This new book on consent will change the way you think about rape culture
Changing rape culture can feel like daunting task. Which is why one author, Kitty Stryker, set about writing a book to start the conversation. Now that Ask: Building Consent Culture is almost ready for publication, the author is trying to crowdfund her book tour. She’s asking for about $5,000 and already has about $1,500 to get started on a funding her tour that she hopes will “help curate conversations on what consent culture is and how to cultivate it.” Stryker adds, “This campaign will help me bring the amazing words in this book, written by people like Virgie Tovar, Carol Queen, Tobi Hill-Meyer, Laurie Penny, Jiz Lee and so many more, to audiences across the US” once the book comes out in October.
Kitty Stryker is a freelance writer who was sick of the same old conversation about consent and rape culture. She writes on her Indiegogo page:
“I found myself disheartened reading about rape culture, which brings up a lot of really important issues but so often doesn’t offer any solutions to what to do about it. Many discussions of rape culture seeks to blame sexuality for the world’s ills, rather than power dynamics (particularly white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy).”
This book about “consent culture” might be just what we all need to read right now.
So grateful that @PennyRed wrote the intro for "Ask: Building Consent Culture"! Pick up your copy here https://t.co/H6ubFfP7Si pic.twitter.com/1drcA2KQ4E
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Bash Back
(@kittystryker) May 30, 2017
The book is an anthology of essays that Stryker hopes addresses consent culture in a more accessible way than usual. She also was sick of reading books about rape culture that focused just on sexual consent and were written by mostly white, cisgendered, women. The conversation needs to be more inclusive than that, with perspectives from “Black folk, brown folks, indigenous folks, trans folks, non-binary folks, and other marginalized populations that rarely get a place at the table,” Stryker wrote. And address how our culture treats consent in institutions like schools or hospitals and how that affects our relationships.
it's the cover art for the book! eeeeeeee! what do you think?
Posted by Officially Kitty Stryker on Monday, January 9, 2017
Consent shouldn’t be such a hard thing to talk about. There are videos of studies that show toddlers understand the concept of consent, yet when we talk to young, sexually active men and women, everything gets muddled for some reason. It shouldn’t be so difficult to figure out for adults. If you want to fight back against rape culture, learning the lingo of consent culture with a book like this is not a bad start.
