Refusing to Submit: Take Back the Night 2025 Rally Speech

Central Minnesota Take Back the Night Rally Speech Transcript
10/2/2025

I want to start out by bringing us back to the origins of Take Back the Night and why, four decades later, we continue to rally and march. 

The stubbornness of patriarchy and misogyny remains and oppressive systems adapt at every turn. But men’s violence–whether against women, children, trans and nonbinary people, and other men, remains constant.  

The idea of taking back the night is painfully simple: women and girls, and many other marginalized communities, are not safe in this world. We march because we want to walk the street, alone, at night, without fear. Something as simple as that should not be considered an unattainable fantasy. 

But it’s not just about taking back the night, it’s our ability to be self-sovereign beings in the daylight. We know that the most dangerous place for a woman is not on the streets, but in her own home. She is most likely to be assaulted by a person she trusts or who claims to love her. Men’s abuse of women happens everywhere and it happens all the time. 

I will never “get over” how maddening the loss of liberty I have experienced in my own life–because of the never-ending threat of men’s violence.

​I will never "get over" my experiences in college where I didn’t first learn about rape culture as a theory in a sociology or women’s studies class, I learned it firsthand, with my own eyes. 

The introduction was instant–multiple women in my dorm were raped the very first week I moved to St Cloud State University. Experiences like this accumulated over time–story after story. For a period of time, I continued on the path of least resistance. I knew how women were rewarded for going along and not questioning inequitable power dynamics. I thought… well, this is just the way things are. I might as well just adapt. It seemed safer to do so at the time. And I was very wrong. 

My second year in college, I remembered being at a house party, one I had been to dozens of times before, and it changed my life.

What changed me was a simple moment of pause. I stepped away from my friends and stopped and observed what was being done around me and awakened with a new sense of vision.

What’s puzzling is there was nothing new or extraordinary about my observations. 

It was the same ritual as every other time: men plying women with alcohol, men dragging women into rooms, men pressuring women to do things they didn’t want to do, men objectifying and critiquing women’s bodies, men using slurs against women, men high-fiving each other competing about their sexual conquests, men shaming women for having sex, men shaming women for not having sex, men feeling endlessly entitled to women’s bodies, affirmation, and service. 

But once I stopped for a moment to think critically and listen to my own intuition, the dominos began to fall. I was re-thinking everything. 

I realized my own complicity. I realized how I played into this “pick me” bullshit that encourages us to sell out ourselves and other women. I started noticing how much energy and effort women devoted to getting tossed some crumbs from whoever the current patriarchs-in-power were. 

But once I faced all of this, it made me sick. And it has made me sick every day since. 

A couple years later, I was tabling for a student organization I started to address rape culture and sexual exploitation. I ran into a woman that I saw at those parties. We talked for a bit about the activism I was doing and she asked me if I was a survivor of sexual assault. I told her I wasn’t. She looked at me shocked. She said, “Wow. That’s crazy. That’s really hard to believe. I couldn’t count how many times that’s happened to me.” 

Let me re-emphasize this: she thought it was borderline unbelievable that I hadn’t been sexually assaulted. 

See that? That is rape culture. The sexual violation of women is so routine and expected that I was considered lucky to have escaped this reality. 

She wasn’t wrong. It’s true that most, if not all women, have experienced some form of sexual violence and boundary violations in their life. But whether or not we’ve personally experienced violence, we all are touched by it. We all live with fear and the threat at varying levels based on our positions in the power hierarchy.  

At least 1 in 3 women have been sexually assaulted and 1 in 3 physically abused–but those numbers are much higher the more marginalized a person is. Women of color and Indigenous women, immigrants, poor, disabled, and LGBT people are targeted at infinitely higher rates. Colonialism, white supremacy, homophobia, ableism, Christian supremacy, and classism compound the harm. 

Years later, I became an advocate. My life continued to change when I worked at a domestic violence, sexual assault center, and women’s center. Something happens when people know you do this work professionally, or you are outspoken against violence, or you are a survivor yourself. People start disclosing their trauma to you. People I’ve known all my life shared horrific experiences I knew nothing about prior. It seemed like almost every woman I knew had been abused. 

Long after my college experiences, I continued to notice all the insidious ways sexual violence was normalized. Catharine MacKinnon, a pioneering feminist attorney of anti-sexual harassment law once said, “rape is not prohibited, it is regulated.” 

When I was in college, this looked like excuses about why some women deserved assault–blaming women for past sexual experience, clothing choices, drinking, being alone with a man, being out at night, ultimately just existing with a female body… 

As I got older, I saw that rape was regulated in different ways. It was regulated when men used a marriage license as an expectation for unlimited access to a woman’s body. Rape is regulated through enormously profitable sexual exploitation industries where men bribe women for sexual servitude so that women can survive economically. Rape was regulated and legal if it was filmed and put on PornHub for millions of men to get off on. 

Violation is not suddenly ethical even if someone appears to make a choice. As much as people may say feminism is about choice, I disagree. I think feminism is about getting rid of both the visible and invisible cages around us. It’s not about trying to get men to be nicer or applauding them for the bare minimum–it’s a serious political commitment to end, not regulate, patriarchal oppression in every sphere. As another feminist once said, feminism is not about choosing the apple or choosing the orange within the cage. It’s the cage. The cage itself is the problem. 

The knowledge I now carry of what has been done to so many women has filled me with a devastating level of grief and made me absolutely furious. I quickly recognized why anger is so discouraged in women. Women’s anger leads to strong boundaries. Women’s anger ignites social movements. Anger is an inward gift we can use to change the world, not to be suppressed.

Women are often encouraged to pretend to not know what we really do know. Because once you see and you know, you can’t unknow it. You are never the same. That’s why people in power are always trying to gaslight women.

That’s been the historical significance of Take Back the Night and the women’s antiviolence movement. Women no longer sit cowering in isolated shame, blaming themselves, or thinking they’re the only one. They realize they aren’t alone. They speak. They demand space and take back their power. They name names. They stop protecting the reputation of abusers. They push for accountability and march together in solidarity. 

Going along and doing what we’re told will never keep us safe. As we know, abusers are never satisfied. They will keep taking away our autonomy and our rights until we have nothing left.

We are living in the midst of astronomical levels of state-sanctioned violence. And just like we fight back against individual abusers, we fight back against our government and all institutions that actively support, stand by, or cover up abuse.  

Rapists, abusers, sadists, and passive bystanders are running the show right now in the US. But as the cowards-in-power get smaller and spineless, we will refuse to back down. We will not look away or hide. We get louder. We use our righteous rage to fuel our movements. We will choose integrity, truth, and justice even when the cost is high because the cost of our silence is much higher. 

We must keep resisting. We cannot wait until we are personally affected. There is always a next victim, a next group on the targeted list, and, in time, you or someone you care about will be next. 

This is not a time to opt out. This is the time to get even more connected and involved in our community organizations and social movements than ever before. Support and commit to volunteering at the social justice organizations that are doing the long-term, difficult work of intersectional anti-violence advocacy and pushing for progressive political change. 

In the midst of that ordinary, but life-changing moment at a party, I no longer accepted the idea that “this is just the way things are.” In time, I realized that this is not the way things have to BE and that we have the power to change everything. 

We created these systems, and we can tear them down. Let’s re-commit tonight to using every ounce of our power, influence, platforms, and voices to fight for the change we want to see. Thank you.