The tires crunch into the gravel driveway, and she jolts awake as the engine cuts off. A panic grips her as she realizes two things. One, he’s home. Two, she dozed off on the couch before she could throw dinner together. As a cold sweat begins to trickle down her back, she hustles into the kitchen and tries desperately to look busy before his rage has a chance to mount.

But her efforts are in vain. At the end of the episode, she is marked with bruises and an overwhelming sense of guilt.

Fifty years ago, John Q. Public would have asked, “Why didn’t she just fix dinner before her nap?” Today, we ask, “Why doesn’t she leave?”

What kind of progress is this? The words have changed, but the blame for family violence still falls squarely on women.

The doublespeak we spew at battered women tells them abuse isn’t their fault, but they must resolve the situation, i.e., get over their psychological problem and leave.

Americans condescendingly refer to women who stay in abusive situations as disturbed, co-dependent, weak and bound to repeat the mistake. Yet the men who beat them are spared this treatment and we are asked to understand their troubled upbringing. It isn’t their fault, we say, they were raised to think this is OK.

Well then whose fault is it? We’ve decided it must be the fault of the woman too weak to leave, as if her departure is A) even remotely possible, let alone easy, and B) something that will cause the abuser to change his behavior.

Men abuse their wives because our culture subtly reaffirms over and over that this kind of behavior is acceptable. Wives and girlfriends are still essentially the property of their male lovers in the eyes of the law.

Lily Devilliers wrote in the fall 2003 issue of Bitch magazine about her experience in women’s shelters 10 years ago. There, she and other women were presented such “self-help” material as Robin Norwood’s “Women Who Love Too Much.” They were routinely diagnosed as being addicted to abusive behavior. That’s about an ass hair away from saying women bring abuse on themselves.

This type of under-the-radar sexism also blames women for rape. Just last year, a sexual assault trial stemming from an event on campus centered on the victim saying she was “horny.”

I’m sorry, but that should not swing the door wide for acquittal. Women can get horny in class, in the drive-thru at Taco Bell, mowing the lawn, digging cat food out of a can, etc. That doesn’t mean their vaginas have become interstate highways and the admission of such horniness is an on ramp. It is still up to her, horny or not, drunk or not, whether you’re in or not.

But in one of my women’s studies classes, several students still said a woman wasn’t raped in a hypothetical situations for reasons such as A) she had a few drinks, B) she turned down the lights and started making out with the man in question, C) she said a lot of stuff that sounded like no but wasn’t the word no, and D) she had dressed seductively and slept with his friend when they had dated.

When you rape someone, you have sex with her when she doesn’t want to have sex with you. Not all rapes are as brutal as those perpetrated at gunpoint, but creating a narrow definition of what constitutes sexual assault does nothing to serve the victims. Not accepting a woman’s feelings of being violated because of technicalities blames her for what happened.

The true culprit behind rape and domestic abuse is sexism. We have to stop regarding women as property and as objects, and changing that doesn’t mean eliminating provocative clothes or sexually empowered women. It means validating women’s sex and power experiences and treating them as adults who make their own decisions- decisions that carry consequences.

A society that beats and rapes the bearer of its children is a society that is incredibly sick.