[Trigger Warning] Rape, Sexual Assault

When my friend, who identifies as female, casually told her boyfriend that she was a feminist, he was baffled. She was more baffled that he was baffled. And I was most baffled because her story would have made more logical sense if she wasn’t a feminist. And I envisioned the utopia we’d live in, where feminism would be commonplace and where the complete, intersectional equality of all people was a fact of life.

But this is 2014. The facts of life for women are not pretty, especially when the woman has more than one marginalized identity regarding race, class, and sexual orientation as examples. Women are still being paid 77 cents to a man’s dollar. 67 percent of anti-LGBTQ homicide victims are transgender women of color. And more than a third of women worldwide have experienced either intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence.

This explains why #YesAllWomen became a global phenomenon. With the power of social media, women had agency in what they said. Their individual narratives and their collective plight were both recognized.

While the benefits of #YesAllWomen are countless, educational, and galvanizing, perhaps the best thing to come out of the Twitter campaign was the weight that the words of women carried. This is remarkably new in a world where sexual assault victims may emerge from a court trial saying, “It would have been better for me not to say anything,” as a young woman in Dallas said last May.

#YesAllWomen was a testament to the command that media can have in dispelling ignorance and sparking crucial conversations. But we have to remember that it was just a Twitter campaign in the vast landscape of gender violence. Although the campaign did much to uncover the physical and psychological burden that comes with the fear of gender-based violence, it does nothing to redirect the narrative of victimization for women.

The conversation that follows must echo what Charles M. Blow of The New York Times has dubbed #YesAllMen. The feminist movement can only succeed if men—who by and large wield more power and privilege—are feminists themselves, a term that simply prioritizes women’s rights.

In addition, the discussion of sexual violence needs to address not only the rates at which women are being assaulted but also the rates at which people are sexually assaulting women. It is hard for a society to admit that its individuals are being raped. It is harder still for a society to admit that its individuals are raping. And these individuals aren’t anomalies posed on the fringes of society. Sometimes they’re individuals that are honored within their communities—the football star, the soldier, the doting doctor.

About 73 percent of sexual assaults are perpetrated by someone that the victim knows. And almost half of assaults occur in the victim’s own home.

Every two minutes, an American is sexually assaulted, and 9 out of 10 of these Americans are female. But this also means that every two minutes, one person is sexually assaulting another person. 60 percent of these assaults don’t even get reported to the police. The women being assaulted sometimes believe they deserved it. The men assaulting them sometimes believe the women deserved it. But the assault would never had happened if the men did not initiate it. All of the facts and statistics are filtered through the Western-constructed gender binary, which in itself is a tool of oppression. All people are entrapped by the patriarchal gender binary.

In navigating that binary, misogyny not only harms women. Misogynistic men can wield that hateful ideology against other men. Homophobia has been described as the fear of a man treating you like a woman. Sexual assault can be seen as a man wielding power over another man as if the victim were a woman. And male victims may not seek support for fear of being seen as wounded or, in another word, womanly.

Teaching a girl how not to get raped perpetuates the cycle of victim-blaming. But teaching all people to understand that gender liberation is the work of them all is both practical and wholly transformative for a nation.