It’s a shitposting comm, but you asked a serious question which deserves an answer.

Trigger warning: it’s about rape, and I mention some pretty specific examples coming from reality. Honestly, I hope this doesn’t keep me up tonight.

To start, I think it’s important to look at how and why rape happens. In most cases, rape is a matter of the perpetrator asserting dominance over the victim. There are many non-sexual as well as sexual ways of doing that. Rape is one of, if not the most intimate way. It’s the reason why there are cases where heterosexual men rape other men, for instance. It’s not about attraction. It’s about asserting dominance, in one of the most disgusting ways imaginable.

Rape is rarely the “someone jumped out of the bush and raped me” story. In the vast majority of cases, it’s someone they know. A friend. A significant other. A family member. And it’s not necessarily the “I was forced into the bed” story, either. It’s often a direct pressuring of the victim into doing something they really don’t. “Why not, do you think I’m ugly?” “It’s been so long, how are you so insensitive?” “You never want to! How is our relationship supposed to survive?” (By the way, these examples come from reality - not word by word, but the statements as wholes.) It’s often part of a larger pattern of abuse - and I mean think about it, if you’re doing something that heinous, it’s probably not the only morally reprehensible thing you’re doing.

So honestly, I’m going to go with a pretty clear “no”. I mean, do we have signs telling people not to steal? Do we have signs to tell people not to kill? No. The closest thing we have to that is signs at stores that essentially say “you can’t steal here without getting caught”. It’s never about “watch out, you might accidentally steal something, here’s how not to do it”. And think about it this way: these “don’t rape” campaigns have been around for a while now. I have yet to see any evidence that they actually do any good.

In fact, I worry that they actually may do more harm than good. And I’m not even talking about people who would never rape someone who are even more scared to approach and make legitimate advances on people due to things like this. It’s oversimplifying the complex patterns present in abuse down to something that can be itself abused. Think about the statements I mentioned above and the fries poster. The last four points listed can be easily achieved by modifying those manipulative phrases. “You always make me feel like I’m forcing you, you know I always stop if you want me to” (for us looking in from the outside, that second statement is obviously a lie). Add a little Gaslighting and the victim will believe they’re freely consenting. So now the victim sees this poster, and goes, “well, I guess it was consensual?” The fuck it was not. And that’s often one of the main difficulties with recovering from rape in the first place: coming to terms with it. Rape is by nature incredibly traumatic, and in traumatic situations (especially ones like that) people often reason that the traumatic situation never happened, because dealing with it is too taxing. Meanwhile the person is developing psychological symptoms left, right and center, which the victim will often, then, in turn, also try to cover up.

So, what should we do to combat rape? Well, we have to take a more holistic approach. Consent is very important in sex, but it doesn’t only apply to sex. We need to teach people how to recognize abusive behavior - and teach kids in school (obviously, at an age appropriate level) about abusive patterns. How to recognize it happening to them, and how to recognize it happening to others. We need to teach people how to deal with abusive situations. We need to reach people how to help others in abusive situations. At the moment, this is knowledge that mostly only specialists in that topic and people who are or were personally affected and did a lot of reading know. When these things become common knowledge, then we have a chance at turning the tide. We also need to vastly improve the way we deal with mental health. Essentially, we need much more readily and easily accessible psychological care. Treating trauma is one of the best ways to avoid victims becoming revictimized, since predators tend to feed on those who are already down, and can also avoid extreme cases where victims become perpetrators. Now, you may be thinking, “isn’t that victim blaming?” We’re not blaming the victim. The victim is not at fault for being a victim. The fault lies clearly at the perpetrator’s feet for being such an abhorrent piece of shit. And while realizing that as a victim is incredibly important on the road to recovery, it doesn’t change anything about what will help. Unfortunately, a perpetrator who keeps getting away with what they’re doing will very, very rarely (really) change what they’re doing. So, we can only try to help victims and avoid creating further victims.