{"id":54915,"date":"2013-04-25T12:00:10","date_gmt":"2013-04-25T17:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=54915"},"modified":"2013-04-25T01:40:26","modified_gmt":"2013-04-25T06:40:26","slug":"how-friendship-can-help-end-rape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/04\/25\/how-friendship-can-help-end-rape\/","title":{"rendered":"How Friendship Can Help End Rape"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at PolicyMic<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a>Let me ask you a question: Do you have a good friend of the opposite sex?<\/p>\n

Odds are you do.\u00a0In fact, the odds are overwhelming.<\/p>\n

When I first began teaching, 25 or so years ago, I asked my students how many of them had a good friend of the opposite sex. About 10% said they did. The rest were from what I called the\u00a0When Harry Met Sally<\/em>\u00a0generation. You\u2019ll remember the scene, early in the film, when Harry asserts that women and men can\u2019t be friends because \u201csex always gets in the way.\u201d\u00a0 Sally is sure he\u2019s wrong.\u00a0They fight about it.\u00a0Then, thinking she has the clincher for her position, she says, confidently, \u201cSo that means that you\u00a0can<\/em>\u00a0be friends with them if you\u2019re not attracted to them!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAh,\u201d says Harry, \u201cyou pretty much want to nail them too.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n

Young people today have utterly and completely repudiated this idea. These days, when I ask my students, I\u2019ve had to revise the question: \u201cIs there anyone here who does\u00a0not\u00a0<\/em>have a friend of the opposite sex?\u201d\u00a0A few hands perhaps, in the more than 400 students in the class.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s think, for a moment, about the \u201cpolitics\u201d of friendship.\u00a0With whom do you make friends?\u00a0With your\u00a0peers<\/em>.\u00a0Not your supervisor or boss.\u00a0Not your subordinate. Your\u00a0equal<\/em>.\u00a0 More than romance, and surely more than workplace relationships, friendships are the relationships with the least amount of inequality.<\/p>\n

This changes how we can engage men in the efforts to end sexual assault, because there are three elements to sexual assault that can be discussed and disentangled.<\/p>\n

First is m en\u2019s sense of entitlement to women\u2019s bodies, to sex. This sense of entitlement dissolves in the face of an encounter with your friends. After all, entitlement is premised on inequality. The more equal women are, the less entitlement men may feel. (Entitlement is not to be confused with resentment; equality often breeds resentment in the privileged group. The privileged rarely support equality because they fear they have something to lose.) Entitlement leads men to think that they can do whatever they want.<\/p>\n

Second, the\u00a0Bro Code<\/a>\u00a0tells those guys that they\u2019re right \u2013 that they can get away with it because their bros won\u2019t challenge or confront them. The bonds of brotherhood demand men\u2019s silent complicity with predatory and potentially assaultive behavior. One never rats out the brotherhood.\u00a0But if we see our female friends as our equals, then we might be more likely to act ethically to intervene and resist being a passive bystander. (And, of course, we rescue our male friends from doing something that could land him in jail for a very long time.)<\/p>\n

Men\u2019s silence is what perpetuates the culture of sexual assault; many of the excellent programs that work to engage men suggest that men start making some noise.\u00a0We know the women, or know people who know them.\u00a0This is personal.<\/p>\n

Finally, we’re better than that \u2013 and we know it.<\/p>\n

Sexual assault is often seen as an abstraction, a \u201cbad\u201d thing that happens to other people: Bad people do bad things to people who weren\u2019t careful, were drunk or compromised.\u00a0But, as I said, it\u2019s personal.\u00a0And besides, this framing puts all the responsibility on women to monitor their activities, alcohol consumption, and environments; if they don\u2019t, whose fault is it?<\/p>\n

This sets the bar far too low to men.\u00a0It assumes that\u00a0unless<\/em>\u00a0women monitor and police everything they do, drink, say, wear etc., we men are wild, out of control animals and we cannot be held responsible for our actions.<\/p>\n

Surely we can do better than this.\u00a0Surely we can be the good and decent and ethical men we say we are. Surely we can promise, publicly and loudly, the pledge of the\u00a0White Ribbon Campaign<\/a>\u00a0(the world\u2019s largest effort to engage men to end men\u2019s violence against women):\u00a0I pledge never to commit, condone, or remain silent about violence against women and girls.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our friends \u2013 both women and men \u2013 deserve and expect no less of us.<\/p>\n

Michael Kimmel is a\u00a0professor of sociology<\/a> at the State University of New York at Stonybrook. \u00a0He has written or edited over twenty volumes, including\u00a0Manhood in America: A Cultural History<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men<\/a>. \u00a0You can visit his website\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at PolicyMic. Let me ask you a question: Do you have a good friend of the opposite sex? Odds are you do.\u00a0In fact, the odds are overwhelming. When I first began teaching, 25 or so years ago, I asked my students how many of them had a good friend of the opposite sex. About […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[106,55,2098,2090,283,133],"class_list":["post-54915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-friendship","tag-gender","tag-gender-prejudicediscrimination","tag-gender-violence","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-violence"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54915"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54921,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54915\/revisions\/54921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}