Reporting on the lawsuit describes a fraternity Snapchat conversation containing a message encouraging others to participate while the assault was taking place.

The woman reported what happened to Cornell police, but the original investigation ended without charges. In September, after she filed her civil case and scrutiny of the investigation intensified, the district attorney reopened it. A transcript of her 2024 police interview then showed that she had told investigators she was ‘100% confident’ she had been raped, despite the original handling of the case later being explained partly through a characterisation of her account as more ambiguous.

What makes the case so resonant is that the questions it raises do not stop at the bedroom door. If the allegations are proved, it will be easy enough to identify the men who committed the most serious acts and place the moral weight entirely on them. It is harder to know what to do with everybody else: the people who saw the messages, the systems that received information, the institutional decisions that followed, the assumptions through which one account became legible as serious and another as uncertain.

At what point does a sufficiently large collection of individual failures become something we are permitted to describe structurally? How many bad men, decisions, investigations, jokes, silences and unfortunate misunderstandings must accumulate before ‘a few bad apples’ becomes an implausibly labour-intensive theory of the orchard?

This is what culture gives us language for. Not collective guilt, but collective conditions. No one is claiming that everyone within a system behaves identically, but behaviour happens inside systems that reward some things, punish others and teach people what they can get away with.

Distance

I think this is also why the phrase accusations ruin men’s lives has become so potent. The remarkable thing is not simply that an accusation can cause harm, but how quickly the phrase directs our imaginative sympathy. Before we know anything else, we are invited to picture the future of the accused man: his career, his education, his reputation, his parents finding out, his friends abandoning him, the possibility that one allegation might follow him forever.

Women learn to perform an almost inverse calculation. What will happen to me if I tell someone? Will anybody believe me? Will they ask how much I drank, read my messages, still invite him to things? Will I become the person who ‘caused drama’? Will everybody know something about me that I have barely managed to say aloud to myself? And, after all of that, will anything actually happen?

I know that calculation because I have made it. So have people I love. It is not surprising that many women decide the cost is too high. In England and Wales, only around one in seven victims of rape or assault by penetration reported their most recent assault to the police. A culture preoccupied with the catastrophic consequences of disclosure should spend at least as much time noticing how successfully the fear of those consequences prevents disclosure from happening at all.

Those two men in Mexico thought we were asking them to admit that every man was guilty of rape. We were asking something less dramatic and more uncomfortable: whether rape might belong to the ordinary world rather than sitting safely outside it. Whether it might have something to do with schools, friendship groups, parties, jokes and the way men talk about women when women are not there - with the ease with which we recognise a victim’s story and the difficulty we have imagining that somebody we like might be the person she is talking about.

It is much easier to believe in bad men. Bad men can be condemned, expelled, avoided and prosecuted. They allow everyone else to carry on unchanged. Culture asks more because it removes the clean distance between a terrible act and the conditions that surround it. It asks not only who did this, but what taught him he could. Who knew, who laughed, who looked away, who was protected? And why do the same stories keep appearing in schools, universities, workplaces, relationships and generations, while every perpetrator somehow remains an exception?

Those men in Mexico had no objection to the word rape. Rape belonged to monsters, and monsters had nothing to do with them. The word they could not stand was culture.