‘Rape culture is a dangerous myth’

Article here. Excerpt:

'Earlier this month, Lauren Southern, a young Canadian reporter and a political-science student at the University of the Fraser Valley, caused a media storm when she challenged a ‘SlutWalk’ in Vancouver by holding up a placard which said ‘There is no rape culture in the West’. Last week, I talked to Southern about why she decided to speak out.

The protest Southern disrupted – she held up the placard and challenged the protesters’ views on camera – was linked to Women Against Violence Against Women, a rape-crisis centre set up in Vancouver in the Eighties, which follows a ‘feminist anti-oppression philosophy’ and claims that ‘rape culture is real and huge and everywhere’. SlutWalks began four years ago after a policeman in Toronto suggested that ‘women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised’. In response, feminists took to the streets of Toronto in their underwear in protest at the cop’s ‘slut-shaming and victim-blaming’ statement. SlutWalks have since become popular across the globe, and are held annually in many cities.

Southern had previously sparked debate by posting a picture online of her holding up a sign that explained why she didn’t ‘need feminism’ – a response to a popular feminist selfie campaign. Following this up a year later with a video entitled ‘Why I am not a feminist’, she called out feminism as a ‘faux form of equality under a gender-biased word’. In Southern’s report on the Vancouver SlutWalk, she explained that she had attended the rally to ‘challenge the fearmongering feminist narrative about men, women and violence’. It is this ‘rape culture’ narrative, she tells me, which is really trivialising rape. ‘Women are going to equate things that aren’t rape with rape because they interpret guys whistling at them as rape culture’, she says. ‘The misuse of the word [rape] is very dangerous because it allows for false accusations.’'