After reading John Spofforth’s letter about my column in Monday’s paper, which asked, among other things, whether “butt dancing and oral sex clubs” in the ’90s “increased the incidence of casual sex, rape and venereal disease,” I called my dad. He and I agreed that the letter specifically isn’t something that can be addressed in its confusing state of misapplied statistics, but that there is a general disconnect in inter-generational discussions about rape culture. My dad and I obviously aren’t the only voices representing our respective generations, but this week, I bring you our thoughts on speaking the same language when we talk adult-to-adult about this issue.
Defining “rape culture” as an umbrella term for behaviors, beliefs and institutions that normalize sexual violence, we think, is the first step. Dad describes his first impression of the phrase “rape culture” as a new kind of “feminist jargon.” He adds that this traditional gendered view of rape, as something men do to women, is something I need to account for when I argue that the anti-rape culture movement is about humans fighting for safety, not a women’s movement reclaiming space from men: “That men could be raped and women could be rapists — that’s not something we talked about, and including people who don’t identify as male or female — that makes sense, but it wasn’t a part of our mainstream reality.”
In a lot of ways, my dad and I have to agree to disagree when we talk about social media and rape culture. “It’s so easy to be anonymous and hateful online,” he says, saying that the spectator aspect of the Steubenville, Maryville, Mo., and OU cases might have happened in his generation, but never with that kind of cyber audience. Usually, when we talk about rape culture, my dad only stops his diatribes about the evils of Internet culture if we can reframe these rape cases as old problems enabled by new tools.
When we talk about changing a sexist mass media, my dad and I realize that we have very different ideas about what constitutes a harmful media message. His central concerns are violent video games and hip-hop music that dehumanize women, whereas I see advertisements that treat women as objects to sell products as sending just as destructive a message. We do agree that mainstream media isn’t doing masculinity any favors either.
“What I see happening on college campuses around the issue of sexual assault doesn’t make sense,” my dad said, “unless I think of this as your generation’s civil rights movement.”
We may not have answers about the butt-dancing clubs, but we both promise to keep translating our opinions on rape culture and making campuses where all students feel safe.
Bekki Wyss is a junior studying English literature. How do you talk to people from other generations about rape culture? Tell Bekki about it at rw225510@ohiou.edu.
