Rape Culture

Rape culture refers to a society in which sexual violence and abuse against women are normalized through all pillars of culture: gender roles, media, education, etc. The misogynistic attitude that prevails in countries like the U.S. continues to normalize rape, excuse it and blame its victims.

War on Women Report: Antiabortion Extremism Makes Its Way to the White House; 28th Woman Accuses Donald Trump of Rape; Arizona Man Wins $68K Settlement After Ex-Wife’s Abortion

PUBLISHED 10/30/2026 by and

MAGA Republicans are back in the White House, and Project 2025 is their guide: the right-wing plan to turn back the clock on women’s rights, remove abortion access, and force women into roles as wives and mothers in the “ideal, natural family structure.”

We know an empowered female electorate is essential to democracy. That’s why day after day, we stay vigilant in our goals to dismantle patriarchy at every turn. We are watching, and we refuse to go back. This is the War on Women Report.

Since our last report:
—Dolores Huerta, the labor organizer at the helm of United Farm Workers and one of the most powerful women in the movement, passed away on Oct. 28. She was 96. Huerta was also a board member of the Feminist Majority Foundation, the publisher of Ms. In March of this year, at the age of 95, she revealed that in the 1960s, Cesar Chavez sexually assaulted her.
—Abortion bans may be linked to approximately 135 excess homicides among women of reproductive age between 2023 and 2024, a new study suggests.
—Federal agents searched the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in the last few weeks of her reelection bid. Omar called the search an “attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.”
—Bernadette Greene-Placentia, the Democratic candidate challenging Republican Rep. Abe Hamadeh in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, says she was raped while repairing a campaign sign in Sun City on Aug. 14. According to her account, Greene-Placentia was struck in the head and lost consciousness, later waking to discover evidence of a sexual assault.
—A University of Arizona sorority member has reported being sexually assaulted by two men at a Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity house on Aug. 26.
—During Trump’s second term, the U.S. Department of Education has drastically reduced its investigations of sexual assault and other civil rights violations at schools and colleges, even though the number of complaints has not slowed.
—A new report from House Judiciary Democrats includes an allegation from Beatrice Keul, former Miss Switzerland. Keul says that in 1983, Trump offered to help her secure a U.S. visa and admission to New York University, and invited her to a meeting at the Plaza hotel.

When she arrived at his hotel room, Trump allegedly raped her in an attack she describes as “brutal.” According to Keul, the assault tore her clothing and caused bleeding and bruising across her body, and Trump told her not to tell anyone about the rape.

… and more.

When Politicians Weaponize Childhood Rape for Political Gain

PUBLISHED 10/27/2026 by

In legislatures and courts across the country, men dominate. They wield outsized power in Congress, state legislatures and key committees and subcommittees.

Men are validated when they run for office, often in ways women are not. Women who pursue political office must also contend with deeply personal attacks that can turn their identities, families and even experiences of abuse into political liabilities.

Consider Ohio’s gubernatorial race between billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy and Dr. Amy Acton.

Acton should be heralded for surviving what would be difficult for anyone, let alone a child. Instead, Acton’s experience of childhood rape has become a political weapon against her.

Time’s up. We are all tired of it. And in Ohio, many women—and a lot of men—are fed up, too.

The Campus Free Speech Crisis We Don’t Talk About

PUBLISHED 10/19/2026 by

It’s not often that an article in a college newspaper becomes national news, but an explosive oped titled “Cornell Won’t, We Will,” has sparked front-page headlines, protests and demands for accountability across the country since its publication in The Cornell Daily Sun on Sept. 21. Authored by the newspaper’s editorial board, the piece highlighted the alleged gang rape of a female student, identified as Jane Doe, by members of the Chi Phi fraternity in October 2024. The op-ed denounced not only the actions of the alleged perpetrators but also what it described as the inaction of Cornell University in response to them.

The authors accused the university of failing to provide transparency and accountability in the wake of Doe’s assault, calling it part of a “morbid pattern” of institutional indifference to campus sexual assault. Despite a finding by Cornell’s own task force that incidents of sexual assault had increased by roughly 40 percent between 2023 and 2025, Cornell had provided “no concrete, feasible solutions beyond the usual passivities of ‘communication’ and ‘understanding.’” The editors argued that the failure to protect the physical safety of students constituted a betrayal of Cornell’s promise to “preserve a higher education community and residential campus where ‘any person’ in the community can pursue their education in a secure and nourishing environment.”

Just over a week later, another op-ed by a Cornell student criticizing the institution reached a national audience. “Cornell Fails Its Free-Speech Test,” authored by Cornell senior Jared Lederman, ran in the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 29. Lederman’s op-ed cited his recent personal experience of being criticized by fellow Cornell students for his views on gender equality as a demonstration of the university’s “culture of intolerance.”

Lederman recounts that after publishing an online essay titled “Men and Women Were Not Created Equal,” which condemned “modern feminism” for “trying to suppress masculinity” and insufficiently appreciating the “irreplaceable beauty in a woman creating the home to which her husband returns and in which her children grow,” his professional fraternity asked him to resign from a leadership position and his social fraternity expelled him. According to Lederman, his experience of “exile” is proof that “expressing heterodox views is socially suicidal” at Cornell, despite the institution’s claims in a recent report to value “‘rigorous deliberation and engaged discourse.’”

The gulf between these two op-eds speaks volumes about what is perceived as a campus crisis, not only at Cornell but across the country.

Sexual abuse is a free speech issue. A campus where students are pressured to stay silent about abuse, where students are doxxed, threatened and swatted for filing complaints, where victims are forced to share classrooms and living spaces with their abusers, is not a campus that respects physical safety or free speech.

Is the Cornell Rape Case a Turning Point for Men?

PUBLISHED 10/14/2026 by

What allegedly took place at Cornell was a preventable tragedy. One young man with the guts to say, “This is wrong!” might have stopped it from happening.

It’s a crying shame that didn’t happen. But a silver lining in this sorry tale is that a growing number of men seem to grasp that their silence has contributed to the problem.

Programming with boys and young men should go beyond awareness-raising and behavior-change messaging, to address the gender norms, power relations and social structures that sustain violence.

This means giving young men the opportunity to talk with each other, as well as with their female peers, about what it means to be a man.

This means allowing them to ask and answer the following sorts of questions:

—If you’re a guy, what does it mean to be one of the guys?
—Are you willing to compromise your values for the sake of fitting in?
—What is the price of being part of the brotherhood?
—Is other men’s approval more important than treating women with respect and dignity?

Keeping Score: Women Marines Pass Tougher Fitness Standards; Congressional Candidate Hopes Rape Survivors ‘Have the Baby’; Sotomayor Questions Colleagues’ Understanding of First Amendment

PUBLISHED 10/14/2026 by

In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too, in this biweekly roundup.

This week:
—”That is my greatest fear: that people don’t understand our system of government. They don’t understand what the First Amendment means. Some of my colleagues don’t either, by the way. And I’m not joking about that,” said Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
—A congressional candidate hopes rape survivors “have the baby.”
—Almost 70 percent of American women have experienced sexual violence, and 61 percent reported intimate partner violence (IPV).
—California passes new law finally banning child marriage.
—Mothers of young children remain dramatically underrepresented in government: Only 7.2 percent of Congress members are moms with minor children, compared to 18 percent of the adult population.
—Harvey Weinstein is resentenced to 15 years in prison in New York.
—Amazon accused of discriminating against pregnant employees using reasonable accommodations or medical leave.
—Public pressure led a district attorney to reopen cases against the “Cornell 7” fraternity members accused of gang raping a fellow student.
—Trump flip-flops opinion on mail voting ahead of the November election.
—Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear calls for Democrats to be a “party of compassion and empathy” towards trans students.

… and more.

The Cornell Rape Case Has Sparked a National Outcry. Can That Anger Shape the Midterms?

PUBLISHED 10/12/2026 by

A dam has broken for women, stemming from the case of the Cornell student who was allegedly gang-raped at a fraternity in 2024.

In the 1980s, Ms. published the first national study of sexual assault on college campuses. What our researchers found was, at the time, shocking—at least, to the college administrators: Over half of women surveyed had experienced “some form of sexual victimization,” and one in eight women had been victims of rape—though of those women, nearly three-quarters didn’t identify their experience as rape.

“The details of what happened to Jane Doe are horrifying, but at least they are now being reported and considered credible. This has not always been the case,” wrote Ellen Sweet, former Ms. magazine editor and coordinator of the Ms. Magazine Campus Project on Sexual Assault in a recent New York Times letter to the editor. “Now there is a public outcry for transparency and accountability that can’t be ignored. Let’s hope colleges and law enforcement finally learn their lesson.”

We know that in this moment, young women are fed up and deeply, deeply angry. The midterms offer an opportunity to channel that anger into tangible, meaningful change.

‘It’s OK to Talk About It’: Arizona Congressional Candidate Shares Her Rape Account; AOC Considers a White House Bid

PUBLISHED 10/10/2026 by

Weekend Reading on Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, on boards, in sports and entertainment, in judicial offices and in the private sector in the U.S. and around the world—with a little gardening and goodwill mixed in for refreshment!

—Friday, Oct. 9, marked 115 years since the men of California went to the polls to decide whether the women they lived alongside would be permitted to join them there.
—Bernadette Greene-Placentia, the Democratic nominee in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District with a real chance to upset her opponent, was reportedly raped while fixing one of her yard signs. “She chose to share her story because she knows many survivors struggle in silence, and she hopes that by speaking about her experience, others will know they are not alone,” said a campaign spokesperson.
—Pew Charitable Trust reports that 37 percent of Americans now believe a woman will not be elected president in their lifetime. I urge women like AOC to seriously consider a presidential bid in 2028.
—The poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for her genre-defying work. Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded 122 times to 104 men and just 18 women.

… and more.

What Accountability for Epstein’s Network Would Require

PUBLISHED 10/9/2026 by

[The final installment of The Pipeline to Predators, a four-part Ms. investigation into the modeling industry’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein and survivors’ fight for accountability.]

From July to August 2025, senior White House and Justice Department officials, including Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer and then deputy attorney general, met repeatedly in the White House Situation Room to strategize about the political fallout—treating the Epstein files not as a legal, accountability or transparency crisis, but rather as a messaging crisis to be managed.

Every survivor we spoke with agrees on the first and most important step toward real accountability: the full release of the Epstein files.

New Mexico is one prototype for meaningful investigation. There, the state legislature unanimously created a bipartisan “Truth Commission” to examine alleged criminal activity connected to Epstein’s Zorro Ranch. The commission has issued roughly 24 subpoenas thus far to law enforcement agencies, financial institutions, state agencies and multiple U.S. attorneys’ offices.

Virginia Giuffre remains a touchstone for many, who say they are finding healing by coming together and honoring her fight.

The Difference Between His Safety and Hers

PUBLISHED 10/7/2026 by

I recently saw a social media post that I can’t stop thinking about: “If a man was severely intoxicated around seven women, he would actually be in the safest place he could possibly be. He’d be taken care of on every level. He’d be hydrated, fed, given meds and a cozy place to lay down. I can’t stop thinking about that difference.”

Neither can I.

I am tired of women being hurt, watched, harassed, questioned and doubted. I’m tired of women being handed an ever-growing list of precautions, then asked what we did wrong when we’re harmed.

Women don’t need another lesson in how to protect ourselves. We’ve had a lifetime of them.

Imagine if instead of teaching our daughters how to stay safe from men, we could trust men not to harm them and to help keep them safe. Isn’t that the world we want—one where our daughters won’t have to think about this difference at all? It’s time for men to step up and take responsibility.

Close the Victim-Blaming Loophole the Cornell 7 Exposed

PUBLISHED 10/6/2026 by and

Ten years ago, Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Stanford University student and swimmer Brock Turner to six months in county jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster at a frat party. He served three months.

Feminists didn’t just get angry—we organized. Two years later, we recalled Persky with nearly 62 percent of the vote.

Now the same crisis has arrived at Cornell. It is time to organize again.

Under New York penal law, a person too intoxicated to consent counts as “mentally incapacitated” only if the substance was given to them without their consent. Unless they are unconscious or physically unable to communicate, a person who is stumbling, slurring and incoherent is treated as capable of consent, so long as they took the drink or the drug willingly.

Look at what that rule assumes: If someone else spikes your drink, the law says you could not consent. If you poured it yourself, the law says you could, however incapacitated you were. That is consent manufactured out of a decision to drink. It rests on the oldest victim-blaming idea there is: A woman who gets drunk is asking for it. The only natural consequence of drinking too much is a hangover. Sexual assault is not caused by alcohol. It is caused by rapists choosing to rape, and nothing else.

We cannot allow political gatekeeping to preserve a law that protects perpetrators and abandons victims. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie must stop blocking progress and bring the voluntary intoxication bill to a vote immediately. New Yorkers deserve to know where each of their elected officials stands on victim blaming.

In a year when feminist victories are few and far between, this is one we can help win. Take two minutes to send Speaker Heastie an email and demand a vote on this bill. You can also call his office at 518-455-3791.