Thanks, We Totally Get That We Should “Watch Our Drinks!” Already

Jaclyn Friedman, co-editor of the anthology Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape, takes on the sexism inherent in campus-based rape “prevention” programs:

At about this time every year, adult anxiety about sexual assault reaches a tipping point and gives way to an avalanche of advice to young women from campuses, commentators, and parents alike: Don’t hook up! Don’t dress provocatively! Watch your drink! Actually, don’t drink at all! Always stay with a friend! Don’t stay out too late! Don’t walk home alone! Etcetera, etcetera, ad nauseam.

And every year, it fails to work. A 2007 Department of Justice-funded trend analysis of rape studies over time revealed that rates of rape haven’t declined in the past 15 years — in fact, they may be increasing.

Why hasn’t it worked? Perhaps it’s because making rape prevention the responsibility of young women teaches students that guys can’t be expected to be responsible for their own actions.

Is this the time to start collecting horror stories of our own worst experiences with college “rape prevention” tactics? I can start.

The rape whistle.

I could never figure out how this was supposed to help someone like the woman I met in my first week in college, who a dorm neighbor raped, in her own room. Was she supposed to only start to make out with someone if she had the pull-cord in reach? Worse, if I went back to someone’s apartment with them, and I was attacked, and I didn’t whistle or sound my alarm, even if I had them in my purse, would my actions somehow, awfully, be questioned?

A piece of plastic never made me feel safer. (Neither did the mace I had in my shoulder bag for one semester, which I had tried out once in the woods but honestly, never was sure I’d get right if I were actually in a chaotic situation.) On the one hand, go administration, for “doing something”! But the “something” had little to do with what could change the pretty deep attitudes and assumptions in play in the college dating scene. It was a band-aid. And it was unsurprising how, again, the burden was back on women to safeguard our purity from “bad men.”

Tags: activism, communication, consent, men, rape, respect, sex, wasted, women