The Rape of the Sabine Women, Nicholas Poussin (1635), Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Though our political, socio-economic world operates according to the dictates of rapacity, many continue to deny the existence of rape culture; a denial (itself a technique of rape culture) as deeply rooted in delusion as the denial of the general ecological catastrophe, from which rape culture is inextricable.

This violence is so pervasive, so much the norm, that we too often fail to perceive it at all. It goes without saying, and without seeing. Given not just its ubiquity, then, but its intrinsicality to capture, appropriation, extraction, and exploitation (the bases of patriarchy, imperialism, and capitalism), it would not be inaccurate to describe ours as a veritable rape civilization.

Present from the beginning, we find it throughout antiquity in the mythic rapes of Zeus, Poseidon, Heracles and other gods and ancient heroes, as well as in the quasi-historic rapes........

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