From the age of 11, I was told that if boys pulled my hair or poked me with pencils, it meant they loved me . I didn't really like it. At 13, the first man looked me up and down in the street, and as I listened to him, I heard him completely change my identity from human to object. I remember my mother always telling me that if I see a strange man following me, cross to the other side of the street and remember if he ever catches you, scream. And this is all I learned when I was only thirteen. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essay Rape culture is a sociological concept for a context in which rape is pervasive and normalized due to societal attitude with regard to gender and sexuality. This one sentence, with the words rape and their normalization together, is enough to make me feel about this topic. These are two words that should never be seen together because if you don't already know, rape is not normal. And no, rape culture isn't just a phase invented by a feminist group, used to make you look bad or to make it seem like rape is something that happens way more often than it should . Rape culture is a judge who sentenced a 50-year-old man who raped a 14-year-old girl (who later committed suicide) to just 30 days in prison and defended that the girl was "older than his chronological age. Rape culture is pop music, like Robin Thicke's blurred lines mirroring real rapists' lyrics "you know you want it", promoting the invalidity of consent and remaining the number one song in the country for 12 weeks. Rape culture affects one in five women and one in 71 men who report having been the victim of sexual assault. Examples are all around us. Is one in five American women surviving rape or attempted rape considered a cultural norm? Don't you see it? They saturate the society in which we live and breathe on individual and individual levels. This crime makes the world cold and scary and ruins the lives of the victims. When a girl complains about being stopped in the street because it made her feel uncomfortable and you tell her to just accept a compliment, you are encouraging rape culture. We see this in the news of CNN, ABC and NBC when they use the Steubenville verdict to increase their ratings, even though it favors the perpetrators who have never apologized for ruining a girl's life, only for getting caught. This is not a world I want to live in, is it? Where in my life I can't watch a single episode of Game of Thrones without a horrible rape scene. Where I turn on the radio and all that bleeds into my ears is sex, drugs and “blurred lines”. The media is a space where rape culture is created and preformed. And let's be honest, nothing will ever stop. Media is everywhere around us now, it's our way of surviving. As a 17 year old girl I will never stop praying for young children, I can't stop people from saying "well look what you're wearing". Rape culture exists because many people don't believe in it. Know your story. Don't laugh at rape. Name the real problems. Violent masculinity and victim blaming. I once knew a girl whose mother said, “You were drinking, what did you expect?” "What were you wearing?" I told you to cover up. “When she went to seek help, she encountered rape culture: a culture in which violence.