What if you're wearing daisy dukes, a skimpy tank top, and flip flops?
Flickr?
They've never seen what Olympic athletes wear?
I like how they mention clogs. Clearly it has nothing to do with racy clothing at all when one of the examples isn't.
Clogs are clearly something you can't run it, I suppose.
What if you're wearing daisy dukes, a skimpy tank top, and flip flops?
I think campus security could say that they are not trying to slut shame, so as far as they are concerned, that is entirely safe attire.
Have you seen the positions people use in starting blocks?
I'm torn, because I really do have strong feelings about hobbling shoes. But everything other than the shoes is clearly bullshit.
Even worrying about bad shoes is framing sexual assault as primarily a problem of "Evil guy jumping out of the bushes at you, while you shriek and sprint away," and not so much "Guy who lives in your dorm blocks you into your room," or "Guy who's giving you a ride home from a party assaults you."
Also it doesn't frame it as "Hey, don't assault people."
flip flops? You could sprint in that.
Not in any flip flops I've ever worn. Too difficult to keep them aligned with my feet. Maybe they're more sophisticated nowadays, but I always thought flip-flops with more straps were called sandals.
Well, if they fly off and you end up sprinting barefoot: they were only flip-flops. (Can't be held responsible.)
I should clarify that this is a document about security in general, including not leaving valuables in your car and things like that.
I think that the tipoff that someone's thinking in a messed-up way is that modern tight clothing hat a college kid is at all likely to be wearing doesn't restrict your movement. Everything's a bit stretchy. For clothes that'd actually slow you down (barring shoes), you'd need a knee-length or longer straight skirt. So if the drafter's head went to 'tight' as a security problem, they were thinking 'slutty and attracting trouble', not 'unable to flee'.
helpy-chalk, do they have any bullet points aimed at preventing things like LB's scenarios in 7?
If you carry a machete, you can dress as slutty as you want.
11: Was it the document the feds require be sent to every body and that has the crime stats?
It's perfectly sensible advice - I notice Rob doesn't say what's in the rest of the guide - and ridiculing it for "blaming the victim" is asinine. It could even end up getting people killed. Giving good advice to people - not just women! - on how to avoid assault - not just sexual assault! - is a good thing. And saying "yeah well how about encouraging the attackers not to attack people instead?" is an argument worthy of the junior common room at best.
So, yeah. Encourage your students to wear impractical clothing that they can barely walk in. While you're at it, encourage them to stay out and get drunk alone when their friends have all gone home. Flash their money around. Go down dark alleys alone. Some poor bloke's going to listen to your advice and get his nose broken and his wallet lifted, but at least he'll feel dead empowered while he's sitting in casualty.
It's also irrelevant that, as in 7, it doesn't relate to every possible form of assault. It doesn't relate to the largest single threat to female students' lives either, which is suicide. (Or the second largest, which is vehicle accidents.) Doesn't make it pointless.
16.1 posted before I saw 11. Advice not to leave valuables in your car is clearly just as victim-blaming. How about leaflets saying "please don't steal things from cars", eh?
Walk through Bedford Sty alone. Ride your motorcycle in the rain.
So if the drafter's head went to 'tight' as a security problem, they were thinking 'slutty and attracting trouble', not 'unable to flee'.
How so? Maybe when the drafter thinks of tight clothing, he or she thinks of pencil skirts. Sorry, but I don't think this is such bad advice if there have been stranger attacks on campus. Though all the running shoes in the world would not help me get away from a physically fit attacker. They should issue jetpacks.
Though all the running shoes in the world would not help me get away from a physically fit attacker.
Right. Have you thought about Crossfit?
Presumably all these self-defence classes are victim-blaming too. Someone should tell the instructors.
Halford, I can barely get through a vinyasa class without hurting myself. Crossfit is for the young.
20: Are there any community college kids wearing pencil skirts these days, though? Barring shoes, I can't think of the last time I saw a teenager/twenty-something in clothes that would actually restrict their movement in an emergency. The vast majority of 'tight' clothes are just what you'd want to run in.
It's perfectly sensible advice - I notice Rob doesn't say what's in the rest of the guide - and ridiculing it for "blaming the victim" is asinine.
Is it? To what extent does permanently editing your wardrobe really protect you? Especially compared to age/fitness/gender/etc/etc/etc.
23 -- I was mostly mocking myself, but [pictures of old chicks doing Crossfit deleted].
encourage them to stay out and get drunk alone when their friends have all gone home. Flash their money around. Go down dark alleys alone.
As I've said here before, I've been mugged multiple times. At least two of those elements factored in each time.
They should worn against the sagging pants the kids are wearing these days.
I'd hate to try to run wearing skinny jeans, but perhaps they are more stretchy than they look.
Does the person composing this list necessarily have an accurate idea of what cc students are wearing? It was probably copied without change from some police-sponsored website intended for the general public.
25: Students cannot be expected to modify their age and gender in order to enhance personal safety. This is a list of things people can actually control, if they want to feel safer. And shoes make a big difference.
15: This is a different document, although we get that one, too.
As far as I know there have been no stranger assaults on campus, although there have been instances of stalking and harassment by ex-boyfriends, estranged husbands, and people who just know their victims from classes.
Also, people have busted the windows on cars in the parking lot and taken stuff left visible from outside.
I was mostly mocking myself, but [pictures of old chicks doing Crossfit deleted].
Actually I looked into it at one point, but decided it was too expensive. Also old injuries...
Is it? To what extent does permanently editing your wardrobe really protect you? Especially compared to age/fitness/gender/etc/etc/etc.
It's true, of course, that gender is a big factor. Male students are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime or murder than are female students. (About twice as likely for murder.) Male students, in fact, are prime victim material; 18-24 age bracket, male, living in cities, often under the influence of alcohol. The only group more at risk of murder or violent assault than those guys is children under one year old, whose parents or step-parents kill them at a fairly startling rate, but you won't see many of them at college.
But "grow older" is not sensible advice. "Try to avoid wearing clothes that can restrict your movements and make it difficult to run away" is.
I had assumed that the reason for wanting to run away would be a school shooting, maybe a fire. Huh.
They should get more whimsical about it. Put up signs telling women to practice the proper style of kung fu: Eagle Claw and Northern Long Fist Style are clearly inferior to Tiger Crane Style, and only dirty sluts use Monkey Style.
20: I would think that all the running shoes in the world would provide a sufficient defense when situated between you and your attacker.
Of course, you might have left all the running shoes in the world at home. But at least then your attacker isn't wearing running shoes. Because you have all of them.
Students cannot be expected to modify their age and gender in order to enhance personal safety. This is a list of things people can actually control, if they want to feel safer. And shoes make a big difference.
How they feel about safety is largely a product of a fear-based society, and not actually rooted in much fact. I see a big cost to constantly haranguing people that stranger-danger lurks around every corner.
35: But what if he's one of those barefoot runner types? Then I'm doomed. Except, stand back! I know Wing Chun!
I vote for mild slut-shaming -- no one is likely thinking "tight clothes and high heels" without thinking "stranger in the bushes." But it's pretty mild, even though the advice is mostly impractical.
I agree that "avoid clothing that can make it difficult to run away" is sensible advice, but as pointed out in the OP and above, the list is both over- and under-inclusive in a way that leads one to suspect that the writer has confused "making it easier to run away" and "not attracting attention with your slutty clothes."
Tight clothing may attract attention, but doesn't make it any more difficult for the wearer to run away. Have you ever walked into a Lululemon or a Gap Athletica? High heels definitely make it harder to run. So do flip flops, which, unlike high heels, don't generally read as "slutty," and are not mentioned in the advisory.
36: Okay, if they want to be safer then. I see no cost to encouraging people to wear clothing they can move in. If students want to run around in tight clothes that are comfortable to move in, more power to them.
The very irritating thing about this advice is not that it's bad advice. It's that stranger assault is much less common on campus than the scenarios described by LB in 7, but the official Safety Advice almost certainly doesn't say so, because universities "handle" those situations internally and don't acknowledge them in their crime statistics. They're giving advice to prevent something that's already unlikely to happen, and ignoring the types of assaults that are likely to happen.
It's very difficult to run away or defend yourself in a burqa too; this is, of course, a feature not a bug from the point of view of the sort of person who favours burqas.
I vote for mild slut-shaming
You could stand outside of American Apparel and make tsk tsk noises.
41 was a bit startling but then I remembered the whole "private campus police force responsible only to university authorities" weirdness.
(Seriously though: total slut-shaming, and actually super-unprofessional on the part of whatever campus security service this is. There is no coherent security-related reason to admonish people not to wear "tight clothes;" it's pretty plainly just an excuse to tell the girls not to look all tempting for all those rapists out there.)
Before condemning someone for trying to attack you, you should walk a mile in their shoes. Because after you've done that you'll be a mile away from them and you'll have their shoes.
38: I vote for mild slut-shaming
Sexist.
I don't think Moby needs to sign 46 for us to identify him.
I wouldn't have been able to do it if Moby hadn't been wearing such tight socks.
37: Then trick him into putting on a pair of running shoes to destroy his power.
I'm on my phone. I can only type so fast.
37: Except, stand back! I know Wing Chun!
That's the spirit!
I totally agree with 41 (and the campus police forces and internal handling of campus security matters are a horrible nightmare).
But in mild fairness to Last Chance Community College sexual assault in residence halls and frat parties and the like is probably not a big issue for crime on campus there, since as a community college it probably has no dorms or residential facilities.
Anti-semite. Krav Maga is where it's at.
Advert in my student union: Tae Kwon Do Classes, Thursday 7 pm. USEFUL FOR EVERYTHING FROM SEXUAL HARASSMENT TO STREET VIOLENCE.
Well, I suppose it would be.
I can sexually harass with words alone.
Everything they need to protect themsevles is demonstrated by the guy with the polo neck and beard from about 12 min 30 in this fantastic video [although the whole thing is excellent/charming]:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xsh2nb_savate-bf-boxe-francaise-1972_webcam?search_algo=1
Notice the tight impractical clothing throughout.
Seriously, I have always, certainly since I was a teenager, considered the possibility of violence when choosing footwear. My wife mocks me, but I'd never go anywhere except the beach in flip-flops.
That said, I agree re: the generally negative assessment of the campus flyer.
59: I always think of being able to sprint for the bus or ride it standing in a crowd. Probably comes to a similar shoe choice.
Well, the document contains apparently nothing else that could be remotely interpreted as shaming, the advice about shoes is entirely sensible, and frankly you have to stretch a long way or be Castock to interpret even the advice about tight clothing to be shaming. So I'd go with "sound advice cherrypicked and misread".
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe there's lots of stuff in there about not showing cleavage or going out without a male escort or whatever, but as far as we know there isn't.
60: This. Or walk a mile or two. In theory, I suppose I should be worrying about violence, and it does affect my cab-taking behavior, but it's never really driven shoe choices.
Well, the document contains apparently nothing else that could be remotely interpreted as shaming,
I'm not seeing your basis for this -- I don't think we know much at all about the rest of it.
39.2 to 61.1 on the shoes. 61.1 is otherwise stretching a long way to claim that anyone is stretching a long way.
re: 60
Yeah. The primary thought here being, 'can I get away from potential violence' rather than 'can I inflict violence'.
62: I forgot about the walking but that also matters. I've had to walk home when the bus doesn't show.
I was walking back from a CVS (I think) near the Takoma metro station in DC a few years ago sometime after dark but not later than 10. I just needed to run out and get contact solution and I was wearing flip-flops. Some guys drove by and started yelling at me; all I could make out was that they were making fun of my flip flops. I was glad they didn't chase me.
Speculating madly about the whole contents of the advice (based on similar things I've seen), I might want to call it stupid in a gendered kind of way rather than slut-shaming exactly. 32 is right, AFAIK, that young men are more likely to be the subject of violent crime than young women, but I've never seen this kind of document with gendered tips aimed at helping young men avoid getting beaten up -- 'tight clothing and high heels' not only frames sexual assault as a matter of strangers jumping out of the bushes, but frames violent assault by strangers as a women-only problem rather than a problem that affects men more than women.
Remember, you don't have to outrun your attacker. You only have to outrun your rent boy.
This is why you make the rent-boy wear clogs. Or a pencil skirt, depending on your tastes.
Even worrying about bad shoes is framing sexual assault as primarily a problem of "Evil guy jumping out of the bushes at you, while you shriek and sprint away," and not so much "Guy who lives in your dorm blocks you into your room," or "Guy who's giving you a ride home from a party assaults you."
Young men haven't really mastered the idea that sex requires consent:
"Only 69% of young men would not try to have sex with someone who did not want to, and one in 20 said they would try to have sex with someone who was asleep ... A significant proportion also seemed confused about what constitutes rape: only 77% of young men agreed that having sex with someone who has said no was rape. ... 'A lot of young people are growing up without really knowing what consent means,' says Whitney Iles. 'But then I think a lot of adults don't really know either.'"
Speaking of violence, the Onion has successfully creeped me out. It's not so much that I disapprove of their being unfair to Republicans, as that I just didn't want to read that, even knowing it was meant as satire.
You can get the crime statistics for the community college at question in the OP pretty easily. There was one reported forcible sexual assault in the past 3 years and zero other kinds of assaults; not even any robberies. So the takeaway is that you should just ignore this message and frolic away at LCC because it's as safe as your Mom's rec room.
And even as to the reported forcible sexual assault, the site explains "One forcible rape was reported to the [] Police Department in 2010 but criminal
charges were not pursued against the alleged perpetrator. Because the rape was reported to the local law enforcement authority
having jurisdiction, the incident must be categorized and counted as one rape although no one was prosecuted."
So basically there's no crime there at all. Kids should just get drunk and walk around alone in their underwear.
I remember getting all-purpose multi-gendered - not gender neutral - advice on safety while in college, including warnings for everyone about sobriety outdoors at night in dark alleys when the streetlights are out and there isn't enough moonlight to be able to see using the reflection of your antique silver dollar as a flashlight, so don't even think of trying to take it out of your wallet stuffed with no bills smaller than a 20.
The stuff we made fun of were the warnings about con artists - do people really fall for the wallet inspector trick?* Someone in my class did have clear plastic backpack, which generated laughter when we got the warning to not let people see what you're carrying.
*Ok, maybe that wasn't real, but some of the cons described, which I no longer remember, were at that level.
get drunk and walk around alone in their underwear.
Alone seems harsh. Surely getting drunk and walking around in your underwear is a timehonored method of making friends.
Getting drunk and walking around in someone else's underwear is even more effective.
Clogs may make movement difficult but they make powerful kicks to the 'nads very easy.
Eh but also to be honest, I've seen hilariously right on advice from the 80s lurking in noticeboards at my institution that advises women to carry whistles prominently.
People give dumb advice & there's something slightly pointless about lumping it all into slut-shaming, I think.
The rape whistle is the true mark of the slut.
78: A friend of mine had to kick off her clogs and tear barefoot down Dearborn Ave in Chicago when a rapey dude tried to pull her into his car.
People give dumb advice & there's something slightly pointless about lumping it all into slut-shaming, I think.
Maybe, but this sort of advice is ubiquitous, and it's not just that it misses the point about where the real danger is--the fact that it's taken for granted as true and sensible, I think, makes a huge difference to how women are taught to experience being outside. As Ajay pointed out in 32, men are more likely by far to be victimized in violent crimes by strangers, but men aren't taught to view the world outside the home as a deadly obstacle course.
I thought this piece, though 20 years old (and hence from when there was a lot more rape happening, at least according to the data we have), does a decent job of highlighting this for a male audience (who may be unused to thinking about it):
What is often missed when people contemplate statistics on rape is the effect of the threat of sexual violence on women. I have asked women repeatedly, "How would your life be different if rape were suddenly to end?" (Man may learn a lot by asking this question of women to whom they are close.) ... Through talking to women, I learned: The threat of rape alters the meaning and feel of the night. Observe how your body feels, how the night feels, when you're in fear. ... What is the difference between walking late at night in the dangerous part of a city and walking late at night in the country, or safe suburbs? When I try to imagine what the threat of rape must do to the night, I think of the stalked adrenalated feeling I get walking late at night in parts of certain American cities. Only, I remind myself, it is a fear different from any I have know, a fear of being raped. ... It is night half of the time. If the threat of rape alters the meaning of the night, it must alter the meaning and pace of the day, one's relation to the passing and organization of time itself. For some women, the threat of rape at night turns their cars into armored tanks, their solitude into isolation. And what must the space inside a car or an apartment feel like if the space outside is menacing? ... Another woman said, "I know what I can't do and I've completely internalized what I can't do. I've built a viable life that basically involves never leaving my apartment at night unless I'm directly going some place to meet somebody. It's unconsciously built into what it occurs to women to do."
"Safety advice" that heightens the salience of one extremely rare form of violence (assault in a situation where the ability to run faster would be helpful) rather than emphasizing how, for example, social groups can take better care of their members and more effectively watch for and deal with bad apples (as discussed in this very good blogpost) helps reinforce this sort of constricted sense of what's reasonable behavior, without actually making anyone safer.
I disagree with both: we shouldn't talk about rape because it scares women & we shouldn't talk about ways women can reduce risk because it takes the onus off men.
72: 'A lot of young people are growing up without really knowing what consent means,'
Thanks to anarchists, there are hopefully more people with at least a rudimentary understanding of consent. It is now de rigeur for pretty much any anarchist gathering larger than a book club to include a "Consent is Sexy" workshop. I just saw a play that was clearly influenced by them.
32: 18-24 age bracket, male, living in cities, often under the influence of alcohol
Surely that includes a disproportionate number of people of color and poor people who are historically underrepresented at college campuses though.
86: I had to stop reading Anarchy in the early 90s because there were a few too many self-serving essays about the beautiful and truly consensual relationship the author had with a 15yo in Thailand/ student in their math class/ whatever and the world just didn't understand, man.
I think that the tipoff that someone's thinking in a messed-up way is that modern tight clothing hat a college kid is at all likely to be wearing doesn't restrict your movement.
While I am not a college kid, I have some pants that are tight enough to restrict my movement.
Which in turn facilitates some movements, rowr.
86: I had to stop reading Anarchy in the early 90s because there were a few too many self-serving essays about the beautiful and truly consensual relationship the author had with a 15yo in Thailand/ student in their math class/ whatever and the world just didn't understand, man.
I recently started reading Disgrace and had to stop after very little time (page 13 or so, then I braved it again and got to page 15)—Coetzee really doesn't give you a lot of lead time before the main character starts acting like a slime.
73: I guess that's what comes of trying to satirize a political party that rendered satire superfluous with its real-life stupidity at least a decade ago.
85: All in how it's done. Talking accurately about how to reduce risk is a great idea, but it would be difficult to mistake for slut-shaming (which is often incoherent in terms of actual risk reduction, as in this example). Likewise there is no shortage of talk about rape, but a desperate shortage of actually useful talk about rape.
Oh gross. I just saw a picture on FB of Lady Liberty cowering in a highly sexualized way while Uncle Sam cradles her head, holds the torch aloft, and says, Don't worry; we'll get through this! This is unsurprisingly followed by a bunch of comments about how Black Panthers have taken over the US under Obama and are now freely allowed to intimidate whites. WTF?
93: Yeah, the Onion piece would kind of have to be the over the top, wouldn't it.
Word is that David Brooks satirized an RNC introductory speech of Romney recently. It might not bear mention but for this line of the column, quoted
not-at-the-NYT.
If elected, he promises to bring all Americans together and make them feel inferior.
Oh my. The actual column is here. It's actually pretty hilarious. I'm ... surprised.
Romney was extremely detail oriented in his business life. He once canceled a corporate retreat at which Abba had been hired to play, saying he found the band's music "too angry."
Who is this Brooks character?
Did you guys see this psychopathic shit yet? It's basically that Onion article, but more latinaphobic than homophobic.
Wow. The dems should play that clip every night on spanish language stations across the country, but especially in Florida, Ohio, and Nevada. Also, Republicans: This is how you lose the future.
RNC chairman Reince Priebus quickly stepped up and asked for order and respect for the speaker, suggesting that, yeah, what we had just seen might well have been an ugly outburst of nativism.
Ugly outbursts of nativism at a GOP convention? I'm shocked!
She doesn't even say anything before they start chanting. And she has blonde hair. Those are some hair-trigger nativists.
That's ugly, but of course just under the surface at all times in today's Republican party. When I attended the convention in Houston in '92, I was totally freaked out (as a young Republican) by the sanctimoniously hateful delegates and the jingoism. (What's-his-name performed the Gulf War theme song live to great effect; Pat Buchanan awed the crowd with his culture war speech; lots of delegates wore ridiculous miniature red cowboy hats to signify they sided against moderating the anti-choice platform plank -- were they supposed to be cowboy hats for fetuses? I don't know.)
It's hard to tell what's going on in the video, and people's lips don't synch with the sound. Maybe they were unhappy with Ron Paul's delegates ruining their ceremony. Maybe it's because the woman up to speak was Latina. But the looks on many of the chanting delegates' faces are grotesque.
Yes, the video doesn't quite work on its own without the narrative. Which will probably keep it from going viral, unless some Democrat with political or media juice wants to push the story and provide the narrative. Somebody should step up and do that, although it's hard to compete when you have sound clips of Republican congressmen and Senate candidates saying that "legitimate" rape can't get a woman pregnant.
It may not surprise you that Fox tells this story a bit differently. How special, to be greeted so warmly and how awkward not to understand that greeting!
I dunno, TPM has a longer clip that's more ambiguous. They report the "USA" as being intended to drown out the Ron Paul supporters, and that looks like a plausible interpretation to me.
This, on the other hand, looks like a more clear-cut example of overt racism.
I wish I could read lips, because it looks like some of those folks are not saying U! S! A! but something else in exactly the same rhythm.
You can read my lips any time, baybee.
They need to come up with some more specific chants. U! S! A! what? USA DOES WHAT?
109: I think some of them are actually the Ron Paul people, chanting whatever Ron Paul people chant.
U! S! A! what? USA DOES WHAT?
EVERYTHING.
It's like you never even took Patriotism 101.
Ron Paul people, chanting whatever Ron Paul people chant
WHAT DO WE WANT?
Freedom!
WHEN DO WE WANT IT?
Liberty!