The diverse contributors to this acclaimed book are activists, opinion leaders, theologians, policymakers, educators, and authors of both genders and many colors. Tackling controversial issues, including pornography and the intersection of race and rape, this book is a much-needed step toward eliminating the sources of rape and the rape culture.

“The thirty-seven women and men contributors .. . offer compassionate, constructive, and non-polarizing proposals for changing a society that, they convincingly argue, accepts and fosters sexual violence and the fear of violence:’
—New York Times Book Review

"Transforming a Rape Culture is the most important contribution to this dialogue—and to making the essential personal individual changes necessary for establishing gender equality in America—that I have read in many years. “This [book] will provoke and enlighten and disturb everyone who reads it, and it is must reading of a very high order.”
—Hungry Mind Review

“The overall emphasis on a different and better future, and on the practical means to getting there is a first in the library of ‘rape studies.’ Transforming a Rape Culture moves quickly past description in order to get to solutions.” —Women’s Review of Books

“This book is a very important collection of information providing both an analysis of the many things in our culture that promote and support sexual assault, as well as a blueprint for ending sexual violence. It is one of the few books that focus on clear, direct, and achievable ways to change our rape culture. This remarkable book should be read by anyone who is concerned about the individual and societal effects of sexual violence.”
—Ellen C. Schell, President, New York State Coalition against Sexual Assault

“Men, don’t let the title scare you. Carrying a book with the word rape on the cover takes a lot of courage, but not as much as a woman has to muster to go to the washateria alone at night:’
—Public News

Excerpt from Transforming a Rape Culture
From Martha's essay, “Transforming the Rape Culture That Lives in My Skull,” p. 405

In preparation for this essay I had to read a lot of rape stories. They shocked and angered but also aroused me; my body responded to the ugly facts of rape as to the most delicate insinuations of erotica, and I fought my own response and felt ashamed.

I don’t like pornography, but sometimes in lovemaking my fantasies speak its language. I’ve tried to reprogram my erotic imagination, but the old hard-core fantasies swim back, and I think of my sexuality as having been colonized by what Susan Griffin calls “the pornographic mind.” Banal, violent images have invaded me and now occupy my most intimate space. What lived in that space before? I don’t know. Nor do I know whether the colonial invasion completely destroyed it.

I want to understand something about the rape culture that has crept into my skull and peopled my earliest erotic fantasies with torturers and murderers - because I had a safe, “normal,” “happy” childhood. Too many women share the fantasies of abuse because, I’m guessing, too many of us have been abused...