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Susan G. Cole on rape culture infecting young women on campus

Just when we thought the St. Mary’s University pro-rape cheer bellowed out during frosh week was becoming old news, here come UBC students with the same chant in a similar context days later.

Just for the record, the chant goes like this:

Y is for Your sister

O is for Oh so tight

U is for Under age

N is for No consent

G is for Grab that ass

Not much ambiguity there.

This kind of thing has been going on for decades on campuses across the continent. The guys in engineering flaunted their misogyny in the 70s the boys at Queen’s hung “No Means Yes” signs out their dorm window during Sexual Assault Awareness Week in the 80s.

But what’s bugging me most about the St. Mary’s incident is the number of women happily chanting along. At UBC, the co-chair of frosh week is a young woman, Jacqueline Chen, who blithely assured everyone that the chant has been a feature there for years and that they at least had tried to keep it private. Big help.

Feminists like me have been wringing our hands over the sexual abuse epidemic, some of us saying it’s time to get men involved in what we used to call women’s issues – kudos to the White Ribbon campaign for taking it on. But it’s obvious that we need to start winning women into the anti-rape fold as well.

During the 80s, when I was travelling the country debating Screw Magazine publisher Al Goldstein on Canadian campuses about the meaning of pornography, almost all the women in the audience grasped my concerns about the impact pornography has on creating a rape culture.

Over the past five years, I’ve been doing a similar series of debates with porn star Ron Jeremy on American campuses. Fully half the audience is made up of women, almost all of them porn fans anxious to get Jeremy to sign their breasts.

I am aware that many women disagree with my stance that pornography is a political problem. They also consider censorship deeply problematic – so do I, by the way. But when feminists were going through the sex wars in the 80s, so-called pro-sex women were interested in some kind of conversation and definitely took seriously the issues surrounding violence against women.

What’s going on in 2013? Why are we so obviously losing this battle, not only with men but with women?

Maybe Gloria Steinem is right that female students are always more conservative than their male counterparts. It’s only when they get more life experience – of the glass ceiling, of the prevalence and consequences of sexual assault – that women become more radicalized. Men, on the other hand, become more conservative when they move into their roles of authority and power.

Whatever the case, things are not changing as fast as they should.

Anybody notice that there was another sexual assault on the York University campus last week?

susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole

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