Witchy Memes

This is just one story and by no means universal, but I thought it might interest you based on what you're saying.

Societies can get mental illnesses and trauma collectively. During the closing years of WWII, on the Eastern front, incidents of Soviet soldiers raping local civilian women was widespread. There was a common trope of "hide your women" as everyone from little girls to grandmas were hiding in swamps, trying to make themselves look unattractive by covering themselves in mud, and the like.

In Hungary, if you look at official correspondence, the local authorities were complaining for years after the invasion that their supply of syphilis medicine was out, as the Soviets confiscated most for their own troops, and then the remaining stock ran out fast. Victims were estimated to be in the high hundreds of thousands, in a country of less than 10 million.

And then, as both current historians and people at the time said, there were two ways to process this immense societal trauma. Both for the victims themselves, and the bystanders, countrymen, relatives, lovers, children and parents who could not stop it from happening. One of them was getting a rope. Suicides spiked during those years, and according to, again, the people who lived at that time, this was a main driver. Inability to cope with the fact that they were unable to save their loved ones, or themselves.

The other coping strategy was denial. Denial that it happened, denial that it mattered. There is an acclaimed novel written about the whole thing by a victim, Alaine Polcz, look it up with a translator, who was raped countless times and then had to prostitute herself to survive. She ended up in hospital and came back from being clinically dead at one time, as she had pneumonia, TBC, and a ton of STDs. In her words, she did not feel anger, only pity towards the soldiers committing these unspeakable acts on her. She should have felt anger IMO. We all should. The fact we don't is the problem.

The point of it is that the part of society that didn't kill itself coped by normalising the rape of women by men. That it is just part of war, part of life. Imagine how that impacted how both men and women perceive women in general. And we are only 2 generations away from people who lived this. Polcz died in 2007. Many people who lived this firsthand are still alive. The people they raised run the country.