On Monday I went to Kate Harding’s talk on sexual assault. I went to this talk because I was interested in hearing what she had to say, and because I personally have experienced sexual assault. Listening to talk, I thought that maybe my experiences could someday be used to help other students and victims in the future. Kate is very inspiring, she even shared many of her own experiences with the audience. I hope others in the audience felt inspired as well, and maybe we can help initiate cultural changes so that one day sexual assault will become a rare occurrence.

When something like sexual assault happens to someone, often they want to forget about it due to shame and what is defined as “rape culture.” We need a safe haven where anyone who has been victimized can go, where they can be taken care of and their stories believed. We also need to make changes in our culture, education, and media. Even today rape scenes are portrayed on television and online. Younger generations are growing up without the knowledge of consensual sex. And certain groups of people are targeted since their stories are less likely to be believed or acknowledged.

It is clear that changes need to be made. So what can we do about it? How can you make a difference? Don’t support rape culture, report things you see online or in media, stop a friend from doing something you know isn’t right. Every one of us can make a difference. Do it for yourself, your friends, siblings, and future generations.

as a white, middle-class male, i’ve always been pretty insulated from rape. not necessarily in the sense that i’m sheltered, but in the sense that it’s just not something i’m ever really personally confronted with. i think about the nirvana song rape me more often than i think about why our campus has blue lights. i try to stay reasonably informed about gender politics, but that insulation from rape has left me, perhaps, a little under-educated on the nuances of rape culture. as such i was excited to go to this event, so i could learn a little about what i, as a male in college, could think about or do differently in order to be a better ally to the women around me. that said, this event felt a little underwhelming to me. that could, of course, just be due to the limited time allotted for the event, but i don’t think that that was the issue here. i guess i had hoped that we would delve into some aspect of the problem of rape culture with more depth than we ultimately did. for example, we talked about how sexual education at a younger age could be a solution to the dangerous way many men conceptualize sex and consent, but we didn’t talk very much about what such an education might actually look like. we also touched briefly upon the question of what should be done with rapists or sex offenders and again, i felt unsatisfied with the directionlessness of the conversation. the discussion never seemed to progress much further than restating that the problem of rape culture exists in the first place.

at any rate, i was happy to have the conversation at all, as i think it’s a timely and an important one. for that reason i’ll still award this event a 10/10.