Word: sexuality
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...promoting this statistic, MenSpeakUp fails to elaborate. If it did, it would become clear that this statistic does not refer exclusively to women who were the victims of serious sexual assault—for instance, rape—but includes women who report so little as having engaged in unwanted sexual acts. This is a fairly low threshold, if ever there were...
...Roiphe ’90 traced the rapid rise of movements like Take Back the Night at Harvard as well as the culture surrounding this increased “awareness.” Roiphe argued that women must take at least some responsibility for what goes on in her sexual interactions, in light of the active role they tend to play in their own day-to-day lives. For the most part, Roiphe’s observations were dismissed as anti-women...
...Fifteen years later, Roiphe’s criticisms still ring true. At Harvard, administrators who have attempted to inject a similar dose of reality into the sexual violence debate have been ridiculed. As noted by Sahil K. Mahtani ’08, a seemingly anomalous one-time poster to MenSpeakUp.org, when former College Dean Harry R. Lewis ’68 encouraged female undergraduates to walk with companions late at night, he was accused of “blaming the victim...
...better or for worse, we are no longer a part of a society that encourages women to be chaste or careful—that is, a society in which reports of sexual assault were likely just that, rather than intimate exchanges that went on too long or signals that were more mixed than we might have hoped. The mentality in which we blindly protect the women in our lives from supposed male predators is not compatible with our can-do credo, through which we encourage the same women to grab life by the horns, even in the realm of sexual...
...that what has been missing from this movement was a gaggle of boys swooping in to save the day suggests that women can’t take care of themselves. That is a notion that, when reinforced, is unlikely to help women to feel more in control of their sexual interactions. And this is perhaps the cherry on the sundae that is MenSpeakUp’s failure—however benevolent its intentions, the group’s very basis is an act of dominating women, not of empowering them...