Last year, Dickinson students performed a sit-in at Old West in protest of the campus sexual assault policy, drawing a lot of attention to rape culture at large and how it affects Dickinson campus. It sparked a lot of heated debate.

For those less familiar with feminist theory jargon, rape culture in a nutshell is an environment that makes rape and scary rape-y type things (things like sexual assault, catcalling on the street, sexual harassment, the way that womenfolk are usually looked down on more for sleeping around than men folk... you know, bad stuff) easier to get away with. For example, the attitude that women that catcalling is harmless or the fact that a lot (not all, but a lot) of women that report sexual assaults get 1. dismissed or even blamed themselves by some part of the system that is supposed to help them 2. shunned by people that know them -- as a result most women don't report. That is an important side note, but not what this blog post is about. It's about the heated debate at Dickinson college around this topic.

The absolute horribleness and pervasiveness of rape culture is something very obvious to me, and I would wager a guess that it's obvious to most women on Dickinson campus. We think about it every day. We're all taught not to go out alone, after dark, in the wrong place, wearing the wrong clothes, smiling at the wrong people, etc. or else horrible, horrible violent things will happen to us and might happen to us anyway even if we do manage to do all the crazy paranoid crap on the list.

However, what was not intuitively obvious to me (because it's not something I have to think about every day) is the way that rape culture effects men; and it does effect men very profoundly. In rape culture (which is a heteronormative structure so please don't assume that I am purposefully excluding LGBTQ or women that commit sexual assault), women are largely classified as the victim gender. We learn to do things to avoid getting attacked. Men, on the other hand, are classified as the assailant gender. They are not threatened daily with the same extensive checklist of insane things you have to do OR ELSE, so rape culture's effects on women are less obvious to them. However, the fact that men are constantly treated as potential rapists, and how that effects the male psyche (fear, irrational guilt on behalf of your entire gender, etc.), is not obvious to women.

These two assumptions of the obvious in opposite genders are the main explanation I have right now for what I see as largely polarized gender rhetoric. The atmosphere on campus has changed since in the wake of the new sexual assault policy. Men feel targeted -- not because they are guilty, or because they oppose the destruction of rape culture -- but because they are men. As women and as feminists, we cannot necessarily dismiss this fear as male privilege or resistance to change or admissions of guilt. Yes, rape is a much worse consequence than men feeling targeted, but that does not mean men's feelings should not be validated and sincerely addressed.

The dialogue needs to change from women vs. men to everyone vs. rapists.

~Jesse Battilana, class of 2012

Religion, American Studies