What would life be like if women ruled the world? According to a vision set forth in a short film, Oppressed Majority (Majorite Opprimee), that went viral when it was uploaded to Youtube a little over a week ago, it would be a pretty grim place for men. In the fantasy world of the film, women are thriving – they have the better jobs, they go jogging topless, they urinate in public and they alternately undermine or sexually harass every man they encounter. The harassment is so pervasive and routine that the female perpetrators hardly seem to notice it, while their male victims have little option but to "put up or shut up". When things inevitably turn ugly and the film's main character, an unusually under-confident man, is brutally assaulted, he has a hard time making a (female) police officer believe the attack took place, even while being almost simultaneously blamed for provoking it.

The filmmaker, Eleonore Pourriot, told the Guardian she wanted to draw attention to the prevalence of sexual harassment and abuse in society and the victim blaming that enables it. As the vast majority of assault victims in real life are female and the vast majority of assailants are male, Pourriot reversed the roles in the film so that men could perhaps gain a better understanding of what sexual victimization feels like.

The results are alternately comical and cruel – the women in this fictional society are emboldened by the power that is afforded them and they are all too willing to abuse it. Meanwhile, the oppressed men are rendered impotent and miserable. It's a vast over simplification of a complex issue, obviously, but still the film makes an important point – that abuse flourishes where it is encouraged, tacitly or otherwise. And what better way is there to encourage abuse than to either deny it occurs or to blame victims when denial is not an option?

Here in America where nearly one in five women report having been raped in their lifetime, denial and victim blaming and shaming, always popular sports, are reaching new and dizzying heights. On Monday, James Taranto, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, a widely read and respected broadsheet, published a piece in which he basically asserted that rape victims who are drunk at the time of their attack are as much to blame as their rapist.

Taranto was commenting on a New York Times story about the rise in popularity of bystander intervention programs to stop sexual assaults on college campuses (where they are alarmingly commonplace) before they occur. The idea behind the programs is that young men will learn to keep an eye on their friends and step in before drunken flirting crosses the line into assault or rape. Taranto writes that the programs "sounds quite sensible not to mention shrewd", which would suggest that somewhere deep in his psyche he must acknowledge that sexual assaults do actually occur, yet he finds a way to absolve the assailants of guilt when drink is involved and to lay at least some of the blame on their victims.

There's no question that alcohol plays a major role in campus rapes. A 2004 report from Harvard University found that roughly one in 20 female students reported being raped and that 72% of rape victims experienced rape while intoxicated. For some unexplained (and incomprehensible) reason, however, Taranto seems to think that when both parties involved in a sexual assault are drunk, more often than not the male party is wrongfully blamed. He writes that:



When two drunken college students "collide," the male one is almost always presumed to be at fault. His diminished capacity owing to alcohol is not a mitigating factor, but her diminished capacity is an aggravating factor for him.

The twisted logic does not end with that nugget. He goes on argue that if being intoxicated means a person cannot give consent to sex then in situations where both parties are drunk, they are technically guilty of assaulting one another. What Taranto fails to grasp is that although getting extremely drunk and making oneself vulnerable to being sexually assaulted may not be advisable or wise, getting extremely drunk and sexually assaulting someone is not just unwise, it's criminal.

So as I said, both denial and victim blaming are being taken to another level, and one of the apparent motivations for doing so is to protect young men from having their promising careers derailed by accusations of sexual assault, false or otherwise. Despite prevailing notions that women are prone to making false accusations about rape, however, it remains one of the most underreported crimes and justice is rarely bestowed. According to the Department of Justice, only 40% of all rapes are even reported to the police, of that number fewer than 10% of accused rapists are prosecuted and only 3% end up doing prison time. On college campuses the number of reported rapes is far lower than the national average with fewer than 5% of sexual attacks being reported to law enforcement.

So while rape apologists may think they are doing young men a favor by promoting the "boys will be boys" and "women are lying bitches" narratives, they are really just promoting a culture that allows rapists to thrive and puts vulnerable men as well as vulnerable women in danger. Would the two boys who will forever be known as the Steubenville rapists have seen fit to publicly assault an inebriated 16-year-old girl if they were living in a society where no cloud of doubt hung over the illegality, not to mention immorality, of such actions?

Such questions are impossible to answer, but we do know for certain that rape myth acceptance affects mens' proclivity to commit rape. The sooner we banish these myths then, the sooner we stop entertaining arguments that suggest victims bear equal or even partial responsibility for their assault or denials that assaults even happen, the sooner assault rates will go down, an outcome that is surely desirable for everyone.

I don't know how long it's going to take or what it's going to take for this to happen, but it's heartening to know that a little film that asked men to walk in women's shoes for a few minutes got over 5m views in just over a week. Maybe half of those viewers just tuned in to catch a glimpse of the bare breasted joggers, but if even some of them gain a little empathy in the process, we could be on to something.