The spring 2014 school year wound down with a mounting number of female students coming forward to testify about campus rape and to protest the callous failure of universities to acknowledge and address this epidemic. Then, UC Santa Barbara student Elliot Rodger - after recording a a tirade against women who have rejected him, called "My Day of Retribution," on YouTube - unleashed his murderous revenge against women, which also took the lives of four male students in Isla Vista, California. Two young women started a hashtag "#YesAllWomen" on Twitter that called forth a whole wave of testimony from the experience of women. The hashtag was a response to the defensive reaction of "not all men" - which was objecting to attributing the massacre to a hatred of women, as if doing so was portraying all men as sexist maniacs. In a few days the hashtag #YesAllWomen saw over a million stories being told, supporting the fact that while not all men assault, abuse or harass women, all women have been treated as less than human by men in too many ways. During this time, Stop Patriarchy took to the streets to give further voice and expression to this moment when a kind of dam broke - when so many feelings and experiences that had been internalized and bottled up for too long burst into an outpouring of grief, rage, and soul-searching discussion about rape culture on campus and in society at large.
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Video: San FranciscoVideo from Bill Carpenter
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