Being a Berkeley Girl

Ever since I got home I've noticed an unusual number of men leaning out of their car windows to yell stuff at me. One guy turned round in the street to walk past me a couple of times; another shouted ‘don’t you look nice’ from the window of his van; one stopped wherever he was going to watch me on a walk to the park. It rankled with me- and it’s odd because it wouldn't have phased me this time last year. Casually shouting stuff at girls in the street is just what a lot of men in London do. 

With a year’s stay in California under my belt I can’t remember a single incident of someone shouting at me, or at any other girl, in the street. I could wander easily around the campus in shorts that would have received a cacophony of blasts from car horns in England, but that no-one blinked an eye at in Cal. As a general rule, I felt a more comfortable, and more safe. But despite this there’s still something not right at Berkeley. Beneath the surface, and the relaxed ‘free spirit’ attitudes on the campus there is a dark sexual politics in play, which bothered me throughout my year of study abroad but that I only really began to notice in the spring, when elections for the student assembly took place. A colleague of mine at Caliber Magazine was running for a place on the Student Senate, and pushing the policy of a safer campus for girls. Stats show that roughly one in four girls at college will be sexually assaulted before they graduate, she explained to me. At Berkeley, a shocking 99% of rape cases go unreported.

“One in four,” I repeated later, aghast, to one of my friends, a sorority sister.

“Oh, yeah,” she shrugged, “a bunch of my friends have been raped.”

I don’t know what disturbed me more about this conversation, the fact that it had happened to more than one of her friends, or her general air of indifference: that “oh, it happens,” response. Somehow over time, a lot of girls on the campus have got it into their heads that this is just ‘how things are’, and that they just have to get on with it. There are crazy levels of accepted misogyny that are taken as a casual standard among the student community. Here, for example, are a couple of extracts from “UC Berkeley Hookups”, a public Facebook community, supposedly male and female-friendly, where students can submit anonymous posts about sexual encounters they've had on the campus. The community is primarily male dominated: and here are a few extracts from accounts that moderators considered totally acceptable to publish:

“So I met this girl outside SAE last weekend. Presumable pretty drunk this bitch asks me for a cig, and being the quick thinker I am I ask her to show me her tits in exchange for a cigarette. She says she has to take me to her room to show me. So she does, and then seeing the invested interest I had she asks if i want to feel them. She gets me inside to a secluded location, and by secluded I mean her, her sleeping roommate and her roommates boyfriend. At any second I figure they may wake up, so while Im trying to enjoy getting my rock hard schlong serviced I begin thinking of a master plan to save all of my cigs and exit the room successfully. When the time was right I covered this chick face like liberals cover Berkeley!”

Another, from an anon. male to a ‘conquest’:

“It is okay for you to be ashamed. By the end of the day, I'm still getting it in. In your pussy that is. As for the phone, those are pics of your slutty ass and or videos that you might have noticed me taking cause you were so shitfaced. Now that was a good night. PEACE OUT.”

Just the one more:

“To this blonde bitch that I took home last week named Katie or Kate or whatever who even cares…”

With screaming irony, the community moderator had also seen fit to post “Girls we need more of your stories!”

The mind boggles.

So I’d stumbled across this culture of shaming, of sexual objectification, and it distressed me that I’d seen far too many girls my age firstly putting up with it, and secondly shaming each other over it. But where had it started? Where was it coming from?

I can’t help but point a finger towards the frats. Of course in doing this I’m not trying to say that every Greek brotherhood actively facilitates sexual assault, and I’m not suggesting there’s no culture of sexual aggression outside of them: but it’s definitely where, in the past year, I saw the most concentrated sexual aggression towards women, and where I saw the most cases of people just shrugging it off as 'boys being boys'. The fact that Berkeley actually has a ‘date rape’ frat on the campus- yes, this is a widely accepted nickname among the students for a recognized campus frat- is so fifty shades of wrong I can’t get my head around it even now. At my first and only frat party, as I stood, sober and witnessing all these teetering girls being dragged about the floor by their considerably more sober male counterparts, I realized there was a guy following me. Considerably bigger than I was, silent and impassive he had latched on to me and was watching me from a couple of feet away, solo cup in hand. Not particularly bothered, but not keen to be leeched onto in such a way I left the room in the hope of losing him. Diligently he tailed me through every room of the three floored house, red cup in hand, never saying a word and always keeping a couple of feet behind me. Having run out of most of my ideas I tried the classic escape into the girls’ bathroom. He followed me in there. 

At which point I turned on my heel and screamed “FUCK OFF! FUCK OFF AND LEAVE ME ALONE, NOW.”

“Woah, alright,” he shrugged, raising his hands in slight bemusement. “Whatever.” And he left.

But what if I’d been drunk? What if I’d been reeling with alcohol, like so many of the other girls in that place, and separated from my friends, and not altogether knowing what was happening? And just suppose something had happened to me- how does the campus faculty handle it? Take a look at this article on the Huffington Post, written by a Berkeley student about her experience of sexual assault, and how the faculty responded. 

Now I’m not trying to bash the campus. I don’t think it’s just students, or just Berkeley that has a problem with sexual politics, it’s a problem America has with sexual politics. The misogyny, the objectification, the tolerance of sexual assault, it’s national. Nothing illustrated this to me better than what happened at the beginning of my second semester the, when the Steubenville Case was all over the media. Two high school boys in Ohio were found guilty of repeatedly raping a sixteen-year old girl, taking photographs of her and publishing them on social media networks.

The case went very public, and many of America’s major news channels covered the trial and mourned the terrible situation- for the boys. When the guilty verdict was delivered, CNN news anchor Poppy Harlow reported that it was: "Incredibly difficult, even for an outsider like me, to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart."

Watch the clip. The victim barely gets a mention. 

I loved the experience of living in America for a year, and I loved every minute of being at Berkeley. But for a liberal, open-minded college in one of the most liberal open-minded states America has, there are many things inherently wrong in the way girls are being treated. Berkeley has long been an institution heralded as a flagship for change: so Berkeley Girls, it’s time to open your eyes to this culture. Because it’s not okay. And something has to be done.