Rape for Granted?

What inevitably followed after graduation was the infamous grad party. Having been raised by strict parents, I felt too naïve as a senior graduate facing college and decided to stop by with my friends; if anything, we thought we would get a good laugh at the drunks.

When things started getting out of hand, we sober ones left to congregate at a friend’s house. We had seen a girl walk out of a room, crying and claiming that she almost had been raped by a drunken guy. It is a typical scenario at a party but we no longer felt comfortable and decided to leave once we made sure that she would be okay.

On our way back, my friends started discussing the safety of such parties, most of them agreeing that when a girl drinks at a party, she is “asking for it.” When I objected, no one really listened (since most of us were tired out of my minds by then). I could not help but wonder if such notion contributed to sexual harassments and rapes at parties. So, if both a girl and a guy are drunk, the former is supposed to be victimized and the latter is supposed to violate? It is the same terrible response when a girl dressed promiscuously is raped at night: she is blamed for her sartorial choices. But these things do not justify rape—what she wears, how she acts, and whether she is drunk or not does not exempt the rapists from the fact that they violated her and her rights. Besides, being under influence affects everybody, regardless of his or her gender, and, as far as scenarios go, a girl can rape a guy too; how would people react to that?

Such notion only aggravates the reified gender roles in our culture: women are supposed to be weaker and men are supposed to be dominant. The fact that such evocation of gender roles exists even at parties (where, theoretically, everyone comes to have a good time) is appalling. But these expectations are fictions: they are man-made creation that has been asserted for a long time. While we still have far to go, women finally have the voice and the audience to better represent and empower women. We can abolish the fiction of hierarchy, segregation, and expectations, and establish a reality of equality.