Soap Box Stew

I have been stewing on and off for the past five hours, which isn’t too out of the ordinary for me. I tend to think about something that happened for hours or days after the event. This was an angry stew though, which is less common for me.

At dinner tonight my two youngest siblings (17 year old brother and 15 year old sister), my dad, and I had a conversation that stemmed from the President’s speech today. My dad is following the gun talk going on in the media and government pretty closely. But the conversation switched.

Today in one of my brother’s senior level classes, they were discussing current events. One of his classmates brought up an article talking about a young woman in college who went to a party and was raped by six young men. My brother told us that his teacher’s comment was, “She shouldn’t have been there.”

I was enraged. First of all, this is not one of my favorite teachers in our high school. But beyond my personal feelings toward the teacher, it was a completely inappropriate and off-base comment to make, especially in a classroom of teenagers. In five words, he made some very bold assumptions.

First of all, an assumption is made that this young woman was essentially asking to be raped because she went to this party. More likely than not, this was not her first party; she had probably been to others and nothing had happened. How was she to know that this would be the party where she would be gang raped? It isn’t like women have rape radars that they choose to ignore on the nights they get raped.

Second of all, he is forgetting the fact that this was a crime committed by six men. Not one, but six. There is a level of human decency, a moral code that no matter what environment we grow up in, raping a woman should be on the ‘do not do’ side of the scale. And because these men were college students, they were born into privilege, therefore there is very little doubt in my mind that they all knew what they were doing was wrong.

Taking both of these into mind, there is the generalization that this woman was to blame. That there was something this woman did that made these men rape her; maybe she was dressed to risqué, maybe she was drinking too much, whatever the case may be, these men just couldn’t help it.

Bullshit.  

With this mindset, the entire male gender is being majorly discredited. With this thought, all men are rapists waiting to pounce; they have no self-control whatsoever, and there is nothing they can do to stop it. With this generalization, this teacher has raised a handful of rapists and set them loose on society, but it’s not their fault, they can’t help it.

Again, bullshit.

Wild, sweeping generalizations make me so angry, and we make them all of the time. Because some homosexual men have aids, all homosexual men have aids. Because some Mexicans are here illegally, all Mexicans are here illegally. Because some blacks are on welfare, all blacks are on welfare. Because some women get raped, all women are asking for it to happen to them. It goes on and on.

My brother was not only frustrated with this teacher, but he was also frustrated that he didn’t speak up at the time. At seventeen he knows right from wrong, and I know the next time this kind of issue is brought up, he won’t stay silent. That in itself is a victory.

These issues are so massive that small victories need to be celebrated. So while I’ve been fuming all night, I can’t help but rejoice at the fact my seventeen year old brother is bringing these kinds of issues up at the dinner table. He has a good head on his shoulders, and I know for a fact he will never be one of those men who blames women for his actions, good or bad. And that is a big victory. 

Until next time, strive for the big victories, rejoice in the little victories.