The Blame Game: Views on Sexual Harassment

For this week’s post, I wanted to touch on an article I came across online regarding an email that one college president sent out to all students and faculty to address the issue of sexual assault on campus. The way in which president Donald Eastman of Eckerd College discussed the college’s awareness campaign to minimize sexual assault relates really well to some of the major concepts we have discussed in class.

First of all, this idea of addressing the entire student body about raising awareness surrounding sexual assault and harassment made me think of Hannah’s post about the It’s On Us vs. Carry That Weight campaigns and the differences between the impact that two campaigns had. As Joyce and Harwood found, the people who produce the message really affects the way the audience evaluated the content of the message (2014). I would say that a mass email coming from a college president who has no known history of being affected by sexual harassment probably doesn’t have a very strong message-consistent impact on the student body. When you really analyze the content of the email that President Eastman sent out, it appears that the content was impactful, however, impactful in all the wrong ways.

President Eastman suggests that sexual assault and harassment incidents are, “almost always preceded by consumption, often heavy consumption, of alcohol, often by everyone involved in them.” (Arata, 2014) The relationship between sexual assault and alcohol consumption made me think of the movie we watched in class about drinking culture on college campuses. One of the main points of the film was that drunken sex is glamorized in popular culture, like in alcohol advertisements and teen movies, but the negative consequences of combining alcohol and sex are never really shown. President Eastman suggests that students of Eckerd College can help prevent sexual harassment on their campus by doing two, “relatively simple things” which include: 

          1) Limiting consumption of alcohol and encouraging friends to do the same

          2) Be aware of the “dramatic and often negative psychological effects of sexual activity without commitment" (Arata, 2014). 

Essentially President Eastman is suggesting that students should abstain from drinking and having pre-marital sex in order for sexual assault to vanish from college campuses. This really struck me as problematic because, as we have seen from the documentary we watched, asking college students to abstain completely from drinking and sex is just plain unrealistic. What is interesting to look at is how students responded to President Eastman’s email.

A large community of Eckerd students took to twitter to express their opinions about President Eastman’s suggestions. The majority of the students felt that Eastman’s assumptions that casual sex and alcohol consumption inadvertently leads to rape, was patronizing and victim-blaming (Arata, 2014). What’s interesting is that #victimblaming was a popular hashtag used amongst students in response to the email. One student said, “Let’s see…@eckerdcollege, you blame sexual assault on offenders who use alcohol as their facilitator, not drinking” (Arata, 2014).

Clearly students feel that President Eastman was wrong to attribute sexual assault to alcohol and not the physical human being committing the crime. This idea of placing blame immediately made me think of the Ferguson article we read about promiscuity and responsibility in regards to sexual harassment. Ferguson found that when exposed to portrayals of promiscuous women, viewers thought of sexual assault victims as more responsible and as of having fewer traumas (2005). How do highly sexualized alcohol advertisements fit into this picture? In a large portion of alcohol advertisements women are portrayed as promiscuous and using their sexuality to gain attention all while simultaneously consuming alcohol. Although sexual assault is not referenced in these commercials, the promiscuous way in which they portray women after they consume alcohol is likely to lead viewers to believe that they are more responsible for and sexual harassment they might receive during a night of drinking (Ferguson, 2005). On one end, we have college students constantly being exposed to advertisements that portray women in this promiscuous way, suggesting that they are to blame for any sexual traumas they might encounter. On the other end we have people like President Eastman who are suggesting that alcohol consumption is to blame. While I think President Eastman’s ideas about preventing sexual assault seem extreme, maybe toning down the glamorized relationship between drinking and sex might be a good place to start especially in advertising, movies, and popular television shows. Maybe decreasing the idea that drinking leads to female promiscuity and thus glamorous sex, might change society’s ideas that drinking and sex come hand in hand and thus prevent sexual harassment when one party does not share similar ideas. Or perhaps this happy medium is too utopian of an idea and more conversations on college campuses should be had that point to how advertising associates drinking and sex. What do you guys think?

References 

Arata, E. (2014, November 25). College President Blames Rape On Student Drinking And Casual Sex. Elite Daily. http://elitedaily.com/news/world/president-blames-rape-on-sex-and-booze/863442/

Ferguson, T. Berlin, J., Noles, E., Johnson, J., Reed, W., & Spicer, C. V. (2005). Variation in the application of the ‘promiscuous female’ stereotype and the nature of the application domain: Influences on sexual harassment judgments after exposure to the Jerry Springer Show. Sex Roles, 52(7-8). 477-487.

Joyce, N.,  & Harwood, J. (2014). Context and identification in persuasive mass communication. Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications,
26(1), 50-57. doi: 10.1027/1864-1105/a000110