Thanks for the shout out and for highlighting this problem. You are exactly right, rape culture is so ubiquitous that many people can't imagine a world without it. They believe it is somehow inevitable, when this couldn't be further from the truth - as evidenced by (non patriarchal) cultures around the world where it is rare or almost non-existent. Pretending that rape is perpetrated by "bad apples" rather than as a function of cultural norms of masculinity in a patriarchy is a delusional way to distance oneself from the problem. We have the culture that we tolerate; we have current norms of masculinity that foster the beliefs that lead to rape and rape culture based in aggression and domination of others. This is clear in the example about the military.
“[Ours] is a culture in which sexualized violence, sexual violence, and violence-by-sex are so common that they should be considered normal. Not normal in the sense of healthy or preferred, but an expression of the sexual norms of the culture, not violations of those norms. Rape is illegal, but the sexual ethic that underlies rape is woven into the fabric of the culture.” — Robert Jensen
FEMINISTS DEVELOPED THE CONCEPT OF a rape culture decades ago to describe how men who rape are not simply a handful of “sick” or deviant individuals. They are instead the products of a culture that glorifies and sexualizes male power and dominance and at the same time glorifies and sexualizes female subservience and submission. Rape must be understood not as an aberration in such a cultural environment but as simply the extreme end on a continuum of behaviors. The controversial aspect of this seemingly commonsense argument is that it implicates tens of millions of men who are not rapists. Most men would rather not think about how they participate in a culture that actively promotes — or at the very least tolerates — sexual violence. Many find offensive the mere suggestion of any sense of shared responsibility.
~The Macho Paradox by Jackson Katz
Individuals need to be held accountable for their actions, but violent individuals must be understood as products of a much larger cultural system. By offering up a steady stream of images of sexually aggressive men and connecting dominant notions of masculinity with the control of women, the mainstream media and entertainment culture — which includes the enormous pornography industry — play a critical role in constructing violent male sexuality as a cultural norm. And here is the paradox: this very “normality” makes it harder to see just how pervasive the problem is. If heterosexual men are routinely turned on by representations of women in which sexiness is indistinguishable from mistreatment, the equation becomes unremarkable — if not part of sexuality itself.
~The Macho Paradox by Jackson Katz
