As Molly noticed, there seems to be a fair amount of resistance and uncertainty when it comes to involving men in the prevention of sexual assault. It seems to me like the Eagle’s Editorial Board, galled by the import Lt. Rima Sifri says RAD for Men gives to the phrase, “I’m sorry, there has been a misunderstanding, I am leaving now,” didn’t notice the sentence immediately after that quote in their news story, which explains that there is also a tactical defense component. Maybe this is because there’s an underlying belief that to be a male involved in feminist causes, you must be somehow feminized, or at least not traditionally masculine.

I also have some issues with the editorial’s assertion that women must be involved in getting men to participate in the anti-rape movement. While sexual assault is usually viewed as a “women’s issue” and the onus is typically on women to prevent rape by speaking out, learning defense tactic, avoiding risky situations, et cetra, men need to have a role, too, and that role can be independent from women’s efforts—groups like GU Men Advocating Relationship Responsibility and the Men Can Stop Rape movement come to mind.

A key tenet of these groups, like RAD for men, is re-framing masculinity to focus more on the manliness of restraint and respect rather than aggression. This kind of work getting at the underlying motivation for sexual assault is essential and men can be more effective (or at least equally effective) at it than women.

Still, I don’t think that the Eagle’s editorial was totally without merit. While the assumption that the responsibility for reducing rape falls to women needs to be changed, I think there would, in fact, be some value in having an inter-gender conversation on what rape is and what constitutes consent. If we want to reduce sexual assault, we can’t rely entirely on either single-sex education or coed coalitions—we have to have both. It seems like the RAD course would be improved if it offered an additional session or two where both genders come together to talk about these issues while retaining the gender-specific classes.

Hoyas Anonymous—Georgetown Health Services’ attempt at harnessing the power of the Post Secret-model as an antidote to (now defunct?) “gossip sites whose outcome is hurt and increased separation“—has come into my good graces for not only having the greatest tagline on the internet (“Hoyas on the outside, Humans on the inside”) but also for posting what I’m assuming is the latest edition of the Stall Seat Journal, Georgetown’s WC-centric news source of record (I can’t be totally sure, though, since my stall-of-choice here in Kennedy is still woefully SSJ-deficient).

This month’s topic? Sexually Transmitted Infections! Because if STIs won’t scare the crap out of you (disgusting pun intended), nothing will:

SSJ definitely deserves props for breaking with the University’s hear-no-evil, see-no-evil approach to dealing with premarital sex and actually giving students information and advice. It’s also really great that they list testing sites on the poster.

A couple of gripes though…

• One of the STIs they list is Human Papilloma Virus (HPV). While they explain the symptoms and possible effects of HPV, they neglect to mention one key fact: there’s a vaccine. Just because the Health Center has the terrible, indefensible policy of not stocking Guardasil, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or isn’t effective in preventing HPV, which can lead to cervical cancer.

• The poster ends with the note “Not everyone is having sex. In the 2008 National College Health Assessment survey, 75% of Hoyas reported having one or no sexual partners in the last school year.”

The SSJ has a quite penchant for deceptive statistics. One of their favorites is “93% of Hoyas do NOT drink (or consider themselves light to moderate drinkers).” No word on what the actual percentage of teetotalers is, but I’m guessing it’s nowhere near 93.

But still, this is pretty transparent: having sex with just one person doesn’t mean you’re not sexually active. Making it seem like the vast majority of the school is abstinent is a willful distortion of the facts (the Voice’s 2007 Sex Survey shows that 63% of students are, in fact, sexually active).

But even if it were true that most Georgetown students aren’t doing the deed, so what? What relevance does that have to a list of “Safer Sex Practices”? Are we supposed to base our actions on what our fellow students are doing? Because there’s a term for that: peer pressure.

Instead of using that space to include a misleading, unnecessary statistics, they should have included some concrete information about protection. We all know that the University is squeamish about condoms, but since SSJ is somewhat affiliated with the Health Center, it’s absolutely their obligation to offer complete information about the effectiveness of condoms, not for their contraceptive properties but for their protective ones.

Molly Redden

Vox Populi reports that GUSA voted to approve the $900 necessary to start the long-awaited RAD program, or Rape Aggression Defense classes. The money will be enough to buy four $225 training suits—for a class of women. But now that GUSA and DPS have invested smartly, they might want to start thinking about our men.

American University did, (its Resisting Aggression with Defense for men teaches physical defense in aggressive situations as well as tactics for avoiding physical confrontations), but not without supremely offending its paper of record The Eagle‘s editorial board, which instead of embracing the idea balked at the prospect of telling men not to be men:

“Men do certainly seem to be more aggressive than women, but it is doubtful that four classes, totaling 12 hours, would be able to change years of learned behavior or magically lower elevated levels of testosterone … Instead, Public Safety should offer a class in addition to the women’s only RAD class that includes both men and women. A class that caters to both genders could be doubly beneficial in that it would help men and women get on the same page about sexual assault.”

Public Safety’s Sgt. Dale Booth soon set them staight in an op-ed over their misconception of what the class actually teaches. Nonetheless, the editorial board’s initial response to what they saw as a proactive anger-management class for men still interests, because they broadly misplace male responsibility as it resides in the murky world of fights and assault.

After all, helping men “get on the same page about sexual assault” as women is pretty much platitudinal-speak for reminding men that it’s wrong to assault women. It divests men of any responsibility beyond acquiring an elementary grasp of what tends to make women uncomfortable or an understanding that women don’t like being attacked. Their insistence that men can’t unlearn the biology that informs male action in aggressive situations relieves them of even more responsibility.

It’s pretty hard to argue with the editorial board when they frame their argument in terms of “not enough time,” but at the same time, its highly telling that their alternate solution addresses a completely different, softball problem.

I’d like to see this class at Georgetown, if not just for its practical value, for its intrinsic value.  Right now, the face of Georgetown’s recent sexual offenses are the women who need RAD training. Meanwhile, the men involved are a largely faceless party, described, say, in PSAs as “about 5′ 10″.”  So faceless in fact, that they can adopt an air of comedy, like one Georgetown Cuddler. This program would broadcast the kind of only-you-can-prevent-forest-fires message to men that this campus sorely needs.

Photo taken from Flickr user oudodou under a Creative Commons license.

Juliana Brint

Stephanie Hannah, the Hoya’s new imitation-Carrie Bradshaw, popped her columnist cherry last week with a truly abominable set of recommendations for what to do if you happen to find yourself taking someone’s virginity.

The biggest problem with the piece is the assumption it makes that losing it to someone you’re in a relationship with = good and losing it more casually = bad:

“Yes, I have heard a few stories of people who were in relationships and had an amazing first time. However, I have also heard plenty of horror stories, from being in a drunk, sloppy stupor to him not being able to get it up.”

Please, there’s no one ideal, perfect way to lose your virginity. Sure, some girls want a bed of roses, a candle-lit room, a flute of champagne and their boyfriend of two and half years. But for some of us, Yom Kippur, the Leavey Esplanade, a couple shots of vodka and that funny guy we sat next to last week at Shabbat are just as good (uh, for example).

There’s only one absolute when it comes to losing your virginity: it’s as big a deal as you make it. Some people want it to be a big, romantic event, some want it to be something exciting and funny, some just want to get it over with. We shouldn’t be attaching a value judgment to which path people choose.

In the other shame-the-sluts section, she makes a truly bizarre comment about those who sleep around ending up with a guy like Trey from Sex and City who can’t get it up. Is she trying to suggest that there’s some karmic punishment for female promiscuity? And is she really incapable of going through her first sex column without a Sex and City reference?

The unbecoming judgy-ness aside, the column is not even that useful.

The section on how to treat a girl who’s a virgin is predicated on the insulting assumption that all girls have extremely simplistic views of sex (“[S]he’s either anticipating excruciating pain or blissful ecstasy”) and that sex is something guys need to “reassure” us about and give us “guidance” through.

How about a discussion of whether or not it’s good to drink before to lessen the pain? What about some suggestions of positions that will make it easier on the girl? And, pretty glaring omission here, what about talking about what kind of protection to use? The impression you come away with is that Hannah simply doesn’t know enough about sex to give this kind of advice—not a good trait in a sex columnist.

And while it devotes a full five paragraphs to what to do if you’re a guy deflowering a girl but has only one, supremely unhelpful throwaway paragraph on what to do if you’re a girl dealing with an inexperienced guy, the gist of which is “yeah, he’s probably gonna come super prematurely.”

Also troubling is that the only other paragraph addressing what to do if it’s the guy’s first time begins “If you’re both virgins…” Because apparently it’s impossible (or wrong) to conceive of a situation in which the girl is the more experienced partner.

At one point in the piece, Hannah mentions that she has a somewhat outrageous virginity story of her own involving a latex allergy. You’d think this one would be obvious: if you’re a sex columnist and you’re writing about losing your virginity and you have a funny story about the way you lost yours, please tell that story. Not only will it be far more entertaining than a list of banal tips that reads like it was cribbed from CosmoGirl, it will also make any of your readers who are stressing out or feeling weird about losing their virginity feel better and more normal.

I wonder, is this trainwreck merely a product of lazy editing and a writer who has read too many teen magazines, or is it indicative of the general sentiment on campus about virginity? For once, I’m rooting for journalistic ineptitude.

Photo from Flickr user smallestbones, used under a Creative Commons license.

As you can see from our info page, we Vag Populi writers are raring to discuss the issues that challenge and confront women at Georgetown.

As far as “issues” go, we feel that campus is ripe with gender issues to discuss—from the occasional egregiously misogynistic articles that appear in campus publications, to the dearth of women in academic and some student leadership positions. The writers of this blog are also eager to draw from their wealth of relevant knowledge and pass it on—if you’ve ever wondered where to get waxed in Georgetown and where to avoid, this blog is for you.

And the Resevoir Dogs-esque banner above just goes to show that we mean business.