In American popular culture rape as a central trope.



It’s puzzling – It’s odd – no one seems to know or care. But why is it that every autumn come rain or shine, rape and all about rape and rape culture just hits the net coming out of the USA, and all the rest of the world looks bemused as asks What the F###?

Is it something to do with schools and colleges?

Is it that suddenly every Autumn every man in North America is affected by the weather and turns into a rapist?Is it Halloween that gets people all focused on rape? maybe it’s a pagan thing being inverted around fertility.

Spring is about sowing and the fall is the harvest, but somewhere along the line it all got mixed up in men’s heads and suddenly they are expecting to sew seed in the autumn and it’s a weird pagan festival all gone awry, cos ladies and gents are out of sync on the sewing season?

I’ve been looking for any stats, but there is no reported seasonal rape spike from the FBI or any other group such as NOW (National Organization For Women) , and I’m sure of there was a Seasonal Spike NOW would be demanding action now! So if there is no real world Spike in rape come Autumn, why is the net set a twitter so easily, and who is driving this twittering over the wires?

I keep seeing so many bad school and college projects ending up on Wikipedia it’s embarrassing. Really, students need to learn how to use Google and learn to check facts before they start on school projects and writing them up as Wikipedia pages.

It’s odd too how many experts and academics from outside of the USA keep making the points, and American readers just refuse to read and consider. Like Prof Sabine Sielke who has even written about it in the Encyclopedia Of Rape:

“In the United States the belief that representations of violence reproduce real violence was reinforced in the 1980s and 1990s by an intensified debate of prominent cases of rape, date rape, and sexual harassment within the media. This prominence of rape and sexual violence in popular culture seemed to suggest that American culture is a “rape culture.” However, the term rape culture misleadingly hints that rape occurs more frequently in a culture that talks about rape intensively than in cultures that deny its existence. Instead of documenting the state of real rape, though, the deployment of rape in American popular culture bespeaks the status of rape as a central trope within the American cultural imagination.” Encyclopaedia Of Rape – Page 150

Is there a reason for this seasonal fascination with rape in the USA, and if so What is it?

It’s very odd too all the claims about rape and levels of rape because internationally the USA is seen as a Low rape risk country. Places such as South Africa are described by Interpol, as the rape capital of the world, and yet The English language net has to focus round the USA and it’s Autumn Fixation of rape.

Maybe next year we can have a different topic – say equality and even world hunger? It might make a change for the school children doing classes and they can Google a different subject.