I realize that articles regarding sexual assault on campus are not normally found on my blog. Nor is this a topic which my readers, if they were aware of the specific case to be discussed, were likely to be sitting by their computers waiting for my opinion on the matter. However, as you will see, I have strongly held personal beliefs regarding this topic and feel it is an appropriate time to discuss them.
This weekend I have been reading about a guy named Brock Turner, a former swimmer at Stanford who was convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman outside a fraternity party – more specifically, in a field behind a dumpster. The woman wrote and read in court a very powerful impact statement which you should take time out of your day to read. There is currently a lot of discussion about how Brock’s six month jail sentence – reportedly given because prison would be too hard on him – is ludicrous. And it is. But that’s avoiding the real problem here.
Before I delve into what I believe, based on personal experience, to be the real problem, I’d like to pause for a moment and head off a few comments I can envision being posted soon after I publish this article. While I personally would not drink until I passed out simply for health reasons, an adult’s choice to do so should not be punishable by rape. I’d also like to say that while in the gun world we focus on guns as a solution for violent crime including rape and sexual assault, guns are not the answer to every crime, and I don’t think carrying a gun would have helped the young lady at the Stanford party, or even the majority of sexual assaults in the United States.
With that said – reading the details of her attack brought back memories of my time in college, and something that happened, or almost happened, while I was at a party in the fraternity house at which I lived for a semester or so.
As some of you may know, I started college early. I certainly focused on academics part of the time, but I’d seen Animal House and wanted to experience some of the fun and camaraderie and history lessons seen in that classic of American cinema.
However, not many fraternities would take a 16 year old pledge, either by choice or according to their bylaws. I found one that would take me (by chance a national fraternity that was about to set up a chapter on campus) and began participating in meetings, activities, and after we took over a house vacated by a fraternity on a five year suspension, plenty of parties involving the generous consumption of alcohol. While I wasn’t everyone’s best friend in the fraternity, some of my “brothers” and I became pretty close.
At one such party, a girl passed out after drinking too much. Some of the guys took her into the vice president’s room and put her on the bed so she could sleep it off. A short while later, the treasurer beckoned me down a hallway away from the main party, where I had been trying and failing to impress girls, and into the doorway of the president’s room. I was a little slow on the uptake, but soon realized that he either wanted me to join him in raping the unconscious girl or to just go ahead and do so on my own. She was at the time fully clothed, so I don’t think anything had happened to that point, but I refused whatever his exact request was and went to make something of a fuss about it with the fraternity vice president, then stood outside the room for a while. After that, I was persona non grata in the fraternity – not that I was the coolest kid to begin with.
I’m not telling this story to impress anyone – really all I did was decline to participate in a rape, which is about the minimum level of acceptable behavior for a human being.
I am telling this story because I don’t think Brock Turner got the idea to take this girl behind a dumpster, partially disrobe her, and shove his fingers inside her limp form all on his own.
In my opinion, the real problem is that he didn’t get to a point in his life where he thought it was acceptable to do all of that (lacking consent) without a clear lack of moral guidance at home and an example of how to behave at school.
His father wrote the judge a letter asking for probation, and I think all or nearly all of the answers I was seeking as to how this happened may be found within the father’s despicably self-centered pleadings. As with the impact statement above, I would recommend you read it in its entirety.
Most telling to me is that while it claims Brock is sorry for having hurt those involved, the only specific people he mentions as having been hurt are members of his own family. It’s as if he’s willing the woman involved to not exist. And while he talks about spelling tests and academics and athletics, he seems to confuse achievement in those areas with character. Character is not what drives you when everyone is watching, but reading that letter, it’s clear to me that Brock was raised only to care about what happened when everyone was watching. “How fast can you swim? How many words can you spell? How high is your GPA?” There’s nothing about “What are you going to do when you’re alone with someone who is vulnerable?”
To be clear, my dad never sat me down and said “Son, don’t rape people.” He simply set the example that my mom, his wife, was an equal. He gave me books in which men were men and didn’t have to subjugate women in order to feel manly. He did a million other things, but of course he wasn’t alone in making me who I was that night at a party, a teenage boy desperately trying to fit in with the older, cooler kids. Without his guidance, though, I don’t know who I would have been that night.
Shortly before that party I had participated, along with members of my fraternity, in a fundraiser for Take Back The Night, which is an event dedicated to ending sexual and relationship violence. The guy who tried to get me to rape that unconscious girl was there too, smiling at all the girls, paying lip service to an idea he clearly didn’t believe in. When we were done with the fundraiser we left and that was that. Other than wanting to put a check mark in the volunteer box in a visible way, we had no more interest or motivation to attend that event than we would have had in picking up trash along the road. Several years after I dropped out to join the military (which was soon after that party), that fraternity was kicked off campus for unrelated and repeated allegations of rape.
Last year, I took part in the planning committee for Take Back The Night at U of A. This basically consisted of going to meetings and speaking up only when I felt it was appropriate, which wasn’t very often because the other members knew what they were doing. When the event came around, some fraternities showed their faces for the opening walk around campus but didn’t stick around to listen to women (and men) who’d been sexually assaulted tell their stories. It was unsurprising but still disappointing to see that nothing had changed in a dozen years.
I am also telling this story because I’m tired of feeling like I’m the only straight guy with a vested interest in this conversation. There were gay guys at the booth we had at the center of campus trying to get people involved, but let’s face it, no 20 year old straight male athlete or fraternity bro is going to listen to what a gay college student has to say about sex with women. I don’t quite know how I can reach those kids with my message that you are not more of a man if you have sex with an unconscious woman who cannot give consent, but I’m going to try, and I think you should too.
Thank you for posting this.
Great article Andrew. While not a true firearms-related piece, not everything worth saying has anything to do with guns. I think you hit the nail on the head in that there are a great deal of people wandering the earth that weren’t taught morals by their parents for whatever reason. The snowball effect kicks in since children without a strong moral code will wind it challenging to instill morals in their own children down the road. Please keep fighting the good fight, regardless of the topic.
I have always respected your insight. Now I know it extends beyond our hobby. You chose ideas and the very words I would have myself and I am very glad to see you take advantage of whatever forum you have to attempt to demonstrate to young men not that they ought to avoid violating woman for fear of retribution- but because that simply isn’t how a respectable person could ever act. It aggravates me as well to be without even the means of communicating to the misguided youth of the world, (especially in the viral generation where completely unimportant messages get passed so prolifically), much less the magical ability to revolutionize their perspective, to make them get it. Prevention is less effective when we focus on instilling fear of punishment rather than simply raising respectable human beings, and I wish she had focused more on that aspect in her letter but I can certainly imagine being more concerned with seeing something closer to justice done when it is that real. I don’t know what we’re going to do. And that pisses the shit outta me. Thank you for bringing this up in a community that probably needs to hear it more than the echo chambers of BuzzFeed and Huffington. I hope to expand the voice.
Thank you… going beyond the echo chamber is exactly why I decided to write this.
If, by the age one usually enters college, one does not know that it is abhorrent and wrong to sexually assault anyone much less an unconscious person what really, can anyone tell one to dissuade such behavior? I’d wager not much, if anything.
However, I refuse to condemn anyone or any group of being more likely than not to sexually assault women. Any report of sexual assault should be investigated for the crime that is, period. I loathe the tendency we now have that men have to be taught not to rape or that every boy is a rapist who hasn’t yet been caught. College women are less likely than their non-college-attending counterparts to be raped.
Well said. Gentlemen have always been in short supply. Unfortunately the amoral rapist is more and more the norm. Thats one of the many reasons I carry. All one has to do is look at the political mob attacking people for having a different idea or the Muslim refugees heinous acts in Europe with the rape game. I hope those frat brothers realize that if they get blind drunk or drugged, they may find that those “brothers” might make them the next victim.
Slainte
well said.
Isn’t it astonishing how hard it is to get some people understand the first step in not doing wrong is to not do wrong?
Gay dude here, recently out of college. The reason straight guys never want to get involved with this kind of thing is that these people run them, and deliberately make the atmosphere as hostile as possible. And recently it’s been noticed that gay men are still men, so we’ve lost the ability to speak in favour of a welcoming environment without being called “homo-misogynists”.
The most important thing to remember is that the organizations holding the creepy screaming marches don’t really care about these problems. It’s all status and virtue signalling, just like “Disarm PSU” “die-ins” or invading and shutting down every board of trustees meeting.
That last one is two hours of raw footage, but skipping through it for a minute or two is a real education in the state of college activism.
Here was the group I was involved with. I was welcomed and made to feel that my contributions were valuable. No screaming occurred.
Great post – thank you so much for sharing, and being so open about your experience as well. Your response is spot on and I hope shared widely!
Very good article. Like your father, I too, gave my son books and watched movies about when men were men. He’s an infantry Marine now so I guess sometimes those “lessons” work. Stay true to yourself! I’m sure your father is as proud of you as I am of my son. Always Faithful
It is annoying to see people repeat the myth that one in four women are sexually assaulted or raped. The number is about 1 out of 146 women that have reported as a crime according to the FBI. Now true, not all are reported, so the actual number is more, but nowhere near 1:4.
There was a study that came up with 1:4, but it was not properly done because most people did not respond to the survey, so it suffered from “non-response bias.”
Wait, who said it was one in four? I don’t remember saying that.
Robert,
Andrew did not say 1 in 4 but that number is actually low by most standards, as it only accounts for surveyed females. This number does not come from one survey but thousands of surveys compiled by various colleges, some making the survey mandatory as part of graduate paperwork. The amount reported to law enforcement is not the same as the amount students report being sexually assaulted when surveyed. A lot of LE agencies have been slow to reform the way they handle sexual assault, making reporting a difficult and sometime traumatic experience. I am not speaking as someone lacking in experience in the matter. I am an LEO that is part of the Title IX team at a prestigious west coast college.
Andrew, I appreciate your perspective very much.
One of the best, Thanks for sharing it.
I agree with you completely. I’m not young and hopefully my outlook on life is not completely skewed. But it appears that in too many instances a sense of honor, ethics and morality is not part of the cultural imperative. There are boundaries that no honorable person should ever consider crossing. You are aware of that and I applaud your article and your thoughts. God bless you, Andrew.
Well said, well said. It is a topic that hasn’t been addressed in this manner in many places. That a man doesn’t abuse others is a foreign concept to many. Thank you.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experience, Andrew. This is good language for guns culture. Instead of focusing solely on prevention, which has value, there needs to be a change in the way that we teach our young men.
I do believe that the easy accessibility to pornography and the incredibly graphic and abusively perverse nature of virtually all modern pornography is a HUGE fucking problem. I recently read that the 12-17 males were the largest “consumers” (their word, not mine) of pornography in the US, although females in the same age were fewer but significant. That is laying the foundations of social and sexual identity with poison. There is a some alarming data regarding some of the consequences of “using” (their word..) pornography, such as erectile dysfunction, lack of ability to feel intimacy, and divorce.
And the nature of the content is particularly disturbing…. at least it is supposed to be. Ted Bundy, who was actually a very intelligent bag of shit, made some comments regarding pornography during an interview conduced sometime after being put on death row:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1NWfys7q4x4
Modern pornography is the most damaging, violent, abusive, and hateful media that has ever been allowed in a so-called ‘developed’ nation, and its something that most parents are either unaware or unconcerned with.
A few days ago I was on Instagram looking at #pnwwonderland and I scrolled down a few bars and was surprised to see a very graphic photo. When I reported the photo, I saw the hashtags.
Whomever did this was targeting children, using many hashtags, but several very specific ones that were predominantly frequented by young children…. Goodbye Instagram.
If we want to unteach our youth, we need to talk about porn.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for writing.
Wray
Ps, Hey Brock, fuck you and your POS Dad.
you are 100% correct when you say the penalty for getting shit-hammered should not be rape adjectives leave my vocabulary as i seek one to enhance my disgust for the act ,that said where the hell were her running buddies ,what was she thinking getting hammered in that landscape this is a pretty nice bit of real estate around stanford ,did that lull her into the lax attitude of imagined safety,me i don’t have a vagina at risk i would think by the time you reach college ,and stanford denotes a certain level of intellect ,that she would have a modicum ,of survival instincts,that says don’t pass out around a tribe of of drunken savages with eternal hard-ons ,but regretfully no i am not blaming the victim ,but if she had just a tea cup full of wariness ,instead of a keg of party she would be happy and safe not her fault ,but pay attention