Afterword: Reading Eighteenth‐Century Rape Culture in the Trump Era

Abstract

Abstract This afterword frames eighteenth‐century rape culture and scholarship through our current political moment and reflects on the concerns raised by the essays in this special issue. Twenty‐first‐century interest in the cultural histories of sexual violence has been galvanized by motivational presentism, an increasingly explicit sense that ‘what matters to us about the past has everything to do with […] what we think is important—to us, here and now, in the present'. U.S. President Donald Trump's crass articulation of financial, masculinist, and racial privilege updates the entitlement of the eighteenth‐century rake. Reading contemporary rape culture through the lens of the eighteenth century allows us to reframe the mainlining of misogyny in the Trump era not as a tragic failure of ‘the enlightenment', but as a by‐product of the eighteenth‐century age of insensibility.