Before the University of Oregon blows a half million dollars to fight “sexual violence,” it might want to figure out what exactly sexual violence is.
It’s unfortunate that the school has already embraced as fact a belief that 20 students per week are the victims of “unwanted sexual contact” or “sexual assault” or “sexual violence.”
The phrases are used interchangeably in a 37-page report called “Twenty Students Per Week.” The title sets the tone for what follows.
It is based on a finding by the Centers for Disease Control and the White House that one in five women is “sexually assaulted in college,” usually by men they know.
Not surprisingly a UO task force on sexual violence – relying on campus surveys – declared a problem of widespread campus sexual violence.
“Preliminary results of a survey at the University of Oregon show similar numbers, but with even higher numbers of women subjected to unwanted sexual physical contact by the time they graduate.”
What else would you expect a university task force on sexual violence to find?
Had it been called a task force on sexual temperance, it might have found examples of campus sexual moderation by students keeping to themselves and focusing on graduating as quickly as possible to avoid more school debt. (I have no studies to prove it, but I bet there are students out there doing just that. Some of them are probably nice guys who wonder why so many girls like “bad boys.”)
From the report it’s hard to tell what the UO task force means by sexual violence. When I was living in a dorm at the UO, a male student who worked the front desk on the graveyard shift woke me up in the middle of the night with an obscene phone call. Was that “unwanted sexual contact?”
Would I have been regarded as one of the 20 students per week? Or was it just an obscene phone call from a lonely creep? (According to my last alumni guide, he’s working for the Oregon Liquor Control Commission. What does it all mean? Probably nothing.)
The task force and its subsequent report and recommendations were prompted by an incident earlier this year in which three UO basketball players were accused of raping an 18-year-old female student. The Lane County District Attorney’s Office declined to file charges since there were serious doubts about whether the sex was consensual.
Almost half of the 23 recommendations in the UO task force report call for more money to fight sexual violence. A look at a few of them:
- Spend $205,000 to hire a Title IX Coordinator and three Deputy Coordinators. What exactly are they going to coordinate? The 20 students a week who are sexual targets of some sort? First, they will have to find them since most incidents go unreported. Maybe that’s what they will be doing. Trying to persuade students that they have been sexually victimized in order to justify the salaries of four positions.
- Spend $90,000 to provide additional staff for the Sexual Awareness Advocacy Team (SWAT). At first I thought the acronym SWAT was a typo. It isn’t. Interesting that while there is growing criticism of police departments becoming militarized, here we have a university using a militaristic-sounding acronym (trading on Special Weapons and Tactics) to identify an office devoted to sexual and gender awareness.
- Spend $75,000 to expand Women’s Self-defense Training. Now this is something tangible and useful. While most women will never have the upper-body strength of most men, we don’t have to surrender to helplessness. (Maybe the NRA could be persuaded to help cover the costs. Marksmanship is a sport, you know. Go Ducks!)
- Spend $65,000 to bring award-winning psychologist Mary Koss to campus in spring 2015 to give a keynote address and meet with researchers on campus. The reason given for this expenditure: “To draw attention to our community standards, our commitment to ending sexual violence, and the national leadership that exists on campus on these issues.”
Koss is especially a waste of money. Aside from the fact she was in Portland speaking at Reed College only four weeks ago, there is no shortage of attention about sexual violence – a well that never runs dry.
Recently, there was the well-publicized video of a young, curvaceous woman (an actress selected by Hollaback probably for her attractiveness) enduring catcalls as she strolled in rough New York City neighborhoods. A couple of the men go beyond leers and shouting compliments to actually following her.
There was Jian Ghomeshi, the coolest guy in public radio and host of “Q.” Six months ago, Portlanders whooped and hollered when Ghomeshi took the stage at the Aladdin Theater in a sellout show.
Now he’s unemployed. Fired by Canadian Broadcasting Co., for rough sex with young women who said they didn’t consent to being slapped around.
Then there’s “Why Kids Sext” in the current Atlantic magazine. Writer Hanna Rosin explores the practice of young girls using their cell phones to send naked pictures of themselves to boyfriends, who then share the photos on the Web, shaming the girls with an ugly label: thot (“that ho over there”).
The story describes one mother finding a naked picture of her 14-year-old daughter, Jasmine, on a Web page. In the photo her daughter was “just standing there, with her arms down by her sides. … There were all these girls with their butts cocked, making pouty lips, pushing their boobs up, doing porny shots, and you’re thinking, Where did they pick this up? And then there was Jasmine in a fuzzy picture looking awkward.”
It looked like a porn site, Rosin writes, except the girls were all real teens from Jasmine’s school.
Some parents are wising up. Jasmine’s mother told Rosin she was bothered more by “the awkwardness of her daughter’s pose, the fact that she had to be really talked into sending that photo.” The mother noted that Jasmine’s sister, who was two years younger, would not have been talked into sending a nude photo unless she really wanted to.
“If she didn’t want to, she’d send a picture of a cat and say, ‘That’s the only pussy you’re gonna get!’ But … Jasmine – ‘she’s a pushover. She would do anything for anybody. … It infuriates me. Girl, stand up for yourself! You should do something because you want to do it, not because somebody pushed you into it.’”
The University of Oregon task force on sexual violence isn’t going to change any of this – men shouting comments at women, a radio celebrity taking advantage of fans and girls caving in or showing off their hot bodies to boyfriends.
No task force is going to change human behavior. For all its 37 pages, the report by the UO task force on sexual violence missed a basic reality summed up neatly in a comment posted on the Register-Guard’s Website in a news story on the issue:
“One of my grandfathers, an avid hunter, had a much simpler view on this subject that he shared with my cousins and I. ‘There’s a couple funny things about bait. First, you cannot control what will take (an) interest in your bait. You have to be an idiot, or extremely arrogant, to think only your intended prey is the only one interested in your bait. (The) other thing is you need to decide if your intended prey is worth hunting – or is it just bait?’
“After a couple of times falling for the bait I finally realized he was talking about people rather than animals. It seems like the college campuses today are filled with nothing more than a bunch of rutting wild animals on the prowl.”
It’s curious that this wild-animal behavior seems to be getting worse. For the past four decades Women’s Studies programs have proliferated in colleges, yet girls and women encounter more sexual-oriented degradation than ever before.
Have segregating and politicizing women’s issues harmed females in ways that academicians haven’t considered? It’s a question the UO task force on sexual violence probably didn’t consider.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
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