I feel like Captain Obvious pointing this out, but there’s so much confusion and defensiveness about religion and patriarchy out there, I’m going to have to say it: That there’s a bunch of rapist priests in the Catholic church and the Pope was involved in the cover-up should not be surprising. The Catholic church is the classic example of what feminists like me like to call “rape culture”. Rape culture crops up when male power over women and children is exalted, when sexuality is demonized, and when men are encouraged to think of women (and children’s) bodies as their property. All these aspects of patriarchy aren’t only part of the Catholic church, they’re celebrated. The exuberant love of male dominance that is the Catholic dogma is going to turn men into rapists who get a rise out of sexually dominated people they believe are lesser than them.
Duh.
But let’s take this argument one piece at a time, looking at the similarities between secular rape culture and Catholic teachings.
In a rape culture, women are assumed to be public property. Rape culture never officially condones rape, but it condones the attitude that women exist to please men, and refusal from women to do so is bitchy. Secular rape culture is Nice Gusy® talking about women’s sexuality as something that’s handed out as a reward for good behavior. Rape culture is men thinking they have a standing right to interrupt what women are doing and hit on them, and that women who reject them straightforwardly are bitches. Rape culture is men telling strange women on the street to smile.
In secular rape culture, women are presumed up for sex with anyone who asks unless they make a big display of how not into they are. In rape culture, victims are chastised for what they were wearing, what party they went to, drinking, and even going on dates, which rape culture teaches is basically a yes to sex with whoever demands it. In rape culture, what women say they want is not considered relevant data, not compared to what they were wearing or drinking.
The Catholic church also teaches that women exist to serve men and do not have the right to say no. A sexually active woman has no right to say no to any sperm that decide to set up shop in her uterus. Catholic women are taught their bodies and their sexualities don’t belong to them, but that these things exist solely to produce more and more babies. You not only are assumed to have a standing invitation to baby-making if you’re sexually active, but they don’t even give you the slim technical right to say no that secular rape culture gives you. But really, the main difference between the two versions of rape culture is that the secular one believes that women have to take all comers, penis-wise, and the Catholic one believes this about sperm.