When I hear people say that rape culture isn’t real, I often wonder if it’s because they don’t know what it means.

Skeptics of the term seem to imagine that feminists are describing a world in which rape is not just common but ubiquitous, and in which the public is indifferent to – even endorses – sexual assault.

Plainly, these things are not true - at least, not to those extremes. As conservative commentator and rape culture dissenter Caroline Kitchens argued in a recent article for TIME, “Rape is a horrific crime and rapists are despised.” Or as Jaclyn Friedman put it in an article responding to (and rebutting) Kitchens: “What we really despise is the idea of rapists: a terrifying monster lurking in the bushes, waiting to pounce on an innocent girl as she walks by.”

But when feminists talk about “rape culture,” we’re not saying that every woman experiences rape, or that every man is a rapist (most are not). We are saying that as much as our culture professes to be disgusted by rape, there are a series of entrenched beliefs about women, men, sex, and consent in our society that serve not only to make non-consensual sex more likely, but to make us less likely to believe people, men or women, who speak out about their experiences with sexual assault. And we are drawing attention to the chasm between our response to the imagined rapist boogeymen described by Friedman, and the more complex rapists who exist in the real world: rapists who are also friends, beloved family members, sports stars, political heroes and so on.

Here is what we are talking about, when we talk about rape culture.

A culture that puts the onus on women to say no, rather than on men to establish a yes.

A culture that doesn’t take women’s “no”s seriously. That assumes that a “no” is just the first step in a negotiation, rather than a statement of resolve.

A culture that doesn’t consider the possibility that men might say “no” to sex at all.

A culture that says that some forms of sexual violence are reprehensible – the aforementioned monsters lurking in the bushes – and others are a matter of debate.

A culture that determines the “legitimacy” of a sexual assault based on the character of the victim. What was she wearing? Was she drinking? Did he have an erection? Had she had sex with that person before? Had she had sex with anyone ever before? Why was she being so chatty earlier in the night if she didn’t want to have sex?

A culture that determines the “legitimacy” of a sexual assault based on the character of the accused. Is he from a “good family”? Is she good looking? Does he deserve to have his future derailed because of this one indiscretion?

A culture that teaches boys that girls need to be persuaded to have sex, and will resist at first as a matter of course, to play hard to get or to maintain their “purity.”

A culture where friends and family of survivors ask them what they might have done to lead their attacker on.

More than anything, what feminist arguments about rape culture contend is that rape is not an aberration, committed by unlikable sadists who cannot be reasoned with. (Some rapists fit this bill, but many are people you might otherwise know and like.) It is a crime that is embedded in – and excused by – everyday social interactions.

It’s easy to understand why this concept is confronting; why some people might take the idea of “rape culture” very personally. It’s not nice, after all, to think that you are part of a system that enables violence. It’s even less nice to think that you might have personally done something that might be read as violence by another person.

But ultimately, I think the concept of rape culture is empowering. Because if sexual assault is a product of culture, that means that by changing our culture, we can change the frequency of sexual assault. Not all sexual assaults can be eliminated by tackling rape culture, sure – some rapes are committed by the violent psychopaths who dominate our imaginations (just like some murders are committed by strangers, but most are committed by people the victim knows very well). But lots of them can.

“Rape culture” isn’t a distraction, or a figment of an overactive feminist imagination. It’s an articulation of how most sexual assaults really happen.