Weinstein's Rape Culture

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Rape culture can be defined as society 's normalization of sexual violence, assault and harassment. (Barry, 2015) Such a definition may be ridiculed as a harsh generalization of modern society as a whole. However, when one delves into the recent scandals of non-consensual sexual misconduct and alleged rape at the hands of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, who acted inappropriately with female actresses for decades within full knowledge of his colleagues, it is clear that the females in question were dismissed as fantasists by their peers or Weinstein’s actions utterly trivialized as 'part and parcel ' of life in the entertainment industry. Fearful of the detriment allegations against a stalwart such as Weinstein, the women aforementioned were …show more content…

Women and men must be treated with absolute equality in all aspects of life in order to create a just society. Alas, the treatment of Emma O’Donovan at the hands of her family and the local community when she is gang raped at a party shatters that utopian fantasy. O’Neill aspires, perhaps in vain, to highlight the disproportion between men and women with regards to sex. Demands are made of women to appear sexy but to never express themselves as such. Men, in contrast are applauded for their sexual prowess by modern …show more content…

Encased in her own social bubble, self-obsessed Emma is unarmed with insight but excessively equipped with bitter bitchiness and an abhorrence for those who don’t invest time in personal aesthetics. She is unlikeable from the outset of the novel, shattering the stereotypical virginal Irish good girl persona. The reader has little affinity with this schoolgirl. Mean-spirited and catty to her friends, Emma is not far removed from the bitchy persona of ‘it’ girl Amber Marines in 1995 teen comedy Clueless. With a predilection for revealing outfits (Bryan remarks that her outfit is ‘a bit slutty, isn’t it?’ while an explicit picture of an FHM model remains firmly fixed to his bedroom wall, further highlighting male hypocrisy, flirtatious Emma attends a party one weekend in which she indulges in copious amounts of alcohol and ingests party pills, not unlike many teenagers in the modern era. She is then raped by the local football