Last night I attended Take Back the Night, an event for people to speak out about sexual violence. I was struck by the fact that there were so few men at the event. As it is commonly known, the majority of sexual violence is committed against women by men. Statistically, one in four women will be raped in her lifetime. However, because this statistic is derived from data comprised of only reported rape cases, many people suspect one in three is a more realistic number. In terms of other sexual assault, based on anecdotal evidence, I would say that a majority of at least the women I know have been sexually assaulted at some point in their lives, whether it involved unwanted touching, kissing, or more. Most sexual violence against people besides women is also committed by men. With all of this in mind, I was shocked and upset that so few men attended Take Back the Night to make a stand against sexual violence.
It also troubles me that in general, there are far fewer men than women on this campus involved in activism to stop sexual violence. I think this dynamic reproduces the oppressive dichotomy of men as aggressive and women as passive. In many male/female sexual situations, it is often assumed that the man can and even should go as far as he possibly can, sexually, and that it is the woman’s job to establish boundaries and stop him when she decides she doesn’t want to go any farther. This idea in itself is problematic because it is based upon the assumption that the man is entitled to put his body and his sexuality wherever he wants. This makes protecting a woman’s body her own problem. This is not to say that a woman has no agency over her body. I’m just saying that it would be ideal if most (hetero) men did not give a reason for most women to feel that they must actively protect themselves in (hetero) sexual situations from the threat of being raped. When (almost) exclusively women are organizing against sexual violence, this reflects the above idea that not only is it exclusively a woman’s responsibility to protect her body from being raped or assaulted, but that if women collectively want sexual violence to stop, then it is also exclusively their responsibility to take organized action against the status quo.
In my four years at Wesleyan, I have seen many women on this campus do a huge amount of work to organize around stopping sexual violence. I think it is time that men organize themselves to make a stand against this violence as a mark of solidarity with women and other people against whom sexual violence often gets committed. Men need to show that they too believe that sexual violence is NOT okay. Attending Take Back the Night is one way to show such solidarity.
To all the Wesleyan men: Your inaction and your silence are not helping.
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