Take Back the Night

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Violence against women and children is the reality for too many victims of rape, incest, wife-beating, child-abuse, and other forms of inhumanity, some obvious and some more subtle. Thus, the recent appearance of a pair of posters on Harvard bulletin boards and kiosks is particularly upsetting. One, an advertisement for a Leverett House play, announces, "Rape, Incest. Murder. REVENGE." The other, a creation of the opportunes, asks us to "See Boys and Girls in Paine" (it's made to look as if a child had primed it).

These eye-catching enticements attempt to exploit, and in doing so cannot fail to trivialize a deadly serious issue. That the motives of their authors were almost certainly not "malicious" cannot excuse a lack of awareness and sensitively to the paid of others. Are such ads ever necessary? If they don't tell as anything useful about the product or performances being "pitched," that need they ever appear? And if they do accurately describe their product, then what does that tell us about the product itself?

Both ad campaigns should be stopped. More than simply tasteless, ads of this sort are themselves small, but not trivial, examples of the violence that they thoughtlessly mock. But the fact that they happened in the first place underscores the lack of awareness in our community of the magnitude of these oppressive forms of violence. And it points to the importance of paying attention to a third poster which appeared at the same time as the other two. It, too talks about violence, but not in so glambrous or catchy a fashion. It calls for women and men to join in a march protesting violence against women, a rally to Take Back the Night, last night."

And that's one "pitch" that shouldn't need sensationalizing or gimmickry to work. Robert Blake '83