Do you really want to walk in my shoes?
Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault
There is a problematic irony in the philanthropy event, Walk a Mile in Her Shoes, which took place on campus this week.
I do not want to undermine the importance of bringing awareness to issues of sexual assault and domestic violence and of raising money for these causes. I also do not want to suggest that fraternities have no place bringing attention to these issues. But, since event is meant to be “fun and it gets the community to talk about something that’s really difficult to talk about: gender relations,” let’s get into it.
My freshman year, I was told to expect sexual assault at the fraternity houses, especially the one directly across the street from my freshman dorm- incidentally the same one who co-hosted this event.
I was afraid to walk by their house, afraid of being cat called by one of the men on the porch.
I know multiple people who have been raped by the brothers, both inside and outside of the house.
My male friend was kicked out of their party for not appearing to have any girls with him, and was repeatedly called a f*ggot, among other profanities.
At the door, men ask other men about their ratio, reminding us women that we are nothing more than currency to be exchanged for the inalienable right to our bodies, and at the bar our flirtations are the cost of a drink.
Therefore, on Wednesday, as I found myself caught in the parade of men in red high heels, feeling compelled to hide myself from their familiar threatening gaze, I was struck by painful contradictions.
A movement to end violence against women had me trapped, left without the option of escape from the thrust of people and gave me flashbacks of being groped in their basement, of having a brother grab me and press my face against his without my permission, of the scared text messages I have received from friends after being coerced into their beds.
And yet, the men in this organization are allowed to relish in their act of symbolism for the purpose of a monetary donation to victims “out there”.
It is not enough to stand in support of women on outside of our borders. Sexual assault is an epidemic at Gettysburg, and the culture that Greek Life perpetuates is an undeniable contributor. It’s a culture which gives the message that one has to prove their masculinity in order to be accepted into their inner circle, and often times this comes with the dangerous combination of excessive alcohol consumption and the treatment of women as objects for the taking.
Sexual assault can’t be addressed at one event each year. It is every person’s responsibility to be diligent to this issue every single day, especially those who are apart of these organizations. We all have a responsibility to practice the message they sent every day.
Sure, this organization can and should be applauded for taking the step to raise awareness, but please also acknowledge the irony.
Fraternities enable and perpetuate sexual assault through their parties, through their culture, and through their lack of accountability. They feel that they can hold this event to raise awareness for victims of violence, pat themselves on the back, and end the year with positive evaluation, even some national attention, and then continue their pattern of violence as usual.
We can also point to the clear limits of this event. The imagery of “walking in her shoes” does little to suggest an interest in women’s experiences and replicates little other than a patriarchal fantasy of femininity. Further, calling on men to “man up” and put on a pair of heels is inherently transphobic, suggesting the emasculating effects of wearing a certain type of shoe and making a joke of lived experiences of trans women who constantly have to prove themselves as “real women”. These reasons are why some colleges are choosing to cancel this event entirely.
Only by critically analyzing and acknowledging these contradictions and by making a commitment to ending sexual assault not just today, not just this month, but every single day. Greek or non-Greek, now is the time to act.
Here are some ways to be involved in ending sexual assault on an ongoing basis:
- Join Students Against Sexual Assault (SASA). They meet every other Thursday at 7pm in the Women’s and LGBTQA Resource Center in Apple Hall
- Attend Diversity Peer Educator events, or apply to join by April 7th
- Sign up for a Green Dot training session to learn bystander intervention
- Partner with Survivors Inc. in town, an organization that works with victims of domestic violence
- Educate yourself. Learn about the structural problems associated with sexual assault. Understand how race, sexuality, class, etc., come into play in this conversation
- Take a WGS class
- Attend nGender every other Tuesday at 11:45 in the Women’s and LGBTQA Resource Center
- Listen to each other. Talk with each other. Keep the conversation alive.
Stay safe. Protect each other. Be diligent.
Anonymous
This is a gross over exaggeration, and I’m ashamed and infuriated to read this as a Gettysburg student, a female, and a friend of many of the brothers of the fraternity you’ve indicted in your article.
Your assertion that “many of your friends” have been raped by brothers of that particular house is not true and not supported by any fact or statistic.
Your assertion that there is a lack of accountability is simply false. Students at Gettysburg are responsible for their crimes individually, not organizationally. On top of that, the organizations can be sanctioned as well if it is found that they directly contributed to the issue.
Your idea that Greek life contributes to this, too, is baseless. Fraternities are required to hold their events with a strict set of rules that specifically mitigate the dangers you are so afraid of. Parties are not something that will ever stop on a college campus, and I would hope and pray that you’d agree that oversight of the events is better and more safe than if parties were held off campus. Furthermore, the idea of ratios (which I understand can be perceived as sexist) and such would continue regardless of the Greek system or not, and happen all across the Greek system here.
Finally, if you are so unhappy with how you feel you are treated at a fraternity party, just don’t go. You are not entitled to enter THEIR house and drink THEIR alcohol. You are a guest, and are free to not go if you still (for a frankly baseless reason) feel you are treated unfairly.
I hope you actually do real research, and maybe go out of your way to actually talk to a brother of any fraternity, so as to hopefully understand that they are not faceless mobs of rapists and misogynists, but rather are real people with real goals and hopes.
What you’ve said in this article is upsetting because the majority of it is not based on fact, and is frankly a hurtful and unfair assertion to a group of people whom I’ve never known to be anything but kind.
I think it’s amazing that you believe you are able to decide whether or not rapes did or did not happen. What statistic is someone supposed to pull up that points to every instance of abuse they personally faced inside a frat?
Congratulations on being a part of them problem. Thank you for standing up for the poor oppressed frat bros and not the victims of sexual assault.
Stockholm syndrome.
It saddens me to see a person lash out in anger at the author of an incredibly insightful piece, rather than look deeply within themselves, their peers, and the greater power structures that be. Maybe stop and think about how your reaction to defend your male peers (who, trust me, as a group, do not need any more privilege, power, or protection) is a product of a patriarchal society where the only way for women to “move up” in the eyes of the system are to be subservient to and defend the harmful actions of men.
Have a long think about the unarguable facts– that freshmen guys literally cannot get into a frat without a bunch of women, that a woman, once dating a brother of a certain frat, is no longer “eligible” to date other brothers of said frat, “bros before hoes”, etc.
I hope YOU actually do real research, and maybe go out of your way to actually talk to a victim of sexual violence, or the 25% of women that will be sexually assaulted in college (that is a statistic you can fact check). Also, why don’t you speak to anyone outside of greek life, at a different school, or ever women outside of your sorority and talk to them about what normal is for you, and you will be shocked that it doesn’t have to be like this.
I genuinely wish you the best, and that you wake up soon, because what you commented is absolutely depressing.
I’m waiting for the above writer to show any solid facts of his own. For someone so preoccupied with ‘proof’ and ‘research’, they provide an astonishing lack of it in their blustery comments. Instead of caring about the “real goals and hopes” of these poor, victimized frat bros, perhaps they can show the same support to all of the victims who have had their own goals and hopes marred by the irresponsible and inhumane behavior of privileged boys drunk on power. Thank you so much to the author of this stellar piece, and I wish them a bright future in their ongoing education and efforts towards social justice.
They literally were showing support through the walk…
What do you say to the non Greek affiliated students who came by to show support? How about the Greek students who attend SASA meetings? The sorority who co-sponsored the event? You failed to mention them. How about the women who work in women’s shelters in town who came to show their support and speak on the relevancy of this issue not just on our campus, but globally? Is that all just another part of the problem? You want to create a conversation, and there it was. You’ve now shifted the conversation to one of hate and frustration, rather than optimism and understanding.
First and foremost, I agree that it’s extremely important that it’s important to promote conversation about sexual assault on our campus. As a victim of sexual assault, a friend of various survivors, and a witness to some of the patriarchal behavior that you described, it has never been more evident to me that there is a huge problem on our campus. It is up to all of us to create conservation, awareness, and understanding to fight this epidemic.
That being said, the conversation this article has provoked is hardly one of understanding and awareness:
1) By targeting SAE as the “bad guys”, you have painted the idea that one fraternity is mainly to blame for the epidemic that plagues our campus.
Is SAE the only fraternity that is selective about who and how many people they let in their doors? No
Is SAE the only fraternity that has assholes that make derogatory comments? No
Is SAE the only fraternity that has had brothers that have sexually assaulted girls? No
None of this, at any fraternity, off campus house, or dormitory is okay. By targeting one fraternity, you are failing to communicate the bigger picture. This issue is not solely inherent to SAE’s culture- not just Gettysburg’s Greek life culture, but campus culture nationwide.
2) Anonymous, fact-less, broad accusations that chastise a group instead of the individual, do nothing but victimize innocent guys and undermine the official reports that survivors (such as myself) have made.
“I know multiple people who have been raped by brothers, both inside and outside of the house.”
It was not a fraternity that raped your friends, it was an individual. While the fraternity culture may have not helped the situation, the 99.99% of amazing, genuine, good guys in SAE who advocate against this as much as you or me, are now facing the repercussions of an accusation from an anonymous speaker.
If you want to make a more valid accusation, than use statistics. How do you do this? Educate all of your friends about how to report an assault. Explain to them that when you report it, you by no means have to proceed with an investigation. Stress to them how their report alone is important because it can serve as a statistic- a statistic that can justifiably communicate the prevalence of sexual assault at a particular fraternity and Gettysburg.
3) When SAE began Walk a Mile in 2014, they were publicly acknowledging that sexual assault was a serious problem on campus. While you may choose to interpret this event as a testament to “transphobia and patriarchal fantasy”, I see it as a unified effort to promote progress and awareness (no matter how slight) in the fight against sexual violence. Walk a mile is a national event meant to be an accessible portal to start talking about what it means to be a woman. Once the broad conversation is started, only then can we talk about the complications of womanhood. It’s not meant to exclude any women, cis or trans, it’s only meant to start a conversation by being an accessible campaign! This year more men than ever (outside of the SAE fraternity) signed up to walk the mile, which to me means that awareness is spreading every year.
It is not the only step, but it is a step. You’re right when you say that we all must be active participants in this battle, and that’s why I’m willing to share my experience and perspective for the first time. Let’s change the conversation from “Reasons SAE’s are hypocritical rapists” to “Reasons the campus community must do more to combat sexual assault.”
I’m not the author and I don’t mean to speak on their behalf but I do want to say this author has sparked the conversation as I can see from the post and has written a beautifully insightful piece despite the serious subject matter of sexual assault on Gettysburg’s campus.
I hope to inform or suggest to those who think the author was targeting a specific fraternity for blame to just think for a moment about the fact that this story is partly based on the personal experiences from this author. So while she acknowledges that sexual assault is a nationwide problem, she is using this fraternity as an example because to list all the ways every fraternity is perpetuating sexual assault on campus would frankly require a book and there’s already a host of other SURGE articles writing on different aspects of sexual assault which you can look to for more information. This article serves as a reminder and it also does more than that by providing resources that are active in the cause against sexual violence and abuse of the body by others. The author simply points out the irony of a fraternity sponsoring such an event and basically being given the credit despite the many other organizations that are involved in making the event more than just a spectacle of heterosexual guys in women’s high-heeled shoes. I’m sure the fraternity itself has more to its name than these atrocities but the matter at hand is that fraternity parties … Greek life (outside of the organizational aspects which have sanctions and rules against such actions) promote the appropriation of women’s bodies and what we now call “rape culture.”
The author also says that they do not mean to undermine the importance of the event because it raises awareness and funds for the cause and it does allow those organizations such as Survivors to be known as a resource and inform the students of their work but a lot of schools have chosen to discontinue the tradition of the Walk A Mile act probably because it is reducing to gender issues we know more about today. So for what it’s worth, I hope you can appreciate how difficult it must have been for the author to write this piece and how difficult it is for women who have been taken advantage of to speak out against a single person of a fraternity, an entire house, or even the system because we’re all playing a part in it.
Thanks for pointing out the obvious contradictions apparent in the Greek system here. Anyone who wants to deny that the Greek system on campus isn’t complicit in sexual assaults is not paying attention. The structure of the frat itself is the problem. Remove the houses and entitlement and their power disappears. The only reason the college has not removed them is alumni old money patriarchs.
When the Greek system really wants to take the problem seriously instead of engaging in symbolic platitudes, they will relinquish their disgusting basements of cesspool alcohol and useless entitled hedonism, which adds nothing of depth to the brains of our young citizens.
As a graduating senior this college is not getting any of my money until they at minimum seize the houses from Greek control.