Oppression, repression, and justification: Stop excusing sexual harassment

I have had plenty of fun nights out during my year and a half at Wesleyan. Unfortunately, the Saturday night before Halloween was not one of them.

As I walked up the stairs from the DKE basement party, “Yo bitch, suck my dick, you cunt!” was not what I was expecting to hear. At first I was unable to even register the words I was hearing, but stopped mid-step, alarmed by just the tone. Once I realized that the speaker had directed that hate-filled tone towards me, and processed the meaning too, I was too shocked to do anything except whisper, “But I’m a human being.” I have no idea what his response was, nor if he even heard me – by then, I am ashamed to say that I had fled DKE.

At first I was just shaken and upset, but gradually as I recounted the incident to friends, I began to shake again – this time with impotent rage. Since then I have replayed the encounter over and over in my head, each time crafting a more indignant and articulate retort. What would I say to my unknown aggressor, my unknown oppressor?

“I am a human being, goddamnit! I am a human being, just like you. But maybe that’s not true. Maybe I should rather say, I am human being, more than you. Because those hateful words you spat at me were more than words, those words showed me how you think. And you think ugly. You think in terms of degradation and power and domination and violence. Because “Yo bitch, suck my dick, you cunt” is all of those things. It is ugly and degrading and violent. And what’s more, you meant it to be all of those things.

“Each and every word possesses undeniable power and meaning and I will tell you right now that words like “bitch” and “cunt” were invented for the sole purpose of degradation. But the joke is on you, because every time you even think words like that, it’s not me you are degrading, it is your essential humanity.”

Would that change the way my unknown aggressor/unknown oppressor thinks? Probably not, if not even my friends can appreciate the real brutal intent behind his command. With the best of intentions, my support system lovingly steered me away from anger, nudged me towards “rationality” – or what I should rather term, rationalization, our society’s most effective tool for dismissing and de-valuing unpleasant reminders of the reality of our constant oppression.

As my friends gathered around to comfort me as I related the experience, they soothingly stroked my arms and talked over me, asking, “How drunk are you?” (Insidious!) “What had you said to him?” (Undermining!) “Were you trying to go upstairs?” (Implicit: It was my fault that this stranger had accosted me and verbally sexually harassed me.)

It had to be my fault, you see. It was inevitable. Because we have all been taught, us women, that our aggressors, our oppressors, are never the ones responsible for our oppression, not even for the aggression perpetrated against us. So, I had to have been transgressing, trespassing. That verbal abuse wasn’t abuse; it was a legitimate, justified reaction to a “wayward woman.”

And what if it wasn’t justifiable? Well then it was excusable. My friends supplied all the excuses in the guise of sympathy: “But you know it was nothing personal, if you’ve never seen the guy before.” So its okay if the sentiment wasn’t directed at me personally? So long as he wants to debase women in general, not just me, that’s okay?  “Are you sure he was a Wes student? Did he look like a townie?” Of course, denial that he could be one of us. He must have been a townie because smart, white, middle-class college kids like us are incapable of sexist harassment, right? Other people do that kind of thing, not our lot. Wrong. “Don’t get too upset, it’s just stupid drunk boys.” So alcohol lowers inhibitions and this hate-speech is what emerges.

And the pièce de résistance, the final deadening, deafening logic: “Boys will be boys.” Boys will be boys as long as this is how our society raises boys to believe this is an acceptable way to behave. Boys will be the boys our society created, behaving along the values of oppression, aggression, and degradation. Just as long as we teach them to, women will continue, as demonstrated in the above quotes, to perform the co-function of oppression: repression.

In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a big deal. It probably wasn’t personal. It definitely wasn’t rape, and I’ll come out of it alright. But it still wasn’t okay. Just because this incident scores relatively low on the sexual harassment continuum does not make it okay. And I want girls and women everywhere to stop excusing this kind of behavior as somehow okay, somehow not “a big deal.” Because it is.

Hyland is a member of the class of 2013.