One irritating thing was the college’s belief that we should fear and avoid all men traveling through campus–which was a little hairy because there was a small number of men that attended the school.

I just transferred to the Savannah College of art and Design, and at my orientation the SCAD security people talked about the self-defencse classes offered. Here’s the kicker: these self-defense classes are women-only. The scad security people are going to get that link that y’all posted.

I would disagree in part with the Oklahoma article claim that college men become rapists because of fraternities.

“The programs that work best are aimed at fraternities, which are at the heart of the problem. Men who join fraternities don’t have different histories of sexual behavior from those who don’t. The differences develop after they join the frat. Greek cultural norms promote sexual coercion and helping each other get laid. They support the myths that condone rape.”

Sure, there are fraternities that indoctrinate college men into a certain mindset.

But the lies about rape that encourage it are already endemic to the culture. Men in fraternities wouldn’t take to these ideas so easily if they didn’t already kind of believe them.

The most important thing one can gather from this statement is the fact that fraternity members are raised no different from non-fraternity members. They’re just more specifically trained by their “brothers” to rape.

This means that the socialization that most young men get in this country doesn’t really prepare them to treat women as human beings. It doesn’t immunize them against such dangerous beliefs.

It’s great that there are anti-rape programs in colleges, but it’s obviously getting to a lot of men too late if these sick ideas about women and sex always seem to find plenty of fertile ground.

Whereas the article SarahMC linked to above takes the approach of first making rape something that obviously does effect them, if only in a secondary way; by first encouraging empathy with victims, and not triggering the “rape is only something Bad People / Criminals do” reaction, the program has an easier time making a difference. Or so the article claims, and that doesn’t surprise me.

The people in my (co-ed) dorm found the whole thing quite hilarious, and regularly acted out exaggerated make-out scenes with pauses every few seconds for a “May I touch you here?” “why yes, you may” conversation.

A decade and a half later, I hear about the “Yes Means Yes” anthology and the concept of “enthusiastic consent” and I finally realize that I was incredibly lucky to be in an environment where that sort of thing would be suggested, so long ago. And I’m embarrassed that at the time, I found it as funny as all my peers did.

I have no clue how to get people in their late teens and early twenties to think past their simple assumptions about rape & consent. Too often what we hear is like the guy in @tallgirl-in-heels’s story, where we only figure it out much later.

I know that many rapes that occur on college campuses would be difficult to prove, and many women might not want to report them because of that, but that shouldn’t stop the university from saying “Rape is a crime. Sex offenders on our campus will be prosecuted.”

/Okie SA advocate