(Trigger Warning)

During my sophomore year of high school, I took a class called Modern World History. I was fifteen. One day near the end of the year, we had already gotten up to present day, so the topic was how to talk about personal history. My teacher, who had graduated from my high school seven years before, told us about an experience that had changed her.

“Have you guys heard of Mr. X, or are you all too young?” she asked us.

Although he had retired just before we had arrived at the school, many of us knew of the (in)famous, eccentric teacher who encouraged his students to call him by that strangely anonymous moniker. Those days, he was better known for running shirtless along the highway, gray mane swaying in the wind.

“Well,” my teacher began, “I took his psych class senior year. There were only five girls in the class, including me. The other four were on the volleyball team, and the team went to state finals that year, so this one day, I was the only girl in the room. Mr. X was talking about social norms, the rules of society. He turned to me and said, ‘Megan, suppose the principal came on the loud-speaker right now and said, “Breaking news, everybody. Rape has been made legal!” Do you think that you would make it out of the building alive?’ ”

Just let that sink in for a second. Think about it. It’s important.

I don’t remember much from that class. History was never my scene, and I had lunch right afterward. But I remember everything about that story, from the look on her face as she remembered to the foreign thrill of fear I felt in my chest when she told it.

Later, as I walked to lunch with a friend from the class, I found that I still had a pit in my stomach. I decided to broach the topic with him. “So that story,” I began.

My friend laughed and said, “Yeah, Mr. X was crazy. Kind of a bummer how we’ll never have him.”

I stared. “What? No, that’s—” And then I stopped.

I could see that my friend hadn’t taken the story the same way at all, but I didn’t know how to illustrate the difference to him. How could I explain that brief, profound dread that had plummeted right through me, and how it had seemed so strange, literally alien? It was like that was someone else’s fear I felt. Phantom fear. I had never been conscious of it before, and I found that I didn’t have the words to explain it.

Years later, I have become aware of rape culture, and I can see just how terrible that story was. Mr. X asked my future teacher, a teenage girl, to make monsters out of the teenage boys around her. He implied that only the law was preventing her from being raped to death in her day-to-day life and that if the law were to change, she would be doomed. He implied that every woman in the building was a victim waiting to happen and that every man in the building was a rapist kept at bay. That is a perspective that comes from and perpetuates a rape culture.

I’ve got to say, though, that the reason I think this is such an important story is not because it exemplifies rape culture so well on paper, although it does. This is an important story because it highlights something we must talk about when we talk about rape culture: the emotion.

In discussing rape culture, I have often found myself struggling to remain logical and objective. It seems like this is the best way to talk about anything so important with people who find the idea hard to believe, so I have tried to adhere to it. It’s only recently that I have begun to ask why. Why am I more legitimate if I am able to quash the subjectivity from the discussion?

One of the terribly insidious effects of rape culture is that it teaches certain members of the population to be afraid. It instills in them a profound fear that drags toward resignation. This subset includes many people but for now, I’m going to focus on my experience as a woman. Now, I want to make it clear that the idea that women are the only people who get raped and that men are the only people who rape is an utter misconception, but here lives the dilemma:

My awareness that rape culture has laid upon me the despicable idea that I am merely a not-yet victim has not made it feel any less true.

The dark makes nightmares of even the most familiar streets in my city. One night, I got out of lab late. On my walk home, I became aware that a man had been behind me for two blocks. I ducked into a convenience store and immediately regretted it, because my fear spiked as I wondered, What will I do if he’s there when I come out?

When I emerged from the store, bottle of Coke clenched tightly in hand as a security blanket or, maybe, an inefficient weapon, of course the man wasn’t there. Of course he had just kept walking, because it was not logical to think that someone who happened to be on a very busy street was following me.

My nightmares about my sisters being raped are illogical.

I miss logic by miles some weekends, ending up instead in the land of worst conclusions when my friend left my house ten minutes ago and hasn’t texted me that she got back OK.

Those tights I put on under my printed miniskirt when I go back out for the evening are definitely illogical; I rail against slut-shaming and victim blaming with everything in me, but still, that small, illogical voice asks me to change into pants, just for the night.

The pounding of my heart in my throat matches the double-time march of my feet up the front steps to my house, and even my inner monologue can’t explain why I have gotten so afraid in the last thirty seconds of my walk as I pass a group of men outside the gas station. All this to the relentless beat of sinister, subjective non-logic.

Fear, shame, unease, discomfort, and dread do not win debates. They wouldn’t make good slides in a presentation, and it would feel silly to put them on an index card. They are not statistics. When we talk about rape culture, though, they cannot be ignored.

We talk about those foreign feelings that rape culture has instilled in us, the feelings we try to overcome, the feelings we share with each other, sometimes without having to try, other times with a great deal of conversational and emotional effort.

If you have not been told your entire life that you should protect yourself from being raped, then you should make it a point to talk to the people who have, because entire aspects of their individual realities are different from your own.

You should listen, really listen to them. Don’t argue, not this time. Save that rousing debate over the tenets of feminism for another night—that’s a talk worth having, but just shelve it for now. They don’t need to hear the logical flip-side, the statistics, or the anecdotes. They don’t need self-defense tips or fashion advice. They certainly don’t need you to put them in hypothetical situations that make them feel viscerally afraid. They need you to understand this one fact:

Human experience is what we talk about when we talk about rape culture, and it is a truth that needs to be shared.