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Rape culture, have you heard of it? Sounds scary right? Well, you’re living in one and you’re probably contributing to it without even knowing.

On the lowest level, it’s all about language, little things that seem insignificant or even funny, but they aren’t so harmless. It’s like when you swear around a toddler enough times they start saying “shit”. This is how problematic language and jokes get spread, you hear it enough times until it becomes normalized and you think to yourself, “hey, well if they’re saying it why shouldn’t I”.

But you shouldn’t, and here’s why.

It’s a pyramid scheme, but not the fun type like Mary Kay or Herbalife. Starting at the bottom we have sexist, homophobic, and transphobic jokes and language, along with objectification. This language leads to the persistence of traditional gender roles, stereotypes and the limitations created by those. Words like “bossy” and “bitchy” are often used when women perform behaviors that are typically only acceptable for men, such as leadership. Words like “ladylike” are used to praise women for behaving in ways that are unthreatening to the patriarchy. On the next level up, we have harassment and verbal abuse. The establishment of these lower levels which lead men to believe women are lesser and are an object to be possessed by men eventually leads to the next level of rape, sexual assault, physical, emotional, and financial abuse. At the very top of the pyramid is murder.

You may be thinking c’mon, isn’t murder a little dramatic? But it isn’t, it’s very realistic actually. We’ve all heard the stories and have read the headlines, “A young woman is dead, her Tinder date charged with murder”, “Nearly Three U.S. Women Killed Every Day by Intimate Partners”. These are real cases of people who have fallen victim to this pyramid of violence.

The viral video #DearDaddy demonstrates the power of language perfectly, and if you haven’t watched it you should, it’s only 5 minutes long.

Young women have been raised hearing words like “bitch”, “whore”, and “c*nt”, and are expected to always accept them as jokes. #DearDaddy shows how sexual assault and domestic violence and deeply intertwined with insulting language and jokes men (including her father) use and choose to accept. She ends the video by asking her father a series of “favors”: “one thing always leads to another, so please stop it before it gets the chance begin”, “Don’t accept insulting jokes from weird guys by the pool, or even friends because behind every joke, there’s always some truth”, “Dear Daddy, I will be born a girl. Please do everything you can so that won’t stay the greatest danger of all”.

Call it cliche, but remember our words have power.