RAPE IS NOT A CRIME ...
(So you are reading this because of the title... NICEEE!) ...
Dear Folks …
I am cross-posting this article by a young Rwandan woman named Shema because it is one of the most incredibly perceptive posts I’ve ever seen on the transactional nature of patriarchy. The title is sensationalist—and sensational—and yeah, it is why I read the first couple of sentences of this article, but it’s not why I stuck with it. This woman’s clarity is stunning, and we need so much more communication on this level as the problems of relationship and patriarchy are serious and deep, and the road ahead toward real equity, equality, and true respect is beset on all sides with dangers. Plus, I love the way she writes, and I think she has a brilliant future.
You will find her Substack here. Please subscribe.
Now for a VERY thought-provoking read.
P.S. A few sentences here are either in Kinyarwanda or Swahili (I don’t know which), but her English is marvelous. In Rwanda, all schooling, from grammar school onward is in English.
Rape Is Not a Crime …
by Shema
All names have been changed to avoid social assassination.
Ubundi Twari tuvuye simba.
this is one of those conversations that should happen in private.
Behind closed doors.
With licensed professionals nearby.
Maybe a fire extinguisher.
Unfortunately, this one happened while crossing the road from Simba to class.
Kigali traffic was performing its usual spiritual warfare. Motos were materializing from impossible angles. Somebody nearby was selling boiled eggs with the confidence of a Wall Street investor. The sun had that suspiciously cinematic late-afternoon lighting that makes university life feel deeper than it actually is. Like we were all in an indie film about capitalism and emotionally unavailable men.
The golden hour.
(maaan what do i owe the lord to be in kigali)
And I was eating a sandwich.
This matters.
Because, as a woman, eating publicly already places you under subtle social investigation. Women are apparently supposed to consume food delicately.
Not aggressively inhale a sandwich while crossing the road like a father of three who just lost custody on weekends.
But I had recently earned a rare social privilege: I had become “one of the friends.”
Not “the girls.”
Not “the pretty one.”
Not “that quiet girl from class.” Because am actually not a quiet person
No.
“The friend.”
This is an important sociological transition because once men stop considering you a potential romantic investment, you unlock new freedoms. You can sit with your legs open. You can laugh like rent is due. You can say disgusting things like “my stomach is fighting for democracy right now.” You can eat on the road without somebody interpreting it as a failure of femininity.
Progress.
So there we were.
Me.
My sandwich.
Steven.
Steven, who somehow has both the most Gen Z name imaginable and also the exact name of somebody who thinks testosterone is a personality trait.
Steven is the kind of man who discovers one evolutionary psychology podcast and suddenly starts speaking like a disappointed gorilla researcher. He holds a Fanta bottle like he’s halfway through a TED Talk titled The Problem With Modern Women. Every sentence leaves his mouth with the confidence of a man who mistakes having thoughts for being correct.
You know Steven.
Everybody knows Steven.
Steven says things like:
“Technically humans aren’t biologically designed for monogamy.”
during lunch break.
As if National Geographic hired him personally.
And then, completely unprovoked, while we were crossing the road, Steven said:
“Why would women say no to things that are biological?”
Silence.
yes, he is talking about what you think he is talking about.
Not normal silence.
The kind of silence that makes the air itself look uncomfortable.
A bus passed.
Somebody shouted in the distance.
Even my sandwich stopped tasting like anything.
( that’s a metaphor because that sandwhich could win master chef. simba, hear me out)
Steven coughed immediately after saying it.
Which was fascinating because even his respiratory system wanted plausible deniability.
“No wait,” he said quickly. “I mean—not like that. Okay that sounded bad.”
Bad?
Steven, it sounded like consent had been explained to you through corrupted software updates.
It sounded like one of those free trial subscriptions that automatically charges your card forever because you once clicked “Accept Cookies” in 2017.
It sounded like a school system where the final exam is misogyny and everybody accidentally got full marks.
But the disturbing part was not that Steven said it.
The disturbing part was that I immediately understood what he meant.
Not because he was right.
But because society has been paraphrasing that exact sentence for centuries.
Women are taught very early that heterosexuality is participation with mandatory attendance.
You attend sex the way students attend 8AM lectures they emotionally dropped three weeks ago.
Present physically.
Dead spiritually.
Women are socialized to experience desire as performance before they experience it as feeling.
Spreading your legs like submitting homework before midnight.
Some women approach sex the way employees approach unpaid internships.
Smiling externally.
Dissociating internally.
Relationships start sounding less like romance and more like performance evaluations.
Did you communicate enough?
Did you reassure him enough?
Did you make him feel masculine enough?
Did you become emotionally available enough while simultaneously remaining mysterious enough to keep things exciting?
Did you let him “access
And men—many men, before somebody develops chest pain in my mentions—are taught that access to women operates on a reward system.
If he buys dinner?
Access.
If he listens to your problems?
Access.
If he waits long enough?
Access.
If he acts emotionally mature for three consecutive business days?
Access.
The logic is horrifyingly simple.
Male effort becomes female debt.
Enter Keyla.
Keyla with the aggressively Gen Z name.
Keyla who says “that’s actually insane” so often it has legally replaced punctuation in her vocabulary.
Keyla who reposts therapy infographics between Instagram stories of iced coffee and cryptic captions like protecting my peace fr.
Keyla who can explain attachment theory but still apologizes when setting boundaries.
Because feminism evolved.
But patriarchy updated itself too.
Quietly. Overnight. Against our will. Like iOS.
And somehow even Keyla inherited the ancient script.
The script that says men giving equals women owing.
what do women owe? their body, access.
A date becomes investment capital.
Flowers become down payment.
Consistent texting becomes contractual obligation.
“Congratulations Keyla, he paid for dinner at Dontez. Your body is now apparently a loyalty rewards program.”
And everybody laughs because it sounds absurd.
But not absurd enough.
That’s the problem.
Because underneath the joke is a genuinely terrifying social assumption: women’s bodies are often treated like repayment systems.
Intimacy becomes debt collection wearing cologne.
And this is where the conversation becomes genuinely ugly.
Because if you follow patriarchal logic all the way to its conclusion, eventually you arrive somewhere monstrous.
So fine.
Let’s continue the argument honestly.
Hear me out.
Rape is not a crime.
(please, do not cancel me)
Relax.
Breathe slowly.
Don’t start typing think-pieces yet.
Because if society already teaches that women owe men access, then rape merely becomes bad customer service.
Right?
If women were never socially expected to enjoy sex anyway, then what exactly was stolen?
If “no” has historically been interpreted as flirting, hesitation, negotiation, confusion, emotional damage, childhood trauma, fear of intimacy, or foreplay with branding issues—then society itself corrupted consent long before any courtroom entered the conversation.
Consent became a corrupted software update.
Everybody clicked “agree” without reading the terms and conditions.
If men are taught access is natural, then refusal becomes the anomaly.
The inconvenience.
The software glitch.
Honestly Keyla, why are you acting surprised? The syllabus was emailed to everybody.
Women are told:
Give him a chance.
Don’t be difficult.
At least he’s trying.
Men have needs.
You can’t expect him to wait forever.
Don’t lead him on.
How much onger can he go?
Forever.
As if your body is a loading screen.
And then society acts shocked when coercion becomes invisible.
But coercion rarely arrives wearing a black villain cape.
Sometimes it arrives with flowers.
Sometimes with guilt.
Sometimes with rent money.
Sometimes with:
“But I thought you loved me.”
Which might genuinely be one of patriarchy’s most successful inventions.
Making women feel cruel for protecting themselves.
That’s the genius of it.
You don’t need chains when guilt works faster.
You don’t need violence when obligation already entered the bloodstream generations ago.
And before anybody panics:
No.
The argument above is not true.
That is the point.
The horror is not the fake argument.
The horror is how culturally fluent it sounded.
(sibigoye rata?!)
Some of you probably recognized pieces of that logic immediately.
Not because you’re evil.
But because society normalized entitlement so successfully that when its conclusions are spoken aloud, they sound less shocking than they should.
That should terrify us.
Because rape has historically not been treated seriously precisely because patriarchal systems normalized access to women’s bodies long before laws attempted to condemn it.
Marital rape, for example, was ignored for centuries because marriage itself was treated as permanent consent.
Permanent consent.
Imagine hearing that phrase in literally any other situation.
“Actually once you buy the laptop, the company now owns your house emotionally.”
Insane.
But apply similar logic to women’s bodies and suddenly entire cultures start clearing their throats and staring at the floor.
And Steven?
Steven is not some cinematic supervillain.
That’s what makes this depressing.
He is socially produced.
A regular boy assembled carefully by ordinary conversations, ordinary jokes, ordinary expectations.
Steven inherited entitlement.
Keyla inherited accommodation.
Neither of them wrote the script.
They just memorized it early.
That’s how patriarchy survives.
Not through secret underground meetings where men discuss oppression beside lava pits.
But through repetition.
Through jokes.
Through dating advice.
Through songs.
Through aunties.
Through movies where persistence becomes romance and female exhaustion becomes proof of love.
Women learn to minimize discomfort before they even learn to identify it.
Men learn to interpret access as affection before they develop emotional literacy.
And then everybody starts dating each other.
Which honestly feels like a public safety concern.
The funniest part—and by funniest I mean spiritually exhausting—is how heterosexual culture markets all of this as romance.
Jealousy becomes passion.
Possessiveness becomes protection.
Persistence becomes devotion.
Female self-abandonment becomes maturity.
And women are expected to navigate all this while remaining:
beautiful but effortless,
independent but not intimidating,
sexually liberated but not “too much,”
emotionally intelligent but still fun at parties.
No wonder girls are tired.
Entire generations of women are walking around performing advanced emotional customer service while men keep asking why the WiFi connection feels distant.
And still people will read essays like this and respond:
“Not all men.”
Which is true.
But also spiritually irrelevant.
Because the conversation was never about individual monsters.
It was about systems.
About how entitlement can sound polite.
How coercion can sound romantic.
How women can spend years saying yes without ever fully feeling free to say no.
By the time we reached class, Steven had become unusually quiet.
The Fanta bottle was hanging loosely from his hand now.
I think somewhere during the conversation he realized biology had never actually been the point.
Power was.
Traffic continued moving.
Someone nearby was playing Burna Boy through a phone speaker fighting for its life.
A lecturer was yelling about attendance.
Life kept continuing in that deeply unserious way life always does after devastating realizations.
And I remember suddenly feeling tired.
Not dramatic tired.
Not poetic tired.
Just ordinary tired.
The kind of tired women inherit quietly.
Because how many girls are still trying to figure out whether they are desired or simply expected?
Which are not the same thing.
But patriarchy trains you to confuse them early.
Steven opened his Fanta quietly this time.
And for a moment, crossing the road felt heavier than before.
Ariko nyine se, harubwo birenze?Munywe amazi…
And as my aunt would say, “ mwiyiteho”
Thanks, friends. Please support Shema and other brilliant young writers. They carry the truth into the future.
Cheers,
Morgaan
Astonishing insight. Thank you.
Crazy fact, Shema wrote the article ‘Rape is not a crime’ next to me in law class emphasize in LAW class because of a debate we were having with grown ass men (30+) who think a man can not rape a woman on his own🤦🏾♀️🤦🏾♀️🤦🏾♀️🤦🏾♀️🤦🏾♀️ but thank you for articulating this clearly