Quotes from Abigail Bray

Rape humour signals that the victim blaming which feminists have fought against for decades has triumphed and that the sexual assault of women is permissible because victims inhabit a culture in which their suffering invites, not compassion, but a predatory, malicious laughter.

Oddly, having sex with men is meant to dispel fear of being raped, as though women who have an accurate assessment of the dangers of rape culture are hysterics who just need sex.

Laughing at the oppression of women is the best medicine for those who fear being laughed at.

For instance, being 'confident', 'carefree' and 'unconcerned about one's appearance' are now central aspects of femininity in their own right—even as they sit alongside injunctions to meet standards of beauty that 'only a mannequin could achieve' (Kilbourne, 1999 cited in Gill, 2008, p. 440).

The main prize is access to patriarchal wealth—not revolutionary social change: feminism is framed as a symbolic 'cock block' that reduces girls' chances of upward social mobility. Ageism is mobilised in an opportunistic contempt for feminism in the hope that conforming to the new girly normative femininity will be rewarded by greater access to the patriarchal pie.

It is time we recognised the casual normalisation of lethal misogyny as an act of political terrorism and not, as the mindless purveyors of the free speech doctrine would argue, as simply the democratic right to masturbate to whatever takes his fancy.

New communication technologies have intensified and expanded misogyny so that smart phones have become political weapons, instruments of rape culture propaganda, in the hands of a population conditioned to secure their status within the group by practising hatred against girls and women.

The increase in eating disorders, self-mutilation, suicide, and other expressions of unbearable suffering among young women are a sign that radical new forms of misogyny are succeeding at destroying girls.

It is tempting to think of such men as a deviant sub-culture, a pathological underground, a sick minority. Yet splatter films which revel in pornographic scenes where women are tortured and killed are part of the mainstream; music videos celebrating male violence against women to the point of death and beyond are also mainstream. Misogynist hate propaganda is so normalised it has faded into the texture of the everyday – and we barely notice how pervasive it is.

Lack of empathy towards women has not only been recoded as "weak" or "politically correct" or a sign that one is sympathetic to the "F word" – something worse has occurred. Cruelty towards women has become the leitmotif of a reloaded misogyny that I have no hesitation in naming as fascist.

Masturbating to violence against women is an "essential, basic and natural drive" that is protected by the U.S. constitution. Sex is collapsed with sexual abuse; misogyny with free speech.

The necropolitical core of patriarchal capitalism is snuff pornography, the abject centre that no one wants to face. It is the logical conclusion of a system that treats women as "things", of an irrational hatred that rapes and murders countless women every minute of the day simply because they are not male. We have entered the era of shock and awe misogyny.

The dehumanisation of women is a central political technology in male supremacist cultures. Male supremacy is founded on the idea that women are biologically inferior to men. The girls and women who have been destroyed, driven into silence by madness, murdered or taken their own lives, are the true witnesses of male supremacy.

The contempt and loathing women are trained to feel for each other is the single most powerful strategy misogyny has in maintaining the oppression of women. Male supremacist culture replaces the natural loving solidarity between women with hate.

Ageism is the intimate colonisation of embodied time by the vampiric forces of patriarchal capitalism that instils an ideological timebomb in the female mind that ticks with the incessant and cruel warning that the passing of time is something for which women must be punished. Women, far more than men, are judged by how old they are and how old they look. The threatening ticking of male domination reduces women's social and economic worth to how "fresh" we appear.

Beneath the saccharine, air brushed girls-can-do-anything image is a ruthless contempt for women and girls who have not sold themselves to the right bidder by performing the neo-liberal strip tease of self-empowerment.

The brutal limitations placed on women's emotions, the pseudo-psychiatric judgements and labelling and the herding of women into therapy and psychiatry, calls attention to the fact that women are still the second sex, a sex that is denied the full range of human emotions.

Most women are frequently labelled "insane" for expressing their misery and failing to act positive. It is form of misogynistic abuse that is also about pushing women towards the doctor's room, the therapists couch, and the chemist.

The sexual degradation of women has long been accompanied by laughter. If misogyny has a soundtrack, it is canned laughter.

Rape jokes are very far from rebellious, subversive, or oppositional. They are fascist salutes to male supremacy. Laughing about the sexual (and thus the physical, emotional, and psychological) torture of females, signals one's servile obedience to the misogynistic status quo.

Rape humour signals that rape culture has escaped the law. The laughter is malicious affirmation of a culture that recognises that, although rape might officially be a crime, the majority of rapists walk free without even having to endure the discomfort of being accused by victims or publicly or privately shamed.