Trigger Warning: This piece contains discussion of sexual assault
Author’s Note: This piece uses female pronouns to describe the survivor and male pronouns to describe the perpetrator. While this is not an uncommon case, survivors and assailants can be individuals of any gender identity or sexual orientation. While this article reflects experiences of my own and my peers, I acknowledge that this is not every Kenyon student’s experience.
For many, college and partying go hand in hand. Alumni will reminisce about the “good old days” of drinking with friends, stumbling around campus in the dark, and being dared to do things they would never dream of doing now. Regardless of the college they attend, incoming freshmen come from all sorts of backgrounds and levels of experience with the phenomenon of party culture, some having never been to a party (but wanting to), some having no interest, and others having many wild tales of their own from high school. This is no different at Kenyon.
It goes without saying—but should be said anyway—that many students have not been exposed to alcohol before college, and are therefore more prone to abuse it. Alcohol invariably plays into sexual harassment and assault, as one cannot give consent to sexual activity while severely intoxicated. Perpetrators of sexual assault often target those under the influence of substances as they have less power. According to RAINN, more than 50% of campus sexual assaults occur between August and November.
Like most of its peer institutions, Kenyon freshmen represent a broad spectrum of interest and experience with regards to partying. However, freshmen at Kenyon can’t throw parties in freshmen-only living spaces, so they rely heavily on upperclassmen for anything larger than a pre-game among a handful of friends. The options presented to freshmen in this position are rather polarizing: all-campus parties or private parties. Both all-campuses and private parties are run by upperclassmen, be it organizations or simply friend groups. In this, there is both comfort and discomfort, the latter particularly felt by female-identifying freshmen.
All-Campus Parties
All-campus parties, as the name suggests, are open parties thrown by Greek organizations and, occasionally, clubs. They are particularly popular in the first semester when freshmen are looking to meet new people and organizations have more time to allot to event planning. All-campuses are advertised by their respective organization anytime from a week before to just a day before the actual event, usually marketed as having a vague theme such as “Beach Party.” You should know that people rarely abide by the theme and that I was one of a mere few to show up to the “Summer of Love” party in flared jeans (It was a great disappointment). Posters also anticipate the event running between 10 pm and 2 am, though this is rarely the case—few come before 10:30, and Campus Safety (Campo) often shuts them down before 2.
For a first semester freshman, they often go like this: you arrive fashionably late, say, 10:30 or 11, and a decently long line trails outside the door. Hosting students cluster around the entrance, hurriedly asking you if you’re “under” (age), and if you say yes they will draw X’s on the backs of each hand in permanent marker. Many times you will be asked to show your K-Card, to prove that you’re both a student and that you are under or of age. However, this doesn’t always happen, especially later in the semester.
Unless the party is nearly empty, as can sometimes happen, the first feeling one registers is simply sweltering, wet heat. Perhaps this is exactly what you’d expect of a room packed with drinking, dancing people. There is usually a corner where cheap beer is poured into cheaper cups, and it is chugged by underage students before Campo arrives. It’s a chaotic corner, and those that occasionally sip their beer and mill around often look lost in its tumult.
On the dance floor, you might surround yourself with friends, familiar faces to dance and laugh uncomfortably with. However, the dance floor is where you must acknowledge a significant divide in the freshman experience. For a female-identifying first year student, it can be a pretty terrifying place.
Around your immediate circle of friends, upperclassmen, and, more generally, strangers dance with their circles of friends. There are of course the occasional “excuse me”s of someone stumbling—either due to the darkness or the alcohol—out of the horde and into the next room or into the crisp outside air. But there are also small groups or individuals that seem to lurk by the clearly freshmen circles, particularly by the predominantly female groups. Usually, these lurkers are harmless, though rather intimidating, but sometimes they invite themselves into the familiar, friendly circle.
At one Old Kenyon all-campus, a friend of mine was quite literally pulled from my group and into the arms of an unknown upperclassman boy, who had been lurking for a song or two just outside the clump of our freshmen friends. No words were exchanged, no introductions, and yet she had to, with the help of another friend, wrench herself from his grasp. I wanted to say something, to ask if she was okay, but the music was too loud, the room was too dark, and they were too drunk.
I wish I could say something similar didn’t happen at every all-campus I’ve been to. This doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy dancing with friends, listening to music, and meeting new people—all things that can and have happened at all-campuses before. In fact, I would venture to say that a stranger being interested in you and dancing with you is not necessarily a bad or dangerous thing. But the uncomfortable reality that an older, oftentimes male, student might watch you for a while just to forcibly remove you from a comfortable space—especially if you are noticeably drunk—is not a welcome one. What’s worse is the reality that this will likely happen to someone you know every night.
Private Parties
So you must be wondering, what alternatives are there? Many organizations throw private parties or pre-games for members, the latter occasionally being open to the public through word-of-mouth invitation. Closed parties—primarily those of sports teams and Greek organizations—are smaller than all-campuses, often held in a living space, and those attending know everyone else, something that probably makes the space feel safer.
However, this sense of safety does not account for predatory behavior within these smaller spaces, felt most strongly by outsiders invited by friends on the team or in the society. One of my friends notes of hookups at these parties that “sex is… [an] expectation” because “you don’t need to [walk] far.” For this reason, those that make advances often do so more aggressively, as in this more intimate space, they expect more from a hookup than with someone even more removed from them at an all-campus party.
Another friend of mine recalls being invited to a private party while at a larger Old Kenyon one. She was talking with a male friend, who was rudely interrupted by an upperclassman stranger, inviting my friend to his party while not even acknowledging who she was talking to. This speaks to another aspect of smaller parties that can be uncomfortable: the unspoken competition between hosts to bring in as many freshmen girls as they can.
Private parties are particularly difficult to first semester freshmen who are nervous about meeting new people, as dancing is not the main event. A lot of private parties center around a drinking game, and thus those that don’t drink can’t participate and those that do can become very intoxicated very quickly. Intoxicated freshmen invariably have less power than the upperclassmen who live there, and this only furthers the potential danger of a closed party for freshmen, particularly freshmen girls.
So here I am, a semester older, a semester of experience now under my belt. I hesitate to write off parties entirely—while I don’t drink, I do love dancing with friends, meeting new people, and engaging in tomfoolery more generally. But I might be writing off Kenyon parties. While we can’t pretend any of the problems and dangers of party culture presented in this article are unique to Kenyon, I think we currently have an epidemic of predatory behavior that is not like our peer institutions.
My twin sister attends Occidental College in Los Angeles, another liberal arts school that many of my friends here at Kenyon also applied to. I contacted her while writing this article, asking if some of the phenomena I’ve observed also takes place there. I fully expected it to and was already writing my concluding paragraph about how “this is a widespread issue” when she replied.
My sister, who has attended her fair share of on-campus, off-campus, open, and closed parties remarked that she’d “never personally seen an older student touch or confront a freshman without clear permission” at her college. I was pretty dumbfounded. This is not to say that it doesn’t happen, but clearly, it occurs with less frequency. Therein lies Kenyon’s problem.
I hope that those of you who self-selected to read an article like this one will consider this power dynamic between our older and younger students and initiate discussion about our unique party culture. Have you seen behavior like this? Have you stood by and let it happen, or did you intervene? Is this normal for you? And more importantly, is this something we normalize as a student body?
Sources: 1,2 Image Credit: Feature,1,2,3,4,5