SPEAKING FREELY
Posted by Regina Mills (’09)
Mr.
Gilleran,
I
have only a brief response to your second and third postings.
First:
Love Your Body Week was not about stopping sexual assault. It was about loving
your body. Stopping the perpetration of sexual assault against women is under
the umbrella of loving one's body for the following reasons: Loving one's body
means respecting one's body.
Learning
how to respect one's body means realizing that you must demand respect for it
from others. Believing that you have the right to demand respect for your body
means believing that others have the right to demand respect for their bodies
and thus respecting and loving everyone's body. That is why loving your body is
the message. It encompasses so much more than sexual assault prevention.
Second:
To come back to your point of men being villified
through a campaign. As you now know, we had no intention of isolating or villifying men. However, you must realize that women who
try to get men into a conversation about what are traditionally considered
"women's issues" walk a tight line. If we try to solve
"our" problems (as they have always been assumed to be only women's
problems), we marginalize men and make them feel like they have no part in the solution.
However, when we try to tell men that they should care about this issue, that it should bother them to no end that when I walk
around by myself in the dark and see a man walking alone nearby I am afraid of
him, men feel villified. It is a tight rope trying to
bridge the gap.
Third:
I agree totally that we need to act from this heightened awareness and
recognition of the issues. I raised this point in my first response. Action is
necessary and it's necessary now. However, I ask: will you be a part of the change? Have you
asked yourself what you can do to solve the problem? Of course, I don't mean
just you, I mean every woman and man on this campus.
LYBW ended just a few days ago. KEWL is holding a debriefing and planning
meeting tonight. Don't tell us that all we've done is stir
the pot. We have just begun and we have big plans.
Regina
Mills
Class
of 2009