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  • Essay / Rape culture: victim blaming and gender stereotypes

    The example will be a Dolce and Gabbana advertisement released in 2007 and brought back to light in 2015 by Kelly Cutrone. It generated a lot of excitement due to its provocative images and unhealthy interpretations. The Dolce and Gabbana ad was meant to showcase their summer campaign, but it showed a woman being held down in a swimsuit surrounded by shirtless men. The positioning in advertising gives the image of women as objects. Medium's Walam author described the ad as "having the woman literally beneath the man is declaring that she is inferior to him, but more importantly, he is about to rape her and he is It is obvious that these other men have no intention of stopping him” (walam). The problem is that they were promoting such a sexist and misogynistic ad without even considering the backlash they might receive. Leitner, author of his own blog, explains it simply this way: “Women themselves and their bodies become dehumanized, objectified, and their rights seem to be violated.” The idea that a company would be more comfortable and willing to promote sexual violence is therefore mystifying. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Rape culture has influenced our society in multiple ways. One of them is “victim blaming,” arguably one of the most important consequences of the uproar. Victim blaming is when blame is placed on the victim, primarily in the case of sexual violence, but it also applies to many other cases. Victim blaming falls into subsets such as specific phrases and questions asked, an example would be “she asked for it”. Phrases like this make it seem like if a woman does something that falls outside of the concept of modesty, she is simply “asking to be sexually assaulted.” Along with this, they will be asked questions such as "what they were wearing" and what they did to "encourage this behavior". In November this year, University of Illinois student Ruth George was murdered after being insulted. Assistant District Attorney James said the killer was "angry" at being ignored and in retaliation followed her into the garage and strangled her until she died, then had raped her (Hauck). He blamed the victim for having to murder him because of his own insecurities. This was previously seen in 2016, when Janese Talton-Jackson was murdered for refusing a date (Young). Not to mention in 2014, when Mary Spears was killed for refusing to give her phone number to a man (Abbey-Lambertz). The three men have the same thing in common: they tried to blame the victims. This takes victim blaming to the extreme. In an article by David B. Feldman, he told his readers that as a people we want to believe that we live in a perfect, positive world and said, "When bad things happen to someone who we looks a lot, it threatens our belief that the world is just one place. If that person could be a victim of rape, assault, robbery, or attack, maybe we could too. So, to comfort ourselves in the face of this troubling realization and maintain our rosy view of the world, we psychologically separate ourselves from the victim. » (Feldman) From here we can understand the desire to live in a peaceful world. That if the peace is broken, the blame will be placed on the main person involved and we must distance ourselves. This has the consequence that the.