 The threat of rape, with its false promise that by being “good” we can avoid disaster, plays an important role in training women in the requirements of femininity. Describing a “feminine bodily comportment that is marked by fear,” Cahill observes that the female body well-trained in femininity “is that of a pre-victim” (2001, 157). The feminine body is marked by hesitancy, relative weakness, delicacy, and restraint—qualities that in fact render women more vulnerable to violence—and yet the woman or girl is taught to view her sexual body as dangerously provocative because inherently “rapable” (159). Hence her duty to control, conceal, and monitor her body and its movements, so as not to bring disaster upon herself. “The socially produced feminine body,” Cahill claims, “is the body of the guilty pre-victim …. she was somewhere she should not have been, moving her body in ways she should not have, carrying on in a manner so free and easy as to convey an utter abandonment of her responsibilities of self-protection and self-surveillance” (160). By molding women both to femininity and to self-blame, the threat of rape thus systematically undermines women’s capacity to resist not only rape itself, but various other elements of their oppression as well. The threat is so pervasive in the cultural environment that, according to Brison, girls “enter womanhood freighted with postmemories of sexual violence” (2002,  87)[1],  and years of peremptory warnings and cautionary tales lead many victims to experience rape as “a threat fulfilled” (Cahill 2001, 164).