A reader quotes a previous one:
You want to get serious about preventing rape? Single-sex dorms, no visitors after ten, doors ajar when there are visitors, room checks by RAs, consumption of alcohol banned, sexual contact beyond first base punished by warning, then formal reprimand, then suspension, then expulsion. Yeah, college will be less fun. But you’ll learn more, and there’s no chance that progressive, sensitive, feminist men will ever rape you in your dorm room.
Rarely has your otherwise insightful, eloquent and attractive readership been so completely full of shit. Have you just not been following the sexual abuse scandals at Pensacola Christian College? Or Bob Jones? Patrick Henry College? And others.
I went to a school like that:
single-sex dorms, no opposite-sex visitors except on specially designated Saturday afternoons (about three a semester, if memory serves), doors ajar during any such visit, no alcohol on campus, no DANCING on campus, PDA reprimanded, and excessive violations expelled.
(On a side note, the expulsion? Only applied to girls. Of course the poor kids coming to my college came from crazy-ass Red State “good Christian families” and had no idea about contraception, so of course pregnancy was a problem, and pregnancy would get you expelled. This was an abortion incentive, plain and simple.)
But buddy you better believe we had a rape problem, and the expulsion policy that your reader touts was a powerful weapon in the hands of an administration determined to cover it up. If you admit to being assaulted, you get expelled for having sex. That is the ONLY reason we hear of fewer rapes from colleges with this sort of policy – because they’re covered up.
This regressive horseshit does nothing more than to promulgate the notion of sexuality as bad, dirty and something to be hushed up and swept out of sight – in other words, rape culture – and these notions of purity always always ALWAYS play right into the hands of straight-up, old-school misogyny, whereby women are a property belonging to men, either their fathers or their future husbands. Shockingly, men who are trained to view women in this way are much more likely to rape.
Update from a reader:
Between the “hookup culture is rape culture” line and your reader’s response to “this regressive horseshit,” there is a middle road is screaming for attention. The first reader’s point should be well taken: empower emotionally under-developed people with the idea that they can make rational decisions about sex and have a bingey good time, and you will likely increase incidences of rape. It’s not blaming rape on sexual progress or chemical liberation; it’s acknowledging that with a benefit comes a cost.
Coming from an evangelical background, I have a lot of sympathy for your second reader; the wholesale application of evangelical university life won’t prevent rape (and it comes with a whole lot of other costs). But they miss the point when citing the Pensacola, Bob Jones, and other Christian college rape scandals. Those are scandals about brutal, systematic administrative cover-ups of rape, not sheer quantity or rates of sexual assault. There is no evidence indicating that the rate of sexual assault is higher or lower at sexually regressive Christian schools. Moreover, your reader concedes that they attended “a school like that.” It may be a question of the grass always growing greener, but “hookup culture” (i.e., a sexuality based on instant and emotionless gratification) is not something I would desire to replicate anywhere (okay, maybe at BJU).
The Dish 