ast night I went to see the film Calling the Ghosts: A Story about Rape, War and Women, playing in Loew as part of Sexual Assault Awareness Week. There were only about thirteen people at the film, including my two friends, those who organized the event, and myself. The poor attendance seemed to illustrate the campus’s attitude about rape and the assumed isolation of our experience.
As I was reading the article in the D about the Zete papers this morning, I could not help but think of the film I had watched only hours earlier. As I stepped into Collis to grab some food, I could not stop myself from shaking as these two experiences, the film-that record of distant horror- and my own Dartmouth experience, seemed to merge. People get upset, but we move on. I fought back tears, checked my blitz, and continued my day.
I have friends and family members who have been raped. I have been harassed, assaulted, and demeaned numerous times; and yet I still cannot admit that I live in a culture where women are denigrated citizens, and sex is too often more about power than pleasure. Whether it is a woman calling herself Mrs. George Goodfellow, anyone using the term ‘pussy’ to mean weak, or the phrase ‘suck my dick’ to subordinate the typically female role, we must realize that it is not just actions that speak of our problems but the very system and language in which we operate.
I am a senior now. I have never played pong or attended a Greek formal, dated or even hooked up with a member of the Greek system. Nor am I in a house. I have lately wondered why my intuition (not to degrade the intelligence of my decision, but these were gut calls) kept me away from the dominant social norms here. Why, even as I looked into the eyes of a man who I really liked and to who I was intensely attracted, did I feel that he could never put me before his brothers? The loyalty that people pay to their fraternities frightens me.
The fact that men here have told me that they would not speak against a ‘brother’ who had raped someone convinces me that I was not wrong to distrust most Dartmouth men. Don’t misread that. I know that one man’s actions are not every man’s, but they do reflect the misogyny encouraged by certain organizations. I love men. I love people. I just don’t love that I could become [Brother D]’s [Woman X].
One woman in the film, a survivor of the Omarska Camp in Bosnia, spoke about her attitude toward global women’s issues before rape and war had become realities of her life. She acknowledged that like most of us, she had ignored the many news stories about women struggling for respect and demanding change, attention, and control.
Like me, the women in the film did not believe that the horrors they experienced could happen to them. Of course rape happens here all the time, but not as systematically as in Bosnia. There is no structure in my experience like they knew. Right? The makers of the film chose to include images of women from around the world protesting, crying, screaming about the horrors they had seen and those who had not lived through them. These images were not unfamiliar. They were the same ones that I choose, not to ignore necessarily, but to actively forget daily.
Rape is a tool of war. Rape in all forms is an assertion of power. Now, we are privileged people. We are not desperate. We are not forced to act as we might if our lives were not so easy. Yet, our culture is set up so that power is asserted over women all the time. This is the given in our experience. We do not often question the essential quality of our sexism.
I wonder, if we were at war, if we were angry, if we felt true rage, how difficult it would be for rape mentality to plainly assert itself? If we were given the unhappy occasion to reveal the hate inside us and unleash it on each other, would the sexism instilled in our culture become something none of us, as we are now, could ignore?
We do not need to be at war to commit crimes of war, and I do not believe that the mentality on this campus is anything less than obscured hate and impropriety.
