Harvard. The very name brings up images of intellectual superiority. Harvard is associated with Presidents, Supreme Court Justices, and Matt Damon. The best of the best. The smartest of the smart. But also, apparently, the dumbest about rape.
According to the Huffington Post, Harvard has a long tradition of private, men-only clubs called “final clubs”. Ostensibly, these are social organizations that morph into networking circles, much like fraternities on other campuses. Also, like fraternities, they seem to have a problem with sexual assault. According to a a recent task force on sexual assault on the Harvard campus, 47% of female seniors said they’d experienced “nonconsensual sexual contact” at final club events. Final clubs were, in fact, found to be second only to dormitories in frequency of sexual assaults.
The university would like to change the culture of final clubs by making them open to women as well as men in an effort to attempt to limit the amount of assaulting that goes on within the clubs. Someone in the administration has evidently studied the subject and knows that rape and other forms of sexual assault are not crimes of sex but crimes of power. Sexual assault is a form of violence wherein one person violates the body of another person, not out of lust, but out of a need to control, debase, and dehumanize.
Clubs with exclusive membership breed a sense of entitlement and specialness that can manifest as disdain for outsiders — dehumanizing others before they even walk in the door. If all the club members are men and the outsiders are women, they might feel entitled to treat women as objects instead of people. And when one person considers another person just an object… well, that’s when shit gets ugly.
However, the lessons about the fundamentals of rape culture have been lost on Charles M. Storey, the graduate club president of The Porcellian, a 225-year-old final club. In a letter to the administration, Storey says, “Given our policies, we are mystified as to why the current administration feels that forcing our club to accept female members would reduce the incidence of sexual assault on campus. Forcing single gender organizations to accept members of the opposite sex could potentially increase, not decrease the potential for sexual misconduct.”
Yeah, let me explain why that’s wrong. See, when you only let girls in for recreational activities like parties, you start to think of girls as being part of the entertainment. And you treat the girls as part of the entertainment instead of as peers. They’re just there for fun right? Right?
Wrong. The reason sexual assault doesn’t happen in co-ed classrooms is not because of supervision or witnesses. It’s because everyone in a classroom is there as an equal. No one is imported for the amusement of others. When people interact as peers, as equals, no one starts to think of themselves as better than anyone else. No one begins to objectify anyone else. No one is dehumanized by their very role in the occasion.
If final club members were to open up the non-entertainment elements of the club to women, women would be in the room as full members, as people instead of objects. And it’s much harder to justify groping or raping a person you see as fully human.
Putting people of all genders together breeds understanding. Anyone smart enough to get into Harvard ought to be able to learn that lesson.
