Now that Sexual Assault Awareness Week has ended, I find myself wondering why even here at Dartmouth women have yet to completely "take back the night." A while ago, when a female companion and I walked across the Green, a large drunk accosted us, making threats and sexual suggestions as he waddled by. Though I myself never felt particularly in danger from the overweight and clearly intoxicated man, I can well imagine how terrifying the experience could be had he approached, say, a lone 110-lb. girl and made the same comments. When I later looked him up in the facebook, blitzed him and demanded an apology, he gave a half-hearted response that assumed drunkenness was an acceptable excuse.
I found this extraordinary. In my conception of masculinity, such behavior is contemptible in the extreme. A man who treats random women the way that individual did is not a man; he is something less. This attitude springs from two deep-seated beliefs: first, that men need to have a conceptualized masculinity that they can appeal to and that can define their relations toward women; second, that sex implies far more than a physical act and should be treated as such. Dartmouth tends to approach gender and sex in far different ways ultimately harmful to both men and women.
Much of the recent work in gender theory has tried to demolish fixed notions of gender. In terms of tolerance and understanding, this is positive. Nobody should be forced to conform to one of a few rigid standards of what constitutes a "man" or "woman." But the reality of gender roles cannot be forgotten. Men generally, though not universally, behave differently from women. Boys will be boys, and more than one feminist has written of the difficulties in getting her son to play with any toy that isn't a gun, a toy soldier, or a truck. Regardless of the claims of academia, gender will create gender roles. Since such roles cannot be successfully dismissed, they should be shaped and tempered. After all, while a sensitive and somewhat delusional man might buy the line that gender is wholly a matter of societal construction, your average drunken lout will not. As a society, we need a conception, or conceptions, of masculinity that will impress upon the drunken party-goer as well as the sensitive college student. That individual stumbling around at night filled with alcohol and sexual frustration needs to understand that any verbal or physical assault toward a woman diminishes his manhood as well as his humanity. Perhaps this is a politically constructed masculinity, but it is one we need. Instead of an act of typical post-modern uselessness like deconstructing masculinity, academia should try to shape it.
Making the issue even more difficult are the bizarre attitudes adopted toward sexuality. Sexual Assault Awareness week rightly tries to impress upon students the magnitude of the damage sexual assault can cause. But there exists a disjunction between the rightly reverential attitude taken toward sexual assault victims and the hedonistic attitude taken toward sex itself.
Think back to the recent Sex Festival sponsored by the Women and Gender Center. Despite the few tables devoted to topics like healthy relationships and even abstinence, the event geared itself mainly toward the physical act itself. Events like the Sex Festival approach sex as the ultimate pastime of our society -- way better than baseball and about as morally significant. Little attention is paid to the spiritual and moral significance of sex. Discussion of love is replaced with an intense focus on the achievement of orgasm. Sex becomes a subjective pleasure, rather than a sacred space, the most intense expression of a spiritual union.
From a cultural standpoint, I find this trend deplorable. Our society becomes more and more sexually obsessed, while the value of sex becomes more and more of a cipher. From a man's point of view, then, sex becomes more and more of a necessity -- it is, in fact, what ends up defining his masculinity, since his culture gives him little else to measure it against. Meanwhile, the consequences and possible harms of a rampant, self-centered sexuality dwindle in importance, thanks to those who tell him that sex is really only what the individual makes of it, which is a dangerous position to take. To the sexual predator, it can be an expression of his masculinity. To the rapist, an expression of power and dominance. Since they both buy into the modern, subjective view of sex, the intense harm done to the victim has little importance. But that harm remains.
Because we degrade sex into physical pleasure devoid of deeper spiritual ramifications, we can hardly be surprised when some men aren't sensitive to the tremendous pain they inflict on women when they engage in sexual assault. Modern man's callous disregard for women, expressed in the form of assault, is rooted not in his natural inclination toward "masculine violence," but in society's dual failure to stress the true significance of sex and to provide role models which establish a conception of masculinity in which honorable men show respect for others.
If women want to take back the night, it will not be done without the participation of both women and men. And men will not take action unless they have clear values they can base their actions upon, such as the sanctity of human sexuality and the obligations of modern masculinity.