I thought the first time I experienced rape culture was August 27, 2016. I was at a party that was winding down when I found myself surrounded by people making their exit. The guy to my left looked deep into my eyes with a sinister stare and shoved his fingers up my shorts and inside of me. It was easy enough to identify what was going on. He was a stranger: the quintessential attacker. It was a party. It was dark. It was the first week of college. And it was the football house.
Yet that’s the problem with rape culture. Sexual assault is more than a stranger at a party. It’s your date, your friend, your partner, anyone. We tend to limit sexual violence in our minds to a shadowy, masculine figure holding a weapon to force the weak feminine form into the submission of her body. But the sad truth about rape is anyone can commit rape and anyone can be raped. Attackers also don’t need a gun or a knife to commit these acts; they use drugs, alcohol, physical or emotional dominance and more often than not, the sheer element of surprise.
Rape culture is more than just rape. Rape culture, according to Oxford Dictionary is “a society or environment whose prevailing social attitudes have the effect of normalizing or trivializing sexual assault and abuse.” In laymen’s terms, that basically means tolerating any of the sexist acts we see so often in our society — catcalling unsolicited dick pictures or sexual harassment — lead to a normalization of these actions, causing them to escalate to worse actions, like sexual assault. As someone who has received more than their fair share of catcalls, unsolicited pictures and sexual harassment in a variety of contexts, I had no idea how much of a problem these actions were. They always made me feel uncomfortable and often unsafe, but they occurred so frequently I’ve learned to ignore them and push them out of my mind even if they come to haunt me at night.
One instance that always bothered me occurred when I was 16 and working at a local pizza restaurant. My coworkers were mostly men several years older than me and tended to be very friendly. For the guys I was close to, I thought nothing of any comments or touching that occurred. One of them even requested I call him “Papi,” which coincided with some pretty racy comments online.
Yik Yak, an anonymous messaging app, had postings about hot hostesses in the area. When they started talking about my restaurant and since I was the only female hostess at the time, with the majority of the shifts and fit the given descriptions, it was easy enough to figure out who they were talking about. Soon enough, there were 40 comments about me ranging from bad pizza puns about my ass to where I went to school to what I was like in person. These escalated to what these anonymous users planned to do to me once I turned 18. Of course, at 16 I was flattered and encouraged the original comments, but they quickly spun out of hand. Those comments scared me, knowing how vulnerable I was to others and how easy it would be for someone to take advantage of me, especially if so many people knew where I worked and went to school.
I eventually quit that job resolving to not return after turning 18 hoping to ward off those perverted comments from becoming a reality. Unfortunately, my story is not a unique one as many women are subjected to unsolicited pictures, revenge porn and constant degradation in person and online. These kinds of occurrences are so common in our society that we often try to ignore them or blame them on ourselves. Yet no matter how we try to ignore elements of rape culture, they continue to occur and lead to so many people dealing with the deep trauma of sexual assault.
It’s not enough to say we need to end rape culture without a starting point. We need better sexual assault and harassment discussions in college as these issues are rampant on college campuses. Ithaca College has programs that run during orientation and another one that freshmen are supposed to attend in their seminar classes sometime during the semester. However, the orientation sexual assault and harassment lecture is so short lived and pushed in with everything else going on during the three days it isn’t surprising to see most students have forgotten what was taught in those sessions. Ithaca does try to encourage students to go to another sexual assault and harassment talk during their first semester, but it’s not a required program and it comes several weeks after the beginning of school, leaving students like me without help and often triggers to the assault they experienced just a week before.