Nickie Muir: On screen rape disturbing

Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in Last Tango In Paris.

The women, dressed as suffragettes; bonnets and long frocks - held placards that read: "I can't believe I'm still fighting this s***". I hear you sisters.

Because for 30 years now I've been a "hard-core" feminist and really I'm wondering if perhaps I should have just taken up quilting.

When I read, that after all these years, my initial reaction, as a 19-year-old watching The Last Tango in Paris - which was not one of arty admiration, but rather a sense of nauseous violation - was justified, I was seriously peeved.

Surely one can afford the luxury of looking back at one's prudish younger self and laugh indulgently at the naive outrage and immature inability to infer the nuances of love.

The fact that I had recoiled at the rapey nature of the "butter-stick" scene not out of not understanding high art but because it actually was a rape scene is vile.

I wish I could say that it was the narcissistic male voice of the 70s before women got their proverbial together and things improved - but I can't because they really haven't.

"It's words - only words" as Donald said; but I worry that words do in fact create worlds. (When Donald said this over his locker-room banter debacle where he indicated that if you were rich enough you could grab womens' bits and they'd love it, I did consider the consequences if I won Lotto and tested this theory on the men I met but then ... ewww.)

Anyone who has worked with or known victims of sexual abuse knows the consequences.

The self-harming behaviour, the drugs, the alcohol, the various cancers both literal and metaphorical. There is always a cost.

I say it hasn't got much better because I read, in the Guardian, the New Zealand police's apology to the victims of the sexual predators who called themselves the "Roast Busters" for not bringing them any form of justice. They published our horrific sexual violence stats.

The Guardian usually portrays New Zealand as some form of slightly mentally retarded bucolic state floating in the Pacific where the police shepherd ducklings across roads and the worst thing that they have to contend with is the robbers of organic avocado fields.

I listen to a conversation about a child-sex offender who preyed on young girls and the comment made that "it happened more than once so there was consent".

The same people are outraged about the systematic abuse in the UK of young men through football paedophile rings.

It happened over years and yet the accusation is never raised that "it was the victims' fault". The victims are men after all.

Our rape culture is not just about women. In a 2001 study it was found that one in five New Zealand women had experienced sexual assault - and one in every 20 men.

Ninety per cent of assaults according to the report do not get reported.

That's a hell of a lot of damage done.

My next placard will read: "Sexual Peace: Are we there yet?" Because I'm seriously over fighting this s***.