There have been a series of sexual assaults near the UC Berkeley campus recently, mostly targeting women walking at night wearing skirts. The assaulter comes up from behind and tries to penetrate the woman with a finger. There have been 20 reported assaults so far. Sometimes the women were walking in small groups, sometimes walking alone, very frequently they were wearing a skirt or a dress, but sometimes not. In response to the attacks, women's groups on campus organized a "Skirt Rally" today both to show solidarity and to speak out against sexual assault and the victim-blaming tendencies we've noticed. Too often, the response to these sorts of incidences is "Well, just don't wear a skirt" when the real issue isn't what clothes we wear but what are the societal conditions that made this violence possible? This is unacceptable, whether you're wearing a skirt or a dress or pants or shorts or a ski suit or a muumuu. We should be able to feel safe in our community, period.
There is an article that covers the story whose first line reads: "Leggings under skirts, for many Cal coeds, is the latest defense against a serial molester who runs up from behind, lifts women's skirts and assaults them."
Why is it somehow okay to call female students co-eds, in this day and age? Because, of course, the prototypical unmarked university student is assumed to be male by default and a student who happens to be female is Other. Never mind that we are 50% of the population. And I googled "coeds" to see where the term is most frequently used. I get a page filled with porn links: Sexy Coeds Get Down and Dirty, Busty College Coeds. All of the links are porn. Why the author of the article elected to use "coeds" in this context rather than, say, women, is something worth thinking about. I feel overwhelmed by the amount of sexism I see ALL the time, EVERYwhere, CONSTANTLY being reinscribed. It wears me down.
Also, the article says that leggings under skirts are our latest defense...
1. It's cold and rainy. We wear leggings not to defend ourselves against assault but because it's 50 degrees outside.
2. Oh yeah, let me just wear these leggings so that if a man creeps up behind me while I am walking home and grabs me and sexually assaults me, he will have to deal with a thin layer of fabric and will not be able to penetrate too deeply. Then I'll be safe.
It's not about the clothes we wear, it's not necessarily about whether he was "successful" in penetrating; it's about personal safety and violation no matter how "far" he got and no matter what we chose to wear that day. It's about pervasive gendered power relations and one man's assertion of that power. This is a specific instance of an institutional condition, not a freak occurrence, and it is not appropriate to point fingers at the sexy busty coeds in short skirts (and no leggings!) who were obviously just asking for it.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Coeds use leggings as defense against sexual assault? Give me a break..
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/12293
For some reason, I thought of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kancho
Oh my God I hate the "coed" thing so much! You would be amazed how often old guys use this term in faculty meetings. And every time they use it I object, the department chair backs me on it, and it doesn't change a thing. Grrr.
As to the issue of assaulting from behind...this is different but related. In the bars around here, on really crowded nights, it's very common for men to molest women from behind - not attempting to penetrate them, but just running their hands over your ass and thighs. I seriously had never encountered this until I moved to Laramie, and I've hung out in some very crowded bars in Seattle and LA. So I now make a habit of wearing boots with chunky heels when I go out on a night when it's likely to be crowded - for one thing it makes me tall enough that I can often spot my friends over the crowd if we get separated. But also, when the molesta-hands start in, I pick my knee up and come down with my heel as hard as I can on his instep, then turn around and calmly say "please keep your hands off my ass." If you catch his instep right this causes a lot of pain (like doubled-over limping pain, and occasionally a yelp), prevents him from seemlessly blending into the crowd when you turn around, and shames him in front of everyone. I've actually done this three times now, and in my experience, everyone nearby stops what they're doing and looks at him in disgust, or laughs at him. Nobody has ever questioned my implicit claim that he was pawing me, which shows you how prevalent this really is around here. This definitely puts a stop to the wandering hands.
Hopefully the assualter in this case will get pepper-sprayed or kicked in the balls to put an end to his career. I'd be tempted to recruit my friends to walk around together in short skirts with cans of pepper spray just to try to catch him. And pepper spray would immobilize him long enough for the police to arrive.
I'm from Britain and going to uni in my home country, and I never heard the term 'coed' until I came on Feministing. So I guess it's an American thing.
Wait... WHAT?!
Because women never get raped when they're wearing pants. Sureeee.
Yeah, there has been a fellow nicknamed The Groper who was going around my campus for about a month, grabbing girls from behind and then biking off...The day he was finally caught, I almost had to leave one of my classes because a couple of other students were talking about how "some of the girls didn't mind" and then a girl piped in that she hates when guys "treat her like one of those girls who dresses like a slut" because unlike those girls she doesn't "deserve" it.