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."
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.