Growing into a woman in New Zealand is confusing and oppressive.

Part two of New Zealand is no paradise: Sex, Drugs and Denial, a five-part series about growing up hating New Zealand by Katherine Dolan, written for Stuff Nation.

OPINION: Small-town New Zealand is one of the most misogynistic cultures I've ever seen - and I've lived in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi women may live under permanent house arrest, but I will say that the culture does cherish (an admittedly extremely limited definition of) femininity.

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Small-town New Zealand has a much simpler attitude; it doesn't like or value girls or women, full stop.

READ THE SERIES:

* Part one: NZ is no paradise, it is brutal

* Part three: Rugby, racism and homophobia

* Readers react to Katherine Dolan on growing up hating New Zealand

* Sexist? Not us, say those living in rural New Zealand

In my community, men and women did not mingle socially except under the influence of alcohol. It was understood that, after puberty, sexual contact would occur but "dating" was as quaint and foreign a word as "wooing" – it happened in books and movies, but not in real life.

123rf Kiwis don't respect girls, or women.

When I was about 11, my more socially adept classmates started talking about Saturday nights. This was when a big group of teenagers and young men would get together after a rugby game, drink hard spirits and have clumsy sex.

As far as I could tell, the point for girls was to drink until you vomited and passed out. If you were super lucky, you got to give some member of the first 15 a sexual favour.

Naturally, the drunker a girl was the more compliant she would be.

The drunker the girl is, the more compliant she is.

The pay off for the girl was a sexual power – an almost effortless way of gaining the approval of popular guys. A girl I knew earned the nickname "the town bike" at the age of 12 because of how many men had had sex with her at the local pub, including a 35-year-old drunkard who was married with three kids.

No one even dreamed of reporting the men abusing her or otherwise trying to help her.

One of the first parties I attended was essentially an orgy, and it was not as erotic as it might sound, especially for an observer whose sex life thus far had been limited to subtexts in Jane Eyre.

123RF But it's what they wanted, right?

A friend of mine confessed she'd just had sex with her crush, who then immediately said, "we shouldn't have done that".

He hopped out the window and took up another half-conscious girl, who had herself recently rutted with another boy (the term for this, in our romantic dialect, was to "stir the porridge").

The following Monday at school, all of this debauchery was magically erased like a Midsummer Night's Nightmare. There was no obligation to communicate or even make eye contact with the person or persons with whom you had been "intimate" (an ironic euphemism because it's hard to think of anything less intimate than drunken sex).

She liked him, but after trying her out, he decided there was someone else he wanted more.

This prohibition of tenderness and intimacy played out in a lunch hour when I was 15. A male classmate of mine was walking hand-in-hand with a girl out on the rugby field, smiling in an adolescent love haze.

A large group of students, mostly boys, lined up along the wall pointing, laughing, and jeering about how he probably had a boner.

The sight of affectionate behaviour was so unusual that people felt compelled to make vicious fun of it. It aroused the group's anxiety and hatred because it wasn't normal.

123rf Holding hands really scares Kiwis - there is no real affection between girls and boys.

Like a lot of girls my age, I didn't want my first sexual experience to be insensate rutting, but nor was I brave enough to initiate any sober arrangement. I had a crush on one boy and had the usual fantasies about anonymously leaving roses by his letterbox or nursing him after a horrific bus crash (we were the only two survivors – sadly, I didn't much care what happened to the other passengers).

One day he asked me in an accusing sort of way, "Do you like me?".

Suspicious, I answered with a flat no and the matter ended there, or so I thought.

I wanted more from a relationship than my peers were willing to settle for.

A bit later, I was playing some sort of word game at the blackboard with my friends and I heard boys giggling behind me. This guy was standing behind me pretending to sodomise me, to the endless amusement of a crowd of 10 boys. I stopped having a crush on him at that point.

I'm beginning to realise why I spent so many lunchtimes in the library.

I mention all of this because at the time, no one thought it was shocking or weird or even bad. Parents knew we were going to these parties, they knew what was happening. Half of us were probably conceived in similar circumstances. It was - and probably still is - a very common practice and it's difficult for a group to accept that common isn't necessarily great.

SUPPLIED In 2011, New Zealand was ranked worst of all OECD countries in rates of sexual violence.

In the United Nations Report on the Status of Women published in 2011, Aotearoa New Zealand was ranked worst of all OECD countries in rates of sexual violence.

Yet we - our media, our police, our guts - instinctively sympathise with the rapists, especially if they're rugby players, because routine sexual violence is an integral part of rugby culture.

It is a Kiwi tradition for young men to have sex with drunken, underage girls. When the Roast Busters made headlines, they did so because they talked about their alleged exploits online, which meant that people outside our culture became aware of it.

You just have to look through the news to find examples of questionable sexual behaviour.

Although the first complaints were made in 2011 by girls as young as 13, the police investigation sputtered along until 2013 when the story got picked up by international media. Headlines such as Jezebel's New Zealand Teen Rape Club is the Worst Thing You'll Read About Today embarrassed us.

We really, really hate being embarrassed in front of foreigners.

In 2013, Inspector Bruce Scott said no charges had been laid because no girls had been "brave enough" to come forward (it later emerged that one of them had actually been brave enough but he'd forgotten).

FIONA GOODALL Inspector Bruce Scott says no one was brave enough to come forward.

In an interview with Radio New Zealand, Police Commissioner Peter Marshall complained, "Anyone would think we're the bad guys in this situation". The police report was worded so as to make it clear that this case was not to be considered a criminal matter, but rather a private one in which victims and rapists had equal responsibilities.

"The prevalence of alcohol in the lives of the teenagers interviewed, male and female, was a concern… it was clear further education about the negative effects of alcohol was needed, as well as educating parents and caregivers about their responsibilities…There was also a poor understanding of what constituted consent," police said.

The difference between this police statement, which amounts to mild admonition, and the Jezebel headline points to what we call different cultural expectations.

Arie Ketel Teenagers and alcohol is, according to police commissioner Peter Marshall, an uncommon pairing.

Allow me to extrapolate:

First of all, the idea New Zealand Police were "shocked at the prevalence of alcohol in the lives of teenagers" is laughable. The sentiment is clearly addressed to a global, media audience with the implication that this sort of thing is very uncommon and the people involved were an anomalous handful of uneducated ratbags.

In fact, perfectly respectable young men have been having sex with drunken, underage girls in New Zealand every weekend for decades. "Consent" is a murky issue when the prevailing, culturally condoned, notion of foreplay is pouring liquor down the girl's throat until she's unconscious. Most of the police – male and female - probably received their sexual initiation in exactly the same circumstances.

Sexual harassment only seems to become a problem when other countries find out and we get embarrassed.

So it's not hard to find instances of New Zealanders in positions of power, supporting alleged abusers and condemning possible victims.

Whether or not the Chiefs assaulted a stripper by groping her and throwing gravel at her, there were plenty of people coming forward to excuse the behaviour.

Margaret Comer - of Chiefs' sponsor Gallagher Group - made the comment, "If a woman takes her clothes off and walks around in a group of men, what are we supposed to do if one of them tries to touch her?", which concisely sums up the rugby-culture view.

Bruce Mercer Chiefs' sponsor Gallagher Group spokeswoman Margaret Comer follows the rugby-minded line of thought.

Again and again, such comments and excuses from authority figures have helped to reinforce our culture's inclination to ignore the abuse of young women, especially in the context of after-match celebrations.

In the words of stripper and author Hadassah Grace, "We could stop saying 'boys will be boys' and then wagging our fingers at women doing perfectly legal jobs which they're entitled to do without fear of harassment and assault."

In the wider social context, the importance of maintaining toughness and cohesion in the male group involves keeping a strict division between the sexes. My husband, a Californian, noticed with surprise that at New Zealand social gatherings men and women did not tend to mix.

ALEXANDER TURNBULL LIBRARY Segregated audience at a screening of the film "Ulysses" in the Memorial Theatre at Victoria University, Wellington in 1967.

He also remarked that what he considered ordinary friendly gestures – a smile or praise for a female colleague – were met with suspicion. When his female colleagues were finally convinced he wasn't trying to rape them with compliments, they became emotional, to a degree he found odd until one told him she'd never before been praised by a man.

Perhaps it is no surprise that we have a Prime Minister that can get away with dismissing a woman's complaints about how he treated her - by tugging on her ponytail - as a "friendly" practical joke.

Key made headlines for repeatedly pulling a waitress's ponytail despite being asked to stop it. She likened his behaviour to schoolyard bullying and felt powerless and humiliated.

GEORGE HEARD/STUFF John Key made international headlines for repeatedly pulling on a waitress's ponytail.

By way of apologising for the incident, he offered her two bottles of his personally branded pinot noir.

I remember an Australian girl who transferred to my rural high school in her final year, when she was 16. She was pretty, well-groomed and unashamedly feminine.

Once, on the school bus, I heard her say that she'd just seen a flower that was so pretty she wished she could have a dress made just like it. My jaw (internally) dropped. This was the kind of ultra-girly sentiment I'd been taught from an early age to revile, but everyone was lapping it up.

The boys were all for it. In fact, because she did it with assurance, they even attempted to "court" her and went on dates with her the way boys did in the movies.

I felt at once betrayed and inspired. It seemed sickeningly clear that her popularity was because of her unabashed femininity, the very quality that had been so carefully crushed in us.