Just because some women may enjoy their chains, does not mean that subordination does not exist. Consent does not eliminate harm. Accepting pornographic roles mean valuing male pleasure and devaluing female pleasure. Sexual pleasure is unequal. Young girls today feel expected to perform oral sex on boys, but feel that it would be abnormal for them to ask for their partners to pleasure them. Sex has become casual to kids, and the ‘hook-up’ culture centers around male pleasure.
3 Creating a Campus Culture of Sexual Respect
Sexual harassment at schools represents a barrier to equality in education. The role of schools is to educate, putting schools in the best position to counter sexually hostile environments through education on sexual respect. Regardless of the civil rights involved in ensuring equal access to educational opportunities, schools everywhere train leaders for the next generation. It is in everyone’s best interest to teach affirmatively the values of respect, that women are not the ‘other’ – the objectified enemy, but rather are future colleagues and collaborators.
We are at a pivotal moment in the United States regarding sexual violence on campus. The US Vice President, in announcing new guidelines for schools in April 2011, looked at the auditorium filled with over 600 students, faculty and community members, and stated: “Look guys. It doesn’t matter what a girl does, no matter how she’s dressed, no matter how much she’s had to drink, it is never okay to touch a woman without her consent … Rape is rape is rape … and no means no.”12
The new guidelines seek to enforce the provisions of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act that provide for equal access to educational opportunities.13 While not directly controlling what schools do, the guidelines present a strong incentive for schools to take a proactive role in preventing sexual violence before it happens by focusing on preventative education. Schools play an enormous role in creating campus community, and have a great deal of power to shape norms based on sexual respect. This requires schools to take steps to prevent pornographic messages from dominating the social scene on campus, and to confront and dismantle the resultant harmful attitudes that degrade women permeating campus culture today. Pornography has been recognized in other contexts to contribute to hostile work environments – it is no less harmful on college campuses and should be treated accordingly.
Just before the publication of the new guidelines, the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the enforcement arm of Title IX, announced an investigation of Yale University for tolerating a toxic sexual culture, which the earlier mentioned rape chants demonstrated, that routinely fostered loud expressions of male dominance on campus. The case has received national attention and has provoked a long-overdue conversation about what we can do to prevent the astoundingly high number of acquaintance rapes on college campuses.14 In a most promising development, Yale announced in May, 2011, that it is suspending all activities and affiliation with the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity for at least 5 years, as well as disciplining some individual members for sexually harassing and intimidating behavior (Miller, 2011).
This is consistent with what I believe schools must do to enable cultures of sexual respect. The project on which I have been working with my students is called the ‘Acquaintance Rape Prevention Project’, and is formulated to transform college campuses to places where equal access to education is a reality. It is an educational project with the following components.
First, it focuses on consciousness-raising. As in the first example with the fraternity email suggesting men rape their ‘favorite freshman skeezas’, when the author of the email was confronted about it, he quickly saw how offensive and degrading it was. Having personally interviewed him, I believe that he was not fully conscious of the implications of his suggestions, but rather reflecting the party scene on campus. After realizing the implications of his harmful email, he agreed to become part of the change through educational programs aimed at men at his college.
The program involves sex-segregated education to develop safe spaces in which to address sensitive issues (Jarrett and Johnson, 2009). The short film The Undetected Rapist by David Lisak demonstrates how many acquaintance rapes are premeditated and planned (Lisak, 2002) and would be shown to both groups early in freshman orientation. The education aimed at men focuses on healthier forms of male bonding that do not involve the sexual exploitation of women. As well, it offers tools for bystander intervention, the brilliant program developed by Jackson Katz called ‘Mentors in Violence Prevention’ (Katz, 2006).
The Acquaintance Rape Prevention Program includes an ‘Empathy Inversion Scale’ for women and men. Studies have shown that men need to develop more empathy in order to prevent them from coercing or forcing sex on another person (Foubert and Perry, 2007). Women, on the other hand, need to decrease the level of empathy for male acquaintances so that they might be better equipped to self-defend when aggressed upon, instead of trying to make sense of why their ‘friend’ would be doing this to them (Rosenfeld, 2011).
The education aimed at women includes reaffirming one’s right to bodily integrity and sexual autonomy. It also raises self-esteem through education about one’s rights (Fallon, 2010). It includes a self-defense program specifically tailored to acquaintance rape situations, as these assaults are much more common on college campuses. Finally, teaching self-defense to individual women promotes a sense of entitlement that reifies one’s rights to bodily integrity. This in turn leads women to feeling both competent and entitled to defend one another.
I refer to this idea of collective self-defense as the ‘Bonobo Principle’ based on the model of bonobo primates. Through strong female–female alliances, bonobos have eliminated male sexual coercion (Rosenfeld, 2009). If a female bonobo is aggressed upon by a male, she lets out a cry, other females descend from the trees to fend off the aggressor, whom they then isolate and ostracize for a few days until he is reintroduced to the troop. They seem to operate on a principle that if one female can be assaulted, then they are all at risk.
The Acquaintance Rape Prevention Project provides a perfect opportunity to apply the Bonobo Principle on college campuses. Female students can forge alliances with one another to reject the designation of women as ‘hos’. As women, we have to realize that being called a ‘ho’ is neither funny nor harmless, and that if men can designate some of us as ‘hos’, they can designate any of us that way. Women must understand that we are stronger together than we are when divided against ourselves, and that when we participate in judging other women as ‘hos’, believing that we are somehow above that designation, we are only hurting ourselves. We must realize that we do not even have to like one another to achieve strong alliances; rather, we just need to agree that we are stronger if we embrace a sense of basic female solidarity. A collective self-defense, challenging loudly the male sexual entitlement to prostitute women, is the first step towards defining a new, affirmative sexuality; one based on the Bonobo Principle.
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___________________________
1 Much inspiration for this article comes from working with my student Laura Jarrett, Harvard Law School, Class of 2010, and a brilliant paper she wrote for my Title IX seminar entitled ‘The Blueprint for Sexual Harassment: How Schools Can Combat Sexual Misconduct As Required Under Title IX by Addressing the Harm of Pornography’ (hereinafter ‘Jarrett’) (on file with author, December, 2009). The author wishes to thank Jennifer Dein, my teaching and research assistant who provided primary editorial assistance, shared insights about the Greek system and contributed enormously to the overall writing of the chapter. Other students, former students and colleagues who contributed thoughts, insights and editorial help include Krista Anderson, Laura Jarrett, Michelle Katz, Renate Klein, Rebecca Leventhal, Kimberly Lucas, Maris Rosenfeld, Roberta Oster Sachs, Anne Catherine Savage, Tamara Schulman, Kamilah Willingham, and Elizabeth Wol.
2 ‘Rush’ refers to the initial process men go through to pledge a fraternity. Men are invited to ‘rush’ a fraternity; they then become ‘pledges’. After meeting the pledging requirements, the pledges become brothers, or full-fledged members of the fraternity. A significant amount of hazing behavior is required for the pledges to achieve brotherhood.
3 The fact that the email specified ‘freshman skeezas’ is consistent with David Lisak’s work on ‘undetected rapists’. As he explained on NPR (3 April, 2010), rapists target the most vulnerable women on campus – freshmen. “The predators on campus know the women who are new to campus,” he said, “they are younger, they’re less experienced” (see Shapiro, 2010; see also Lisak and Miller, 2002).
4 ‘Student Footage of Frat Pledges on Old Campus’ YouTube (13 October, 2010),
5 Similar stories emerge from Australia. In 2009, the highly prestigious St Paul’s College of the University of Sydney came under fire after it was exposed that a group of male college students had created and participated in a Facebook group titled ‘Define statutory’ described as being ‘pro-rape, anti-consent’. The same college had previously come under fire for a slogan in their bar reading ‘they can’t say no with a cock in their mouth’ and for awarding an ‘animal act of the year’ trophy to a male student accused of committing rape. See
6 There are many variations on this theme, such as ‘CEO’s and Office Hos’, ‘Golf Pros and Tennis Hos’. In each, women are designated as the ‘ho’. ‘Ho’ is slang for ‘whore’.
7 The new guidelines clarify schools’ responsibilities to prevent and address sexual harassment on campus as well as articulate the importance of the civil rights to equality in education. Dear Colleague Letter, Assistant Secretary’s Office for Civil Rights, Department of Education (2011),
8 A common pattern presented in 4 recent cases I have worked on involved a young woman partying with friends who is either left in a room with 1 male friend who calls another to join him, or finds herself with 2 or more men who were friends of hers, who then rape her. Later, the men inevitably claim she consented, while she was caught completely off-guard, having been with people she’d considered her friends. See, e.g. Laura Dunn, featured on Headline News
9 In a popular Nelly song called ‘Tipdrill’ the lyrics include the lines: “Now baby girl bring it over let me spit my pimpjuice, I need a tipdrill … I said it ain’t no fun less we all get some,”
ame woman.
10 In response to the Yale chanting, the Yale Women’s Center objected, and then was derided in the Yale Daily News editorial entitled ‘The Right Kind of Feminism’,
11 I am using a pseudonym for Anne, who wishes to remain anonymous.
12 Vice President Biden spoke at the University of New Hampshire on 4 April, 2011 to address sexual violence on campus. National Public Radio covered the press conference at
13 The guidelines are contained in a ‘Dear Colleague Letter’ at
14 See, e.g. ‘At Yale: Sharper Look at Treatment of Women’, New York Times, 7 April, 2011 found at:
Christopher N. Kendall1
The Harms of Gay Male Pornography
Introduction
Justified as a source of gay male liberation, self pride and a valued source of much needed sex education, some (indeed, far too many) gay male academics and activists have gone to great lengths to promote and sell gay male pornography as ‘harm-free’ and ‘different from’ heterosexual pornography.
Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry Page 11