It's easy to feel horrified - even furious - after reading these words. Rasmussen's statement is like a paint-by-numbers rendering of rape culture's greatest hits, from her assertion that alcohol is the true culprit to her belief that "real rape" is a woman being kidnapped and assaulted in the middle of a parking lot. Her words are not only ignorant and deeply hurtful to the millions of rape survivors whose assaults occurred in manners less reassuring to a society invested in the Monster Myth, but also harmful to those conditioned to view themselves as culpable. I have read far too many heartbreaking comments from women acknowledging they were raped but who stoically seem to claim it as being their fault. That's rape culture in action.

Rasmussen has been publicly raked across the coals since her statement was published. She's been branded a rape apologist, with her band pulled from slots they were due to play at an upcoming music festival. I've no doubt she's fielding an extraordinary amount of online abuse, which might account for why her Facebook page has been removed. And while I'm not saying these actions are unfair or unwarranted (except for the abuse part), I find myself unable to condemn her as readily as I do Turner's father.

Why? Because this is rape culture too. Rasmussen is a 20-year-old woman who has been raised within the context of the rape culture brought to light by Turner's trial. Small town America is not kind to young women, particularly in terms of their relationships to the promising young men who are coddled and protected by its reverence. Look at how the community rallied around the two football stars convicted of raping a similarly unconscious young woman in Steubenville, Ohio. It didn't matter that it had all been caught on film or that students who'd witnessed it were later caught laughing about how 'dead' she'd appeared. What mattered was that the careers of two young men had been destroyed by a young woman's choice to report them to authorities for sexually assaulting her. She shouldn't have gotten herself so drunk. It was her fault. None of this would have happened if she had done what she was supposed to.

Like so many women, Rasmussen seems to have bought the lie that women can prevent these things from being done to them if they just take better, more sensible precautions. That if good boys like Turner are compelled to rape someone, it must be because she tempted him somehow with her irresponsible, slutty behaviour. Ergo, if girls like Rasmussen avoid participating in irresponsible, slutty behaviour they can protect themselves from the threat of rape that clings to all of us like a mist.

Is it any wonder that a woman like Rasmussen, raised as so many of us are in environments which teach us to view rape as a mistake all men have the right to make at least once, has internalised its corresponding message of victim blaming so deeply? We are all negotiating our way through the patriarchy, but women's paths through this are inevitably tougher and more punishing than the ones walked by men. Survival is one of humanity's keenest instincts, and surviving within a rape culture is no different. The men and women who enforce its rules do so for different reasons.