Blog Post 21: How to change the Kairos of rape?

Today, the class talked about the factors that highlights rape culture throughout the semester. This includes best possible moments for rape to occur (Kairos). The class talked about routine Kairos, the Kairos that is created based on American culture such as drinking, partying and late night walking. Instructor point out that it’s important to disassemble the routine rape by education or bystander training. School girls could be trained to intervene the Kairos of rape such as calling the police or help victim escape. The instructor said it is possible for rape culture to change if there is a good timing for it to change. He gave example of interracial marriage, same sex marriage, and universal health care. These events all change at a moment, but no one did anything about them before. This shows that the right timing for change is necessary to alter the issue of rape.

Instructor suggests that people are starting to create kairotic moments that will help women turn the table around while addressing sexual assault. He suggests that people should change other social issues first in order to change the Kairos of rape, social issues like wage gap between men and women, and gender inequality. The instructor showed an example of an ad that shows about gender inequality and wage gap. The ad shows that a man getting money from a woman, she gave him 7.7 cent and he said it’s too little, she said it’s “women’s money.” This is an ad making fun of the social issue and gender inequality in the working place. This reminds me of the coke ad from 70s; the ad actually showed that the coke is only for men but not for women. Nowadays, the issue of gender inequality is less strong; people sort of being aware of the problem, but they just don’t have any strategies to solve it. In the working place too, women started to report when they get sexual assault. But back to 60s, no one really realized there is a problem with women because very few victims reported. The instructor said changing the Kairos of rape requires time; as the issue of gender inequality shrink, the issue of sexual assault may shrink too. In my view, rape rate may go down as a country acquires more gender equality, but as my previous paper talked about, growing gender equality actually can cause more sexual assault, because male dominated society doesn’t like it when women acquire equal power as men. This is why issue of rape is more severe in developed country because developed country has greater gender equality. But this is just one theory of the issue of sexual assault, it does not apply to all countries in the world; it certainly doesn’t have to apply to America, because America has other cultural factors that triggers rape.

The instructor then moved on to talk about how people might change the Kairos of rape. One way is to reduce people’s denial by training them to talk more about this issue. As the class mentioned before, American culture never really talk about rape. In order to change the Kairos of rape, American should overcome that silence they hold towards this topic. The more they talk about this issue the more feminist response they get and the more people are aware of this issue.

Another way is to change media content. This reminds me that media usually portray women being attacked in the dark, this make people think that women are not supposed to walk alone in the dark instead they should stay at home, while in fact being at home and throwing parties put women in more danger. So if media could change the way it portray sexual assault and ties it with reality, people may change the way they perceive sexual assault and put more efforts in preventing party rape.