As this image makes almost comically apparent, what is going on in ethno-fascist invocations of rape is, to be blunt, masculine penetration anxiety, and note here also the colour scheme of the escalator and the cliffs, and the way it alludes to the racialised dynamics at work. I’d also like to stop here for a moment and observe that images like this are kind of indicative of why I have such a huge problem with being lectured about how unimportant genitals are, and being told that my concerns are ‘creepy.’ A vast swath of the psycho-ontological infrastructure of our culture is informed by the morphology of genitals and the resultant metaphysics of sex, and until we have taken phallocentrism apart in its deepest aspects, I reserve the right to think that genitals matter very much indeed.

Okay, so, finally, after a fair amount of backstory we get to the point, which is this. All of this projected penetration anxiety about the other as rapist, and the playing out of fantasies of absolute sovereign security on the bodies of women is all about men’s symbolic systems, and has almost nothing to do with actual women’s actual experience of sexual violation, along the entire continuum from unwanted predatory looking and touching to sexual assault. The kind of men who whip up fears about the other-as-rapist are markedly unconcerned, indeed, are usually the first to flatly deny, the existence of any kind of ‘epidemic’ of rape that does not cross racialised lines, because, for them, the crime only signifies within the sovereign imaginary. Such men are frequently extreme misogynists, evaluate women on the basis of a stark hierarchy of sexual purity and pollution, and, as in the case of Breivik, will frequently link immigration-cum-rape to feminism’s alleged emasculation of the nation and corruption of women’s sexual morals. They are, moreover, wedded to a logic of phallic sexual dominance and often, the heroism of conquest by force. It is no coincidence that the man obsessed with the Great Big Wall is also, infamously, the Pussy-Grabber-In-Chief.

All of this is a million miles away from what rape means to women and why radical feminism is so centrally concerned with the devastation of women’s lives by rape. There is nothing in male discourses about purity and pollution and conquest and invasion that expresses concern for the actual harm caused to actual women by sexual trauma, and the fact that we are damaged not by an invasion of territory but rather, by a profound assault on our humanity and personhood. We are not just bits of land on which men play out their sovereigntist fantasies and battles, we are persons, in our own right, and assaults against our personhood mean what they mean, to us. We are not worried, for example, about non-female people in rape crisis centres because we trying to recreate the primordial tribal purity of women and have, to that end, conjured a figment of invading contaminating males. We are worried about male-bodied people in rape crisis centres because they are highly likely to be a source of trauma to women who have been sexually assaulted by males. To assimilate women’s concerns about compromises to their dignity, comfort, and sexual safety to ethno-fascist discourses structured by masculinist metaphysics, is, therefore, to deny that women have their own experience of the world apart from male symbolic projections, to effectively position women as men, and hence, most fundamentally, to erase the specificity of women’s own existence. It is to insist that women, and especially feminist women, understand and experience male violence in masculine symbolic terms, when our entire political project is precisely about challenging the assumptions of the phallic construction of our social world. To wit, what rape means to feminist women is not the same as what rape means to phallocentric right-wing racist white men, and it’s actually absurd, and exhibits profound disregard for women’s experience, to suggest otherwise.