Let me back up. I feel very conflicted about what happened in Cologne (which is why it took me two whole months to write anything about it.)

On the one hand, a bunch of women were sexually assaulted, and that’s terrible and should be taken very seriously. And I am bitterly disappointed that part of the official response was to (yet again) blame the victims and warn women to have a buddy system and keep men at “arm’s length.”

Partly in response to this incident, Finland has instituted classes to teach migrants about consent and how to treat women. They will be taught, among other lessons, that “even if [a woman] dances with you very closely and is wearing a short skirt, that doesn’t mean she wants to have sex with you.”

In a vacuum, such classes would be wonderful. Feminists have been advocating for classes that teach men about consent for decades. But I’m sad to say I can’t get behind these particular classes, because they are incredibly racist.

It is racist because it panders directly to the stereotype that Arab men are misogynists, and Arab women are oppressed. Now before I go any further, let me address the elephant in the room head-on. Yes, a number of countries in the Arab world have terrible, repressive laws that show little regard for women’s lives or rights. But the Arab world does not have a monopoly on treating women badly, now or throughout history. (The United States actually has a pretty horrendous set of repressive laws when it comes to reproductive rights, for the record.)

But more importantly, these terribly repressive regimes are what the asylum seekers are running from. It is incredibly unfair to paint them as representatives of the forces that drove them out of their homes. Also, the majority of asylum seekers come from Syria, which actually has a pretty great record on women’s rights relative to its neighbors.

It is racist and ignorant to assume that all Arab countries are the same.

Not only is it racist and unfair to accuse all Arab men of being misogynists in need of education about how to treat women, it is dangerous to Arab women. It leads to victim-blaming of the “you bought into the religion that is oppressing you” sort.

And it leads to the awful mindset that there is nothing “we” can do to help “those” women, because their “culture” inevitably leads to their abuse. I mean, look at this experiment about how people react to witnessing domestic violence in a white couple as opposed to an Arab couple:

The attitude is, when Arab men abuse Arab women, that’s just how things are. But when white women are harassed by black or Arab men, close the borders! Be tough on crime! We have to rescue “our” women from “those” men.

Do you see the problem here?

Let’s be clear — accusing black and brown men of raping white women leads to black and brown men being killed. That’s what happened to Emmett Till, the 14-year-old who in 1955 was abducted, tortured, and murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman on the street. And more recently, it’s what drove Dylan Roof to massacre a group of black churchgoers while saying, “you rape our women and you’re taking over our country.”

The attacks in Cologne were in many ways the ultimate racist nightmare — white women being victimized by black and brown men. No wonder white people are getting whipped up into a frenzy about it.

This isn’t hypocrisy. It actually makes a twisted kind of sense.

If you see women as property, white women are the property of white men, and white men don’t want black men stealing their property. (And the opposite holds true as well — black women are seen as the property of black men, and since white men take what belongs to black men all the time, it’s fine for white men to rape black women.)

This is the source of violence done to women, in their own names. Dylan Roof massacred a black church, killing mostly black women in the name of protecting white women from black rapists. Men who use the protection of white women as an excuse to kill black men are not protecting the women. They are protecting their own egos, their own property. That is what women are to these men — something they own, that they fear will be taken from them.

Other kinds of injustice is also done in the name of protecting women from rape. For example, the city of Houston recently voted down an equal rights ordinance that would protect trans people from discrimination. The coalition opposed to the law managed to get people to vote against it by stirring up fear that men would use the ordinance to pretend to be trans in order to get into women’s bathrooms and assault women and girls. The protesters’ signs read, “No Men in Women’s Bathrooms.” Lt. Governor Dan Patrick told crowds at an election night party, “It was about protecting our grandmoms, and our mothers and our wives and our sisters and our daughters and our granddaughters. I’m glad Houston led tonight to end this constant political-correctness attack on what we know in our heart and our gut as Americans is not right.” But then, the feared event actually took place. A man in his 20's lured a 12-year-old girl away from her mother and grandmother, then raped her in the women’s bathroom of a CVS pharmacy. And what did the Houston police say? “She was not necessarily all that unwilling, but at the age of 12 it doesn’t matter.”

The fear of rape — that is, men’s fear that “their” women will be raped — corresponds not at all to the same men’s reaction when rapes actually occur. Protecting women and girls from rape is merely an excuse to persecute and oppress hated groups.

This is also why rape is used as a weapon of war. Raping women is as effective a tactic as destroying farms and infrastructure, and more so because it is so inherently demoralizing. Obviously to the women, but (more importantly to those waging the war) to the men who are tasked with protecting them. Women are considered the valued possessions of a country at war, which is why they used to be taken as “spoils.” And they still are.