The Dilemma of Empowerment

“Take Back the Night” (TBTN), the well-intentioned campaign against sexual violence, necessarily begs the question, who is the night being taken back from?

In 1999, Ross G. Douthat ’02, now a reporter at the Atlantic Monthly, chronicled the campus event, which featured an invited speaker who accused conservatives of wanting “to lock up pregnant black women.” She then compared a law permitting a woman to defend herself against a would-be rapist with a woman’s right not to be besieged by “the aggressive fetus”—two sides of the same coin.

At the somber candlelight vigil meant to be an occasion for victims to share their personal stories of rape, the last to speak was then-Assistant Professor of English Ann Pellegrini. She digressed, declaring her disappointment at how few contraceptive commercials were broadcast on television and lamenting that “matriarchy” provoked red squiggly lines from her spell-check.

In short, there’s a good side to Take Back the Night, and behind it, there lurks the potential for a simple, widely supported cause to be obscured by inconsequential, fringe tirades.

Harvard TBTN’s present organizers deserve credit. They have taken something that, in past years, was profoundly crazy and have made it reasonable. They have retained its modus operandi—a frank, blunt approach to make the reality of rape at Harvard more real to students who are only passively aware of the problem.

Although the vigil this year conflicted with Maundy Thursday, precluding the participation of a number of observant Christians, myself included, it’s reported to have been an impassioned and chilling event, which escaped the trivialization it has encountered in years past.

Outside the Science Center last week, amidst the Clothesline Project, a collection of t-shirts with jostling messages from rape victims written on them, one could still find the tangential leftover. The most vile read: “‘Your mother gave you up for adoption because she wanted you to have a better life’ means ‘she couldn’t afford an abortion.’”

Although Harvard’s TBTN is now more well-coordinated and on-theme, it’s hard not to sense an undying orthodoxy lying beneath the surface.

Ever since it was first held in the 1980s, the Harvard event has treated sexual violence not as the provenance of a few depraved criminals. Instead, as TBTN’s organizers put it in a Crimson op-ed last week, “We spend 51 weeks of the year in a culture that tacitly condones sexual violence.”

Actually, you might not want to exempt last week from that total. After all, it would be a mistake to ignore the Catholic Schoolgirl party, held annually by the Owl Club. The party was held last Tuesday—coincidentally, that day’s TBTN event was the “Men’s Forum.” And then the biggest irony of all: the Owl Club is nothing less than a co-sponsor of TBTN.

To get a sensation of what the Catholic School Girls party is all about, it might’ve been best to watch the Owl’s promotional video for the party—had it not been taken down after it caused people on House open-lists to label it, among other things, “a vaguely pathological sexual fantasy.” Suffice it to say the video’s message, and that of the party generally, was that participating women should bring scant clothes and few inhibitions.

And one cannot help but wonder whether there were any private words of reproach that passed between TBTN organizers and their Owl Club co-sponsors. Because publicly, TBTN organizers were inauspiciously mum. One might have expected a disavowal, a roundtable, even a protest.

That is, one might expect those reactions if one was altogether unacquainted with the heritage of TBTN, whose bottom line is not just about stopping rapes.

TBTN’s residual orthodoxy is to “empower” women wherever, whenever it’s possible—in this case, bestowing power equivalent to that of sex-driven men who ought to restrain themselves but don’t because, thanks to the silent acquiescence of TBTN and groups you might expect to stand up to such behavior, they go unchallenged.

And in the case of the Catholic Schoolgirl party, the prevailing logic goes that it’s simply inappropriate to question the wisdom of an 18-year-old who would don short-cut, plaid skirts, get as drunk as she wants, and put herself in danger.

Rape has existed forever. But it’s safe to say that there has been more “date rape” these past several decades than ever before, as formal courtship has eroded, physical intimacy has become routine, oversexed environments (and even pathological male fantasies) are merrily facilitated, and drunkenness is de jure. The boundary of consent is blurred in these instances, as even the actors/teachers of the University-funded rape prevention theatre troupe Sex Signals admitted in its mandatory-attendance presentation to first-years last Fall.

None of this mitigates the wrongness of the rapist and his crime. But even proffering the foregoing paragraphs as an explanation is what TBTN organizers would label “victim-blaming”; it is this mentality which is said to “tacitly condone sexual violence.”

Take Back the Night has rebounded admirably from its bizarre incarnation of the previous decade, where empowering women in the face of rape became a convoluted, extreme, and profligate notion.

Now it beholds the final frontier, with a collegiate culture so oversexed that it bursts unbecomingly out of its seams more often than before. TBTN might tacitly embrace this “anything goes” sexual culture at odds with respect for women and their bodies. Or it might reorient its goal and, if they want to be real revolutionaries, forge a new culture of assertive modesty.



Travis R. Kavulla ’06 is a history concentrator affiliated with Mather House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.