The 'Failures' of Sexual Liberation?

I find it disturbingly funny when I hear people talk about rape culture like it’s this new phenomenon. As if rape didn’t happen 50 years ago, as if something about today’s youth culture (and their “hook-up culture”? Their “feminist culture”?) is conducive to rapes on college campuses, in the military, in high schools, in prisons, in public spaces…

My landlord for my off-campus house next semester (holy cow I have a house! I’m not homeless!) is a Tufts alum who graduated 20-something years ago. When we first visited the house, he mentioned to my three female housemates and me about how college has become a more dangerous environment since he was our age.

“College isn’t the way it used to be,” he said. “It’s so hard for girls these days. I hear about all this sexual assault at colleges and I think about how much things have changed.”

I know he had good intentions in making this statement, but it strikes me as unbelievable that some people think that rape didn’t happen in those glory days of the Reagan administration or the pre-civil rights era.

Unfortunately, some of my peers seem to believe this absurd claim. Tufts senior Edward Lowe wrote an op-ed earlier this month about what he described as the “failure of sexual liberation,” and his concern for his sisters who will soon attend colleges rampant with rape and hook-up culture (which he seems to see as interchangeable).

At one point, Lowe asks, “how is it that professors and adults a century ago understood the passions and aggressions of young adults and found effective ways of dealing with it while we, having 'progressed' as much as we have, can only offer more punishment after the fact?”

In other words, this Tufts student wonders why he hears so much about sexual assault today and thus assumes that this means sexual assault didn’t happen in the past. Has it occurred to him that sexual assault did happen in the past, among college students, but that maybe victims were even more likely to be blamed and ridiculed for even speaking about it than they are today?

My mom told me that if someone were raped when she was a college-aged student, she (or he) probably wouldn’t tell anyone, much less call it rape. Victims would usually not talk about it because they would feel embarrassed and would feel that they had brought rape upon themselves.

In other words, we didn’t hear about sexual assault in the past because no one was talking about it. Today, many, many victims still do not speak about the suffering they’ve gone through for the same reasons that victims years ago didn’t speak up. But isn’t it a step in the right direction that we’re now actually reading articles and hosting events about sexual assault instead of completely ignoring the issue?

Lowe seems to think that giving women autonomy over their own bodies and sexual choices is causing, or at least worsening, the problem of sexual assault. He suggests that the “passions and aggressions of young adults” (or, let’s be real, he’s talking specially about young men) can’t control themselves in the face of a woman who chooses to embrace her sexuality rather than hide it as best as she can.

It’s insulting and simply untrue to assume that men are animals who “can’t help but” rape a woman because of her perceived sexual attractiveness -- or, more accurately, her very existence. And conflating hook-up culture on modern college campuses (which isn’t nearly as “rampant” as some people suggest) with rape culture only perpetuates victim blaming by implying that rape “happens now” because women are more likely to be granted sexual autonomy.