Why are we surprised that sexual assault is still happening?
Most people are aware of the prevalence of sexual assault in the sense that they have heard scary statistics about occurrences of rape. Despite this, sexual assault is still something that surprises people disturbingly often.
A major component of this problem is that men do not understand what it feels like to be a woman and to be so physically vulnerable. Of course, sexual assault is not a one-gender problem, but women have a 1 in 5 chance of being raped in the U.S., while men have a 3 percent chance. There are power dynamics at play between men and women that center around predatory action and possession which have not been eliminated.
The attitude that sex makes men powerful, and women expendable, maintains a role in everyday life. Why, then, do people like Harvey Weinstein or Matt Lauer shock us when their crimes are uncovered?
In the 2015-2016 school year, 40 percent of Duke's female undergraduates reported being sexually assaulted. The fact that this number is so high is concerning in its prevalence, but comforting in that it indicates Duke is not trying to cover up reports of sexual assault. But sexual assault is definitely a problem at Duke.
Before progressing further, I want to acknowledge that I am speaking from the heterosexual experience. I understand that sexual assault takes on different variations when it is compounded by marginalized sexual identities.
From my perspective, a large component of the issue pertains to how straight male students view straight female students. When a woman goes to Shooters (often intoxicated), sees someone she vaguely knows and says hi, this is somehow perceived to be an invitation to grind on her, to spin her around, kiss her briefly and whisk her from the sweaty mass to hook up. If that is what she wants, then fabulous! More power to the women who want to explore their sexuality through brief sexual encounters. For the women who don’t want this, however, what would otherwise be a meaningless interaction becomes a situation in which a male is claiming their bodies.
Once the allure of Shooters wears off following freshman year, often students come to view it as the sleazy, predatory environment that it is. Women who go to Shooters with the intent of finding someone to spend the night with approach these interactions in an entirely different way. They don’t grab mens’ hips to trap them against their bodies; they don’t berate men into paying attention to them.
Hookups are often not the meeting of desires that they should be—more often, they consist of a man embarking upon a conquest and then sending the woman away because he “isn’t into girls staying over.” Shooters is not the only place at Duke where predatory dynamics take precedent, but it is a spitting example of how unequal power dynamics play out between heterosexual men and women.
A lot of fraternities and organizations on campus tout that their members are PACT-trained (a training offered by the Women’s Center on gender violence), which is a positive step toward dealing with sexual assault. But no training fully addresses and improves the power dynamic between men and women that encourages sexual assault. Violence against women is a men’s issue because most of the violence comes from men. Things like PACT training push the problem of sexual assault under male noses and force them to think for a couple hours, but at the end of the day, they can still walk out and not have to worry about walking home alone at night.
Most will not be catcalled as they go for a run, or grabbed in personal areas at a party. Nor will the overwhelming majority wake up in someone else’s bed the morning after being drunk and have to deal with the fact that their bodily autonomy was violated for the rest of their lives. Men are just not obligated to care about sexual assault in the way that women are required to, because this is women’s reality.
So how do we make men care that actions, or those of their friends, are hurting women?
Men have to recognize a connection between the girl at Shooters, or the woman at that party whose name they have already forgotten, and the mothers or sisters or female cousins who they love. Sexual assault cannot just remain a headline, or a training class that is a few hours long, because it is a personal issue. Sylvia Plath once wrote, “Girls are not machines you put kindness coins into until sex falls out.” Women are not something to be won over and discarded. The hookup girl, the friend or any sexual assault victim is also someone’s child, girlfriend or sibling. She is not an anonymous face for someone to sleep with, send off and boast about the next day. This is where the unbalanced power dynamic surfaces: when men get to engage in predatory behavior, are not held accountable and fail to understand the pain they cause.
I do not intend to discount the men in the world who care about women and do not engage in harmful behaviors. But there are undeniably men who care more about the number of notches on their bedposts than the wellbeing of the girl laying on a pillow beside them. They are not fringe outliers—otherwise, 40 percent of Duke’s undergraduate women wouldn’t be reporting instances of sexual assault. Maybe they don't know that what they did was hurtful. Maybe they were heavily influenced by the words and actions of their peers. But they are a problem not only when they assault someone; they are also a problem when they carry out seemingly small microaggressions and assertions of power leading up to an encounter.
Fulfilling a desire to be powerful at the expense of a woman’s body is wrong, but our society still does not regard it as wrong enough to focus on eradicating the dynamics that underlie these occurrences. In order for us to make any progress, men must be taught to see the power that they hold and the pain that they create in the wake of sexual assaults.
Camille Wilder is a Trinity first-year. Her column runs on alternate Wednesdays.
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Camille Wilder is a Trinity first-year. Her column runs on alternate Thursdays.