We Celebrated Women’s Gains. We Also Need to Talk About What Is Being Eroded. There is a story we often tell about women’s progress. Women organized,
We Celebrated Women’s Gains. We Also Need to Talk About What Is Being Eroded.
There is a story we often tell about women’s progress. Women organized, laws changed, rape became more openly discussed, marital rape exemptions were challenged, sexual harassment was named, rape crisis centers were built, and Survivors fought their way out of a culture of silence. Those victories deserve celebration. Women worked for them, sometimes for decades, while being mocked, threatened, dismissed, and told that what they were describing was not really happening.
But progress does not move in only one direction.
I began noticing something years ago, while working inside nonprofit organizations addressing sexual and domestic violence. By the early 2000s, and in some places sooner, I could see resistance developing around some of the language, analysis, institutions, and political confidence women had built around sexual violence. Sometimes the change was obvious. Other times it arrived quietly, through changes in terminology, priorities, institutional practices, funding environments, or what people suddenly seemed reluctant to say plainly.
I remember, for example, the debate over the term rape culture. Whatever disagreements people had about the phrase, the analysis behind it gave us a way to look beyond an individual rape and ask larger questions. What does a society teach about sexual entitlement? How are victims talked about? What happens when women say no? Who is expected to prevent rape? What behavior gets dismissed as harmless fun? What happens to the person who tells?
Those questions did not become obsolete because the language made some people uncomfortable.
What I was seeing was not simply my imagination or something that began yesterday. In 2000, Sheila McIntyre, Christine Boyle, Lee Lakeman, and Elizabeth Sheehy published an article with a title worth sitting with: Tracking and Resisting Backlash Against Equality Gains in Sexual Offence Law. Looking across three decades of feminist sexual-assault law reform, they documented resistance and backlash against reforms women had fought to achieve. They described resistance involving police, lawyers, judges and juries, as well as legal doctrines that could offset or bypass previous reforms.
Think about the year: 2000.
Women were documenting backlash against gains in sexual-offence law while many of us were still living close enough to the victories to remember how hard they had been to win.
That distinction is important because a right or reform does not have to disappear from a statute book before something begins going backward. Erosion can happen in interpretation. It can happen in enforcement. It can happen in institutional practice. And long before a protection is formally removed, erosion can happen in language, because language teaches a society what deserves its attention and what it is permitted to minimize.
Listen to the WORDS
We have watched mainstream conversations about sexual exploitation reach for strangely vague language even when the ages of the people involved were known. Children and teenagers become “underage women.” Sexual exploitation becomes a “relationship.” An adult man’s sexual involvement with a girl may be described in language that leaves readers with an impression of two people occupying roughly equal ground.
But “underage woman” is not a stage of female development. A girl is a child.
Precision is especially important when describing sexual violence because imprecise language can quietly redistribute responsibility. A headline does not have to announce that a child was responsible for her exploitation to make her sound older, more powerful, or more sexually situated than she actually was. A few carefully chosen nouns and verbs can do an astonishing amount of work.
Then, in September 2026, I saw another headline.
A former Cornell student has accused multiple fraternity members of sexually assaulting her in 2024. The allegations are now the subject of renewed investigation, and the New York Post reported that a fraternity member had provided a screenshot of a Snapchat message that the woman’s attorney considers important evidence.
Look at how the Post originally presented that development in the headline shown above:
“Cornell frat member ratted out bros in alleged gang rape…”
I stopped at “ratted out bros.”
There are plenty of accurate ways to describe someone providing evidence about an alleged sexual assault. He provided evidence. He disclosed information. He came forward. He gave investigators a message. Yet “ratted out” carries another meaning with it: somebody violated the loyalty of the group.
And then comes “bros.”
Now we are inside the fraternity relationship. The men are socially connected to one another. One “bro” has “ratted out” the others. The woman at the center of an alleged gang rape is still there, but the linguistic action belongs to the men and the violation suggested by the slang is one man’s betrayal of other men.
That is precisely why women developed cultural analysis around rape in the first place.
Rape culture was never merely another way of saying rape happens. Women were asking us to look at everything surrounding sexual violence: the jokes, excuses, myths, pornography, expectations, institutions, peer loyalties, victim blaming, sexual entitlement, disbelief, euphemisms and ordinary language through which something profoundly serious could be made to feel a little less serious.
The Cornell allegations themselves must be resolved through evidence and the legal process. But we don’t need a verdict in that case to read a newspaper headline. The headline exists. We can examine what its words communicate.
We have to learn to recognize erosion
This is where I think women have sometimes been placed in an impossible position. We are encouraged to celebrate progress, and we should. Yet when women point toward something slipping backward, the conversation can quickly become about whether we are overreacting, whether our language is too strong, whether there might be another explanation, or whether acknowledging regression somehow erases everything women have achieved.
No. Adults should be capable of holding two truths at once.
Women have made extraordinary gains.
Some of those gains can be eroded…and have been
We should know this from history. A generation can inherit language it did not have to invent, institutions it did not have to build, legal protections it did not have to fight for, and cultural knowledge purchased at tremendous cost by the women before them. Eventually those things can begin to look permanent.
They aren’t.
That is one reason I am increasingly interested in returning to the early 2000s. I was working in this field then. I remember some of the conversations happening inside nonprofits. I remember changes that seemed small enough to overlook individually but looked different when viewed together. I want to revisit that period with the records in front of me, because memory can tell us where to look, while archives can tell us what was actually there.
And I especially want younger women and girls to understand something about the vocabulary they inherited. Women fought to give names to experiences that had previously been dismissed as private trouble, misunderstanding, bad dates, marital business, boys being boys, or simply something a woman should have prevented.
Naming was part of the progress.
That does not mean every feminist term is beyond criticism or that movements should never change their analysis. It means we should pay attention when increasingly precise language about sexual violence is replaced by language that makes exploitation harder to see, responsibility harder to locate, or women’s experiences harder to describe.
We can celebrate women’s victories without turning them into a comforting story in which every victory remains won forever.
Our foremothers did something harder than that. They looked directly at what was happening around them, found words for what others preferred not to name, organized, documented, argued, built institutions, changed laws, and taught the next generation what they had learned.
We owe their work more than celebration.
We owe it vigilance.
And when we see erosion, we will not resist acknowledging what we see because naming it makes somebody uncomfortable. We will examine it. We will document it. We will place it beside the historical record. And when the evidence tells us what we are looking at, we will call it by its name.
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The Power and Authority of Womanhood: A Call to Honor and Protect Female Voices – WE Survive Abuse
What Is a Rape Apologist? – WE Survive Abuse
We Called It Rape Culture for a Reason. And That Reason Still Exists – WE Survive Abuse