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Misogyny and Rape Culture on Campus
Wibod
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So there's been a minor shit storm developing at my university recently over a post on the Overheard at Guelph facebook page. Just look for the drunk bus comment, no guarantee it will still be there later though.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/6893397826/
Anyways an Arts faculty member saw this and posted a blog about it (http://andrewbretz.blogspot.com/2012/03/rape-culture-at-university-of-guelph.html). tl;dr he is a professor/PhD candidate who specializes in rape in contemporary English theatre and complained to the University Ethics Committee.
Now I see several problems with the whole chain of events; I don't think what the original poster did was really that bad, it's a kind of offensive drinking song and it's kind of clever and I chuckled. The rest of the stuff coming after that though through additions to the song and just general shitposting in the comments and making stupid remarks is dumb to downright offensive.
My main problem is the Profs response to this, he posts a blog and then singles out a former student of his AND then goes to the ethics committee. In my eyes it's wildly inappropriate to single out someone in this way and he could have made his point just as effectively by saying "hey look at what this douche posted" and not mentioned his relationship to the student or posting pictures of his name. I would think that as a professor you would realize that there is a better way to handle this situation then publicly shaming specific students and complaining to the ethics committee about them posting shit on facebook.
Now obviously misogyny and rape culture are problems, but I don't really see the original chant as a "violent male fantasy about rape". Admittedly I found it amusing, its kind of clever, but I can see why people would offended.
So I ask you; Was the prof justified in his response, were the singers on the bus horrible people and are the people screaming rape culture overreacting?
I'm leaning towards no, no and a little.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/6893397826/
Anyways an Arts faculty member saw this and posted a blog about it (http://andrewbretz.blogspot.com/2012/03/rape-culture-at-university-of-guelph.html). tl;dr he is a professor/PhD candidate who specializes in rape in contemporary English theatre and complained to the University Ethics Committee.
Now I see several problems with the whole chain of events; I don't think what the original poster did was really that bad, it's a kind of offensive drinking song and it's kind of clever and I chuckled. The rest of the stuff coming after that though through additions to the song and just general shitposting in the comments and making stupid remarks is dumb to downright offensive.
My main problem is the Profs response to this, he posts a blog and then singles out a former student of his AND then goes to the ethics committee. In my eyes it's wildly inappropriate to single out someone in this way and he could have made his point just as effectively by saying "hey look at what this douche posted" and not mentioned his relationship to the student or posting pictures of his name. I would think that as a professor you would realize that there is a better way to handle this situation then publicly shaming specific students and complaining to the ethics committee about them posting shit on facebook.
Now obviously misogyny and rape culture are problems, but I don't really see the original chant as a "violent male fantasy about rape". Admittedly I found it amusing, its kind of clever, but I can see why people would offended.
So I ask you; Was the prof justified in his response, were the singers on the bus horrible people and are the people screaming rape culture overreacting?
I'm leaning towards no, no and a little.
Wibod on
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sexual assault is pretty endemic on college campuses, is widely under-reported, and colleges have a history of taking little to no action against accused rapists.
were there women on the bus? in all probability, if there were, quite of a few of them have been victimized in the past. I believe colleges are supposed to act against what could be percieved as fostering a hostile environment towards an oft-victimized group. I don't see how it's different than a song about dragging black people trucks or tying gays to fence posts. It's probably classified as hate speech.
In any case I cant stand this mentality where people act like if you make enough jokes about something then it happens more often. No amount of Jew jokes is going to lead to another holocaust. No amount of rape jokes is going to make somebody just one day decide "Oh hey, I think I'll rape somebody today."
People are terrified of the things they can't laugh at being laughed at by others, and its a fearful mentality, which is to say one that distorts one's perception of reality for the worse.
Edit: it's in the article actually:
Guy:I wish that all the women
Group: I wish that all the women!
Guy: Were statues of Venus
Group: Were statues of Venus!
Guy: Cuz then they`d have no arms
Group: Cuz then they`d have no arms!
Guy: To push away my penis
Group: To push away my penis!
Yeah now that I heard that (really lame) joke, rape seems pretty harmless, we should legalize it.
If the president had any real power, he'd be able to live wherever the fuck he wanted.
...And yet a certain threshold of memes about groups of people is exactly what leads to certain attitudes about minorities, which can ultimately culminate in crimes like the Holocaust.
'No amount of misogynistic communication will lead to misogyny' is a ridiculous & demonstrably wrong statement.
Dude opted to troll on facebook with an idiotic rape joke. Euhuhuhuhuhu. Well, welcome to being called on it.
My sympathies for this individual seem to have taken a cab out of town.
If you're an addiction medicine specialist you're probably convinced that everyone's an addict, because that's what you see every day.
This guy specializes in "rape in contemporary English theater"
I know it's not really fair to discount his opinion because of that.
In fact it's not fair at all and there's a ton of problems on college campuses with a variety of sexual abuse issues.
But seriously... The guy who's majoring in rape thinks everyone's a rapist? Le shock!
It kind of reminds me of my terrible sanitation teacher in culinary school, who had 3 phd's and some kind of undiagnosed mental condition
Every day was her wildly rambling about everything being covered in germs and how eating meat is killing us all because it's got blood on it and cleeean, must cleeean
Uh, point being, sometimes people choose majors because they think it's interesting
sometimes they choose it because they want it for their career
and sometimes they choose it because they've got major issues about it.
"a lot of students I know or have taught are going to be raped this weekend. Or if not one of my students, then perhaps someone they know. It will happen. "
He goes from a lot of his students are going to be raped this weekend to well maybe someone who one of my students knows.
And if you're a misogynistic introvert who enjoys dumb rape jokes, it won't surprise anyone when you defend rape joke trolling.
...I can't believe I used to spend a lot of time defending gamers / gaming when it came to sexism. I really shouldn't have; I guess I just assumed most gamers had attitudes similar to mine. Big mistake.
If he'd said it was a sign of the misogyny in college culture I'd agree with him, but the rape culture phrase is like the feminist equivalent of "death panels." It's an intellectually dishonest attempt to provoke an emotional reaction, and it doesn't do the cause of feminism any favors in the long term.
It's the sort of thing that reinforces a culture where it's okay to try and force girls into having sex with you. a "coercive" culture, you might call it.
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So you think it's appropriate to boot a person off campus, ruining their education and costing them tens of thousands of dollars, because they said something offensive?
I mean, I'm not arguing that it's not offensive. It is. Of course it's misogynistic and offensive. But, when a person starts saying there should be repercussions and punishments for things people say, I think it's pretty important to stop and question what punishments you are comfortable handing out, and for what kind of transgressions.
"Laugh this off" is a pretty disingenuous presentation of the response many are having to this, Eddy, and I think you know that.
The response of a lot of people, including some posting in this thread, is to shrug, sullenly shake their head and go "Typical".
A resigned frown at both the insensitivity and jerk-assedness of one person followed by the histrionic over-reaction of another.
Ain't nobody is coming out of this lookin' pretty.
that's pretty fucked up, brah.
The term stereotype threat seems appropriate here. It's been shown in several studies that the perception that a certain social group will perform less well in their schoolwork (this usually refers to women and math or minorities and school in general) causes them to perform less well in said schoolwork. This leads to wider support for said opinion.
Reading the professor's blog, it doesn't seem especially 'histrionic' or grandstanding. He even asks what the community thinks he can do to fix the problem at the bottom of the post.
I don't think the guy should be kicked out of school, but I don't mind if he catches some social flack for it.
Edit: Actually, a more accurate reference is probably the idea of 'moving the Overton window' or the sociological concept of normalization.
In reference to men, it would mean that because we think they're more likely to rape, they're more likely to rape (in which case the entire feminist movement is doing women a disservice by pointing out that men are rapists, thus making them more likely to rape).
Not really sure it's applicable.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the Overton window, but it seems like you need a "new idea" to be unthinkable to shift a "desired idea" into sensible. If rape is being put into 'sensible', what's the new idea? Equally, if 'rape' is the unthinkable new idea, what's the desired idea?
Normalisation is far too broad a spectrum to demonstrate what we're supposed to see here, I'm afraid.
In specific reference to 'rape culture', if you ask me to provide specific support for that, I'm not sure I can provide it. Certainly sexual assault and harassment is severely underreported, and many people blame the victim, but I'm not sure there's enough evidence to support that low level misogyny leads to or increases those attitudes other than on an intuitive level, which I admit is not enough.
On a personal note: there's nothing clever about that song.
So you think it's perfectly okay to punish students for things they say outside of a classroom environment.
What punishments do you think are adequate for a person saying words that make other people feel bad?
Do you believe that it is within the rights and responsibilities of an educational institution to police student behavior beyond what is absolutely necessary to ensure the operation of the educational environment? Do you believe it is a university's right and responsibility to enforce a specific political, social, or cultural viewpoint on the student body regardless of whether or not they agree with it?
If so, at what point does this become unacceptable to you? If a school can and should punish a student for saying something insensitive and crude on what may or may not technically be school grounds, should they also be policing the students for other unethical or immoral behavior?
By whose standards should these behaviors be judged? I mean, in some private schools students are pressured or outright compelled to swear oaths adhering to "Christian values" with regards to the usage of drugs or alcohol, and engaging in promiscuous sexual relationships. Do you think that's okay?
Because I fucking don't. I'll give you my answer to the question I'm posing: A university's only responsibility is to ensure that it is capable of educating the students, and enforce a series of rules and regulations that are designed to make sure that is able to happen. A person acting out or being disruptive on campus or in-class should be subject to some sort of internal response, because they are directly and negatively disrupting the ability of other students to learn.
When it's something that happens on an arguably and nebulously defined component of the school, like a barely-off-campus party or a questionably-under-school-authority form of transit, and when the something that happens is "someone may have been made to feel bad by something people said", then I think it's bullshit to expect or demand that the school step in and do... "something" about it.
When someone is directly disrupting the school's ability to operate and teach, they can act. When someone is doing something that is blatantly in defiance of the law, they can get the police involved. It's not the duty nor should it be the duty of universities to sculpt people or enforce certain political, social, or ethical views.
Students go to school to learn, not to be told how to be.
Granted, but I bet you could agree that the not-insignificant statistical possibility of a woman being raped during her education demands a certain level of intervention. Promoting a particular kind of culture not conducive to rape is certainly a step towards reasonable preventative action. I think championing an environment where it's totally not cool to victimize people or to take that victimization lightly is a pretty far cry from stripping students of ontological agency
This definitely isn't a cool thing to sing, but the profs reaction to this is equally as bad in my mind. Publicly shaming people because they offended someone is questionable. As is attempting to police apparently everything people say in a public space. Is this guy a fucking tool? Yes. Is this indicative of "rape culture" or that this person in particular has a hateful view towards women? Possibly. But I can't see how this doesn't fall under the category of simple free speech. He said something stupid. In case we haven't noticed, most people do this all the time. The right to say stupid things in public places are highly enshrined in the US, and for good reason I think.
And, christ, its a joke! Are we going to expunge every rude joke from the english language? Or remove any possibility of offending any minority? I know this will come off to some as "olol liberal pc thought police", but there are a LOT of possibly offensive things posted by college students on the internet. Publicly shaming, or worse, formal discipline, can have long term effects on a person's life, especially since any old person can look around the internet and see what this guy has been accused of. Is this worth it over a facebook post, whose content, if sung at a party, would have been immediately forgotten by everyone?
It's not a far cry at all when you start academically punishing them or publicly subjecting them to shame and ridicule or outright tossing them out of the institution for it
which is exactly what some people in this thread are calling for.
If you're calling for a more measured, reasonable, complex response to this issue then by all means, continue, I concur.
But that's not what some are doing here and I feel that should be challenged.
This is one of the weirder sentences I read today.
So what does he actually do?
This professor is a joke.
"Abloo Abloo, one of my former students was acting like a drunk asshole. HOW DID MY ENGLISH LIT LECTURES NOT MAKE HIM A BETTER PERSON?!?!"
I agree - the response to situations like this demand a level of reason and nuance that major outrages rarely yield. Public shaming is only ever going to yield the kind of reactionary nonsense that dismisses the issue that caused the outrage in the first place.
I think it's indicative of a virulent and poisonous attitude prevalent in a wide variety of universities and espoused by many students and faculty.
Which is that people go to university to become better people and that they should come out of it more worldly, enlightened, liberal, and understanding.
Instead of simply more educated.
It is true that the idea of joking about a serious subject, such as rape, genocide, etc. can cause people to view that subject in a less serious light. For example, "Pollock jokes" became so widespread that people actually thought Poles were considered stupid. Many Americans view the French as cowardly, and that stereotype will extend into their personal views and interactions. If me and my buddies joke about sex and rape and how women always tease and that they're always asking for it, when one of my buddies takes advantage of a woman, I'm more likely to defend him and continue with my lighthearted approach to the subject. It often remains funny until it happens to you.
It's a virulent attitude for a university to want its students to become more worldly and understanding? Uh what? These are the kind of things one hopes to happen with things like education. You don't go to school for four years just to memorize a bunch of shit.
Not to say that this situation has produced the most ideal reactions, but seriously, it's virulent and poisonous for a university's mission in education to include people becoming more worldly, enlightened, and understanding? Do you not know why universities were established to begin with?
I agree with everything else you've said, but isn't all education, school too, supposed to make people better in some way? Not just more employable? Perhaps that's a debate.
Regardless, even if you do think university is a place where people should learn to be 'better', you don't make people less sexist by treating them like crap for sexist facebook comments and singing.
To clarify, do you think it's virulent because people don't actually go to school to become better people, and the notion that they do is delusional, or is it virulent because people do and this isn't a reasonable thing?
What I find fascinating about discussions regarding rape culture is the tendency of otherwise careful, reasonable posters to exaggerate, misrepresent, and dismiss challenging positions out of hand. The OP appears to be a good example of this.
This seems to imply that the professor reported his former student to "the ethics committee", whatever that is. The blog post indicates that the professor approached the "Human Rights and Equity Office at the University of Guelph". A quick search reveals that the HREO serves a number of functions and while it does provide "volunteer(s) to assist with the resolution of concerns and complaints", there is no indication that it is only in the business of meting out punishment, or that the professor sought to punish his former student.
I think the suggestion that the professor intended to "name and shame" is also problematic. The blog post linked in the OP certainly does contain a picture with names not redacted, and the text of the post notes that the person who added a particular comment was a student of the professor. That seems like fair play to me. If someone attaches his name to a comment in a (relatively) public discussion, then why should anyone go out of their way to divorce the statement from the person when confronting it? But aside from that, the post itself was introspective, with the professor wondering how he had failed in his pedagogical project, and whether there is anything he can do differently to reach students.
Clearly he isn't happy with his student, but the student is also not really the focus of his concerns.
This is just ridiculous. Did anyone take the position that the people singing on the bus were "horrible people"? What does that even mean? I don't see anyone "screaming" about rape culture, so where did that question come from? Characterizing a sort of soul-searching blog post (because what else is there that the OP could refer to?) as "screaming rape culture" reads like an exaggeration designed solely to make it easier to dismiss the issue.
Group: I wish that all the men!
Guy: Were Greek statues
Group: Were Greek statues!
Guy: Cuz then they`d have no arms
Group: Cuz then they`d have no arms!
Guy: To push away my penis
Group: To push away my penis!
He intended to name and shame. It would have been trivial to post simply the lyrics and a reference to the fact it was a student he had lectured to. Instead, he posted a Facebook post with all names included. This is exactly what naming and shaming is; attribution of 'shameful' quotations.
Had the blog post alone been the issue, the OP would have noted it. It was not, however, and was part of a whole.
We're not concerned with what his intended focus was (insert joke about authorial intent here), we're concerned with the outcomes of his actions.
Read the comments to the professor's blog. Condemnation abounds for what is a song more about blues balls than rape.