I’m walking to class slowly. The two guys in front of me take up the entire sidewalk and are so engrossed in a deep conversation that they don’t even notice me trying desperately to figure out some way to get around them. I could say excuse me, but they’re about a foot taller than me and that would involve me actually speaking to these strangers.
One of them wears a snapback cap and a Miami hockey hoodie and is clearly the dominant one in the conversation. I’ll call him Chad.
The other is wearing a Vineyard Vines shirt and chinos. I’ll call him Brad.
Chad and Brad are talking about sex.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. After all, this is a college campus, and I am the one walking awkwardly close to them. However, as I catch bits and pieces of their conversation, I become concerned.
“Dude, she was so wasted last night,” Brad tells his buddy.
“She just kinda laid there. For a minute I thought maybe she had passed out on me,” Chad says.
The more I hear the more concerned I become. And as a man, the more I listened, the more scared I became about the state of my fellow men.
Because as much as I understand that bad sex and dumb decisions are part of the college experience, rape isn’t.
Every year 321,500 people are raped, and date rape makes up for 78% of the crimes. Most commonly, the rapist is sober or mostly sober, and the victim is under the influence of alcohol. Date rape drugs are a terrifying reality but represent a minority of the cases. Most of the time, it just involves someone in power taking advantage of someone with less power or ability to resist.
That’s where toxic masculinity comes in. Toxic masculinity includes, among other things, the prevailing idea that men somehow have a sense of entitlement over women, have a right to sex or hold any sort of ownership over women’s bodies. This is why a large majority of rapists are men, and why college, the time in which young men are living independently and free to make their own choices for the first time in their lives, is one of the places where rape is most common in America.
It’s also why despite the heartfelt efforts of many colleges to hold rape prevention seminars and to make campus a safer place, rape statistics remain pretty much the same. This is because the issue lies with men and the toxic masculinity culture they’ve been surrounded by since birth.
Ultimately, rape is a symptom of a larger problem within our society: We’re teaching women how to avoid rape, and then turning around and teaching men how to rape better. Team sports that teach boys to do whatever they can to meet their goal foster the idea that men should do what they can to get everything they want. Sexualization of boys as young as infants with “Ladies’ Man” onesies creates an environment where having a girlfriend and subscribing to heterosexist notions of relationships is what it means to be a man.
The list goes on.
And none of this is to say that rape isn’t a problem that needs to be addressed in the short term. But it needs to be addressed differently. Women already know that the world has been made to be a dangerous place for them. It’s men that need the lesson. So let’s stop teaching men that masculinity is a badge of honor and women are trophies to brag about. Let’s stop teaching them that to be a man is to have heterosexual sex and to be proud of it.
I wish that I had stopped Chad and Brad when I heard their conversation. I wish that I had grabbed them firmly by the shoulders and told them that what they did was wrong. Who they were was wrong. But I didn’t. So maybe I’m part of the problem, too, writing op-ed pieces about how to fix rape culture without implementing a change in my actual life.
Chad and Brad probably still have no idea they did anything wrong.
And that’s why we’re failing.
