@vy_vance/via Twitter
An image of the assault.
It was a “Goodbye, Columbus” kind of weekend in Athens, Ohio earlier this month — homecoming weekend at Ohio University, to be exact. There were all the trimmings: the parade, the big game, tailgating and every manner of student and alumni celebration.
As the entire Internet now knows, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, a female student and a young male alumnus nursed their sorrow over the Bobcats’ loss by getting heroically plastered and then making each other’s acquaintance. The young woman perched on the narrow windowsill of a Chase bank near campus and the young man knelt on the ground in front of her and performed oral sex on her.
Soon enough, an excited group of students gathered around to take a look.
One young woman interpreted the scene as one of female sexual empowerment: “Get it, girl! Get it, girl! Get it, girl!” she cried out.
Several kids thought it was the sort of hilarious and outrageous episode that demanded to be videoed and posted on the World Wide Web. They apparently did not interpret themselves as indifferent bystanders to a Kitty Genovese-style horror, but rather as witnesses to an instance of gleeful exhibitionism.
There was good reason to understand it as such: Throughout the act, the woman gave no indication of distress. She tossed her long hair, pressed her hand to the back of the man’s head and looked directly at the cameras pointed her way.
However, there were two men in the crowd who correctly adduced what was up: The young woman was out of her gourd on booze, and the young man was taking advantage of her drunkenness to assault her. When he stood up to leave, they chased him down the street and beat him up.
In the sober light of a hideous Sunday morning, the two young people at the center of these events reached for their phones and called the police to report their respective assaults.
The young man got what was coming to him: By committing his act in public, he exposed himself to the swift judgment of men, and his ass-kicking probably won’t be the half of his problems. But the young woman — as always, in these matters — got the worst of things. Her titanic humiliation, sent up the satellite gods before it was even completed, will be available in perpetual replay until the last syllable of recorded time.
That drunk young college woman are stratospherically more vulnerable to sexual assault than drunk young college men is both unfair and a serious threat to their safety and well-being. But take it upon yourself to warn these young women to stay away from heavy drinking unless in the company of reliable friends, and you violate a strongly held feminist belief: that these warnings serve to blame the victims of sexual assault rather than perpetrators, and are to be avoided.
Late last week, the New York Times hosted a Room for Debate discussion online on this very topic. Citing the well-known connection between extreme intoxication and college rape, it asked a panel of experts, “What’s wrong with asking young women not to get blind drunk?”
Three university women explained why they opposed such advice. Louise M. Antony, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts, said these warning send a “dangerous message,” that they imply we have “chosen to regard misogyny as inevitable.”
Alexandra Brodsky, a student at Yale Law School, wrote that these recommendations “demand the victimized sacrifice their freedom and adjust their behavior so we don’t have to disturb the status quo.”
Anne M. Coughlin, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said that she has often wanted to warn young woman that their danger of rape rises greatly when they get blind drunk, but she avoids doing so because “I know the advice will be misunderstood and misused.”
And so: a stalemate. The louts who perpetrate these rapes on drunken female students are apparently unmotivated to change their behavior, and the feminist power structure that controls the message regarding campus rape is unwilling to recommend that female students adopt safer behaviors.
In the dangerous middle are the young women themselves — living away from home for the first time, excited to party and hook up, ill-informed by their fearful professors and advisors (come athwart a feminist shibboleth in academia, and good luck to you) about exactly what they should do to lower their risk of assault, and often left to sift through social media to find out what horrors befell them during the previous night’s blackout.
Clearly — as we can see from the range of responses to the event in Ohio — the young people themselves are deeply confused about all of this, and need guidance from bona fide adults, whose experience of the world — and the many good and bad things in it — is far greater. Who among us will step in to help them out?
Flanagan is author of “Girl Land .”
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via Great Local News: New York http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info
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