Take It Back

Friday was Take Back the Night. It was cold and rainy—really cold, like 34 degrees cold—and I wasn’t dressed appropriately, what with it being 60 degrees when I went to work that morning. I figured I’d go to the rally and not actually do the march. But when I got there, the crowd was kind of small, and then when they opened up the mic to anybody who wanted to talk woman after woman got up and talked about how she’d survived sexual assault as a teenager, or walking home from the campus library, or at the hands of her foster father. They were crying and moving and I felt like I’d have to be a real shit to leave because I was chilly. So I went on the march, too, and it went all through downtown and down to campus and back. I’d planned on dropping out when we got back around to my car, but after getting screamed at by frat boys on campus I stuck with it.

There are a lot of reasons I wasn’t enthusiastic about the march: it’s cold and wet, I’m old in comparison to these whippersnappers. But mostly, I just started feeling like walking around yelling stuff isn’t going to change anything. That’s basically what sororities do during rush, isn’t it? And the concept of women-only marches isn’t exactly novel at this point in history. I figured maybe it was time to look for a new thing. But then we went through campus.

Good lord. What kind of person hears “stop violence, stop rape” and thinks “well, I’d certainly disagree with that”? How insecure does a man have to be to feel threatened by a group of 20-year-old women chanting “no means no”? I’m not being flippant when I ask this—if you’re a guy, and your buddy starts yelling “no means yes,” or the classic gem “I’ll rape you, you fucking lesbians,” does that make him look tough and cool to you?

So. Maybe a group of women getting together and yelling stuff is still radical.

Nothing to be done about the jackasses yelling from apartment buildings but Awesome Rossum may have a word with the fraternities in question. Yay! Yay for men who think men who yell things at women who think men who rape should just stop it already!