But I haven't seen Barbados...

Me, and a gun, and a man on my back,

But I haven't seen Barbados,

So I must get out of this.

-Tori Amos, Me and a Gun

When I was in college, I went to see Tori Amos in concert, which I suppose gives me some kind of feminist street cred, which I need to draw upon in order to talk about something that makes most of my gender either angry or uncomfortable, or both.  Tori is a survivor of a violent rape, and her song, Me and a Gun, is about that experience.  As a 20 something year old boy/man in a darkened auditorium surrounded by mostly women, listening and watching as this flame haired pixie hammers out one of the most uncomfortably powerful songs I have ever heard, I was not aware that probably more than a quarter of the women sitting near me had been victims of sexual assault and rape.

But statistically they had been, and as "survivors" of a big anonymous school like Penn State, and devotees of Tori Amos, the percentage may have been higher.

Full disclosure moment: as a college student, I was an utter misfit.  I was disenchanted with the football and frat party crowd, but was not at all comfortable with the "sensitive new age" crowd either.  I was fully aware of the prevalence of date rape and alcohol related sexual assault.  I knew women who had been assaulted, raped, accosted and harassed.  I knew boys who told stories gleefully about encounters they had that almost certainly fell into one of those categories, and to tell you the truth, I didn't really know what to do about any of that.

When I was sober, I made a promise to myself that I would never take advantage of someone who was too drunk.  As I grew up a little, I tried to keep myself under control enough vis-a-vis the binge drinking, to try and avoid even being on the border of that.  What do you do though, in a world where drunken hook ups are a way of life?  How do you keep from becoming a freaking rapist?  It's not as easy as you might think, especially in the muddled adolescent mind.  So I do have some sympathy for that kid from Stanford, but I have more sympathy for his victim.

It seems to me that two lives have been ruined, and to recognize that there are really two victims in this case is not to negate the suffering of either one. We all have some guilt in that destruction.

There are a few things that we must stop doing in order to address that guilt.

1. We must stop shaming and blaming the victims.  In the Stanford case, as in so many of these scenarios, alcohol and drugs are involved, questionable behaviors are involved, "going out to party" in skimpy clothes and with flirty intentions are involved.  None of that means that a girl deserves to be raped or assaulted.  You should not have to be a model citizen in order to be protected from such a violation.
2. We must teach our boys better.  It would seem that a lot of these cases involve athletes, but that might be just a warning flag about a deeper problem.  The culture of most athletic programs does indeed reinforce the type of drive and attitude that leads to this sort of event, but let's be clear, we teach all of our boys that assertiveness is manly.  We glorify the winners.  We idolize strength and the alpha male ideal.  Sports don't make rapists, but the same sort of single minded focus and determination that gets you up for a 4:00 AM workout and drives you to push through the pain of wind sprints can blow up in your face when hot and heavy runs into a, "No, stop." If you have been conditioned to overcome obstacles, her free will can seem like just another tackler to evade.  Which actually leads right into...
3. We need to work harder on presenting a healthy approach to human sexuality.  Our dysfunctional attitudes about sex are absolutely toxic to so much of this debate.  We have tried to make it "no big deal." We have tried to treat it like learning geometry.  We have tried to somehow keep our old "dark and shameful," labels to scare away the young.  We keep it always out there as a tool to sell things and we parade it up and down. We present it as though it is an achievement or a conquest. Losing your virginity is akin to winning some sort of trophy. We have worked furiously to insist that it can happen without emotional attachment and damage and our glorification of promiscuity has robbed people of the ability to learn about sexuality in a safe and committed relationship.  The "hook up" was the most common form sexual encounter when I was in college, actual relationships seemed harder to come by. To many of my peers this did not seem to matter, but it did matter, and a lot of us are dealing with scars now that we're creeping into middle age.  I am terrified at sending my daughter (and my son for that matter) into a world where people are so steeped in badly warped ideas about sex and intimacy.

As these sorts of events play out on college campuses around the country, it is pretty clear that something needs to change.  It is not as simple as telling girls to be more careful.  Nor is it reasonable to imagine that you are going to be able to train 20 year old boys out of this sort of thing while you still feed them hyper-sexuality in almost ever waking moment.  I think that one thing that is hopeful in the Stanford case was the simple fact that two passers by intervened.  Not so long ago, I think those bikers might have just kept on riding. Which, I think, shines a light on the fact that our solution must be the work of our culture and our communities.

Rape and sexual assault has been happening forever, read the Bible sometime, but it's not something that we as a community just have to accept.  Not accepting it involves much more than just punishing the offenders though.  Fear of punishment should not be the only thing standing between us and becoming a rapist.  We need to confront our deep denials of the issue, we need to take the victims more seriously, we need to seriously consider the culture that we create where this stuff breeds like mildew. We need to talk about this, like Tori did, we need to hold a light up to this darkness, because that's the only way we're ever going to beat it.