Our campus has been downright oversaturated with talk of sexual assault. The words lose their meaning, the statistics become white noise and in the end we're left with the people who care the most yelling over each other, while those who most need to appreciate the gravity of the situation slip out the back door.
Allow me to yell next, but don't worry I'm not going to rehash that old "one in four women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime" stat (an aside: it's statistically true, and when I look at my friends, I find it's real-life true). Instead, I want to discuss how we think about ourselves, our bodies and sex, and how our thinking contributes to why so many people at Dartmouth shrug off all this talk about sexual assault.
I'm throwing out the term "sexual assault" not because it isn't accurate, but because all the nerve endings it used to hit are dead at this point. I'm going to refer to it as "sexual damage," even though it seems absurd to combine the enormous range of instances we call sexual assault (from dragged-in-an-alleyway-by-strangers rape to the more genteel-sounding "date rape" of a woman who is perfectly happy to stay on third but the guy suddenly steals home without the go-ahead) all into one neatly-labeled box. Frankly, our inability to be specific about sexual acts makes it almost impossible to understand the important distinctions between the kinds of sexual damage that all of these acts cause to women.
You don't have to be a heartless monster to commit such an act. In many cases, you just have to be too drunk to have the physical or mental control to quell your urges when she says no at that pivotal moment you're expecting a yes. That's not to disregard the many stories I've heard from women at this school, like the girl who received a blitz from a guy whose name she didn't even recognize telling her he urgently needed to talk to her. He later showed up at her room and explained that he had sex with her while she was unconscious in his fraternity and he just wanted to "make sure she was on the pill." There are monsters here too, and they walk among us.
But you might also just be a regular person who would never want to cause the permanent damage that can result from a momentary loss of control. If you're in a fraternity, think about that one guy (or those few guys) who gets a little too violent when he's blacked out. Maybe he breaks shit or tries to start fights with brothers, but it's not that hard to calm him down and no one ends up getting hurt. Even if he got in someone's face or took a swing, you would probably never dream of telling someone, "Yeah, Jim committed assault against Sam last night." But he did even if he didn't touch Sam, the threat of violence legally constitutes assault. Just like a lot of what goes on during pledge term legally constitutes hazing, and the facilitation of underage drinking by an organization is legally a felony.
The problem here is the vast disconnect between what is seen as acceptable behavior in a basement setting and what is "technically" acceptable behavior according to law. We don't think the violation of a lot of these laws is a big deal, because they happen on a daily basis and we hardly ever experience any severe consequences. A lot of people immediately stop caring about the issue of sexual assault when they hear that if either party is intoxicated, it can't be consensual sex. That's so far beyond our own status quo it's laughable. I'll be honest I've laughed at stories from both guys and girls about extremely drunk or even blacked-out sexual experiences. They're little trophies we can put in our "crazy college days" trophy case.
Given how wildly different our current status quo is from the expectations we attach to adulthood, it's not surprising to me (though it is infuriating) when I hear a guy casually say that most accusations of sexual assault come from girls who got too drunk and regret what they did. Think about that for more than 10 seconds. What motivation would a woman have for making public a drunken mistake that she regrets? Why would she want a lot of other people to know about what happened? It's possible that many men who are responsible for sexual damage to women genuinely believe that they engaged in consensual sex. But for the most part, they know that they crossed a line somewhere. Maybe they are plagued with guilt by it and terrified about what their mothers would think. Maybe they wish every day that they could take it back.
When you get a little too drunk and flip a pong table, you might piss off some brothers, and you even "technically" committed assault. But you won't give them nightmares for the rest of their lives or destroy their ability to trust potential sexual partners or make them gain 20 pounds so that they feel their bodies are desexualized enough to keep them safe.
There are things you do that you can never take back. It doesn't matter how good your intentions are, or how hard it is to believe that you and your buddies could ever be capable of something like that. If you're capable of throwing your iPhone on the ground in a fit of drunken rage, you're capable of losing your inhibitions during a hookup so that it becomes the most harrowing memory of someone else's life. Hell, if women had the necessary appendage, plenty of us would be capable of it as well. Not because we're monsters, but because we devalue our bodies so frequently that we forget that unlike a horrible hangover, some consequences are forever.
