Sorority members embracing the porn culture in such a way is an example of what Ariel Levy explores in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: A Rise in the Raunch Culture. She comments, regarding similar behavior by other young women, “[t]hat women are now doing this to ourselves isn’t some kind of triumph, it’s depressing” (Levy, 2005, p. 44). Apparent self-objectification does not make it less objectifying; objects are less than human. As Tamara Schulman writes (Schulman, 2009, p. 29):
Just because some women may enjoy their chains, does not mean that subordination does not exist. Consent does not eliminate harm. Accepting pornographic roles mean valuing male pleasure and devaluing female pleasure. Sexual pleasure is unequal. Young girls today feel expected to perform oral sex on boys, but feel that it would be abnormal for them to ask for their partners to pleasure them. Sex has become casual to kids, and the ‘hook-up’ culture centers around male pleasure.
3 Creating a Campus Culture of Sexual Respect
Sexual harassment at schools represents a barrier to equality in education. The role of schools is to educate, putting schools in the best position to counter sexually hostile environments through education on sexual respect. Regardless of the civil rights involved in ensuring equal access to educational opportunities, schools everywhere train leaders for the next generation. It is in everyone’s best interest to teach affirmatively the values of respect, that women are not the ‘other’ – the objectified enemy, but rather are future colleagues and collaborators.
We are at a pivotal moment in the United States regarding sexual violence on campus. The US Vice President, in announcing new guidelines for schools in April 2011, looked at the auditorium filled with over 600 students, faculty and community members, and stated: “Look guys. It doesn’t matter what a girl does, no matter how she’s dressed, no matter how much she’s had to drink, it is never okay to touch a woman without her consent… Rape is rape is rape… and no means no.”12
The new guidelines seek to enforce the provisions of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act that provide for equal access to educational opportunities.13 While not directly controlling what schools do, the guidelines present a strong incentive for schools to take a proactive role in preventing sexual violence before it happens by focusing on preventative education. Schools play an enormous role in creating campus community, and have a great deal of power to shape norms based on sexual respect. This requires schools to take steps to prevent pornographic messages from dominating the social scene on campus, and to confront and dismantle the resultant harmful attitudes that degrade women permeating campus culture today. Pornography has been recognized in other contexts to contribute to hostile work environments – it is no less harmful on college campuses and should be treated accordingly.
Just before the publication of the new guidelines, the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the enforcement arm of Title IX, announced an investigation of Yale University for tolerating a toxic sexual culture, which the earlier mentioned rape chants demonstrated, that routinely fostered loud expressions of male dominance on campus. The case has received national attention and has provoked a long-overdue conversation about what we can do to prevent the astoundingly high number of acquaintance rapes on college campuses.14 In a most promising development, Yale announced in May, 2011, that it is suspending all activities and affiliation with the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity for at least 5 years, as well as disciplining some individual members for sexually harassing and intimidating behavior (Miller, 2011).
This is consistent with what I believe schools must do to enable cultures of sexual respect. The project on which I have been working with my students is called the ‘Acquaintance Rape Prevention Project’, and is formulated to transform college campuses to places where equal access to education is a reality. It is an educational project with the following components.
First, it focuses on consciousness-raising. As in the first example with the fraternity email suggesting men rape their ‘favorite freshman skeezas’, when the author of the email was confronted about it, he quickly saw how offensive and degrading it was. Having personally interviewed him, I believe that he was not fully conscious of the implications of his suggestions, but rather reflecting the party scene on campus. After realizing the implications of his harmful email, he agreed to become part of the change through educational programs aimed at men at his college.
The program involves sex-segregated education to develop safe spaces in which to address sensitive issues (Jarrett and Johnson, 2009). The short film The Undetected Rapist by David Lisak demonstrates how many acquaintance rapes are premeditated and planned (Lisak, 2002) and would be shown to both groups early in freshman orientation. The education aimed at men focuses on healthier forms of male bonding that do not involve the sexual exploitation of women. As well, it offers tools for bystander intervention, the brilliant program developed by Jackson Katz called ‘Mentors in Violence Prevention’ (Katz, 2006).
The Acquaintance Rape Prevention Program includes an ‘Empathy Inversion Scale’ for women and men. Studies have shown that men need to develop more empathy in order to prevent them from coercing or forcing sex on another person (Foubert and Perry, 2007). Women, on the other hand, need to decrease the level of empathy for male acquaintances so that they might be better equipped to self-defend when aggressed upon, instead of trying to make sense of why their ‘friend’ would be doing this to them (Rosenfeld, 2011).
The education aimed at women includes reaffirming one’s right to bodily integrity and sexual autonomy. It also raises self-esteem through education about one’s rights (Fallon, 2010). It includes a self-defense program specifically tailored to acquaintance rape situations, as these assaults are much more common on college campuses. Finally, teaching self-defense to individual women promotes a sense of entitlement that reifies one’s rights to bodily integrity. This in turn leads women to feeling both competent and entitled to defend one another.
I refer to this idea of collective self-defense as the ‘Bonobo Principle’ based on the model of bonobo primates. Through strong female–female alliances, bonobos have eliminated male sexual coercion (Rosenfeld, 2009). If a female bonobo is aggressed upon by a male, she lets out a cry, other females descend from the trees to fend off the aggressor, whom they then isolate and ostracize for a few days until he is reintroduced to the troop. They seem to operate on a principle that if one female can be assaulted, then they are all at risk.
The Acquaintance Rape Prevention Project provides a perfect opportunity to apply the Bonobo Principle on college campuses. Female students can forge alliances with one another to reject the designation of women as ‘hos’. As women, we have to realize that being called a ‘ho’ is neither funny nor harmless, and that if men can designate some of us as ‘hos’, they can designate any of us that way. Women must understand that we are stronger together than we are when divided against ourselves, and that when we participate in judging other women as ‘hos’, believing that we are somehow above that designation, we are only hurting ourselves. We must realize that we do not even have to like one another to achieve strong alliances; rather, we just need to agree that we are stronger if we embrace a sense of basic female solidarity. A collective self-defense, challenging loudly the male sexual entitlement to prostitute women, is the first step towards defining a new, affirmative sexuality; one based on the Bonobo Principle.