Maybe more than anything else, sexual violence is repetitive. Men commit it in patterns: mostly against women who are close by and vulnerable, just below them on some social hierarchy: their assistant, their date, their friend, their daughter, their student, their kid’s babysitter.
Men rape for opportunity – because they can – and for status – because it makes them feel good. They rape to impress other men, documenting it on phones for one another’s benefit. Men rape and do not always seem to register much of a difference between the sex they’ve had that was rape and the sex that they’ve had that wasn’t. They rape, often, without seeming to think about it, registering their victims’ unwillingness with vague contempt, if at all.
