Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I am not anti-sex. Not only am I not anti-sex, but I whole-heartedly support the frank and open discussion of sex and sexuality. At Dartmouth especially, I believe this to be crucial.

I also want make it plain that feminism is not anti-sex. Despite what the propaganda of the feminist backlash and the extremely well-funded and powerful forces of reactionary politics on this campus would have you believe, feminism does not entail a disavowal of sex or pleasure. Indeed, feminism has been in large part responsible for breaking down the taboos against speaking about sex, especially women’s sexuality. To see evidence of this at Dartmouth, we need only look to the Women’s Resource Center’s Sex Series, one of the few opportunities for women and men here to engage in open and safe conversation about sex.

What feminism actually opposes is the sexual (and physical, and political, and emotional) exploitation of women. Thus, one can understand feminists’ opposition of domestic violence, sexual assault and, sometimes, and more controversially, pornography. The fact of the matter is pornography oftentimes is explicitly misogynist, deeply heterosexist, and just plain anti-woman. Pornography that portrays violence being performed against women is not about sexual pleasure. It is about hatred of women.

But why discuss pornography at Dartmouth? Because this past Friday, the Dartmouth Asian Organization and Korean-American Students Association, funded by COSO, intended to co-sponsor a "Playboy Mansion" party complete with "bunnies." Not only did the College agree to sponsor this event, but female Dartmouth students agreed to dress up as "bunnies" to service the party-attendees. I would never dream of denying anyone the right to dress as they please, to act as they wish and to speak as they choose. But I will noisily protest the glaringly obvious chauvinism inherent to the concept of the "Playboy Mansion" party.

While Playboy is not in the same league as other pornographic magazines, which include much more degrading and exploitative images of women, it still clearly supports the heterosexist and misogynist power structure that has oppressed women for thousands of years. Very clearly, that power structure, which privileges straight white males, is still very much a part of our society. At Dartmouth in the past few weeks, we have discovered that some Psi U brothers consider it perfectly acceptable to scream sexual and racial slurs at women in the middle of campus, and that some men consider it just as acceptable to accost women in the shower.

It is absolute nonsense to consider events like these isolated, given their clear recurrence in our small community. While conservatives and other anti-feminists like to diminish the ramifications such events have, the fact is that these occurrences point to a larger problem, a problem that feminist scholars and activists have pointed to for years. The power of the patriarchy is alive and well here in Hanover, just as it is throughout the rest of the world. Not only does it provide a basis from which misogynist, racist and heterosexist acts to be perpetrated, but it also creates a culture in which those acts are considered harmless, unavoidable, and useless protesting. That culture sanctions rape and anti-gay hate crimes.

A common argument in defense of racist, homophobic and sexist behaviors claims that if those responsible for the action are members of the harmed group itself (they are female or queer) then the actions are somehow validated. The fact that two organizers behind the Playboy Mansion party were women, for instance, was used as a justification for the event. (An unsigned e-mail message from the DAO claims, "our two ‘female’ social chairs came up with it and they were really psyched about [the theme] and had been working hard to put it together, so we decided to support them.") It seems, according to this line of thinking, that since women participate in their own and other women’s oppression, that oppression is somehow excusable. The argument is illogical.

Just because the institutions of patriarchy have been internalized to such a degree that women themselves support their own objectification does not make those institutions in any way legitimate. In fact, that internalization only speaks to the incredible power the patriarchy still holds over women and men.

It is possible for organizations to make mistakes. The fact that the DAO and KASA changed the name of the Playboy Mansion party in response to Dartmouth students’ outrage, points to their sensitivity to peer criticism. Yet the fact that such an event was conceived in the first place indicates that the objectification and exploitation of women’s sexuality is still considered acceptable in our male-dominated culture. To realize that may be unpleasant and disheartening. But to ignore it is to doom ourselves to repeating the mistakes of the past.