I live, work and teach on a college campus, so I'm surrounded by this constant, weird energy of graceless horny sexual frustration that seems to peak between Thirsty Thursday and hangover Sunday. There is no doubt of the primacy of sex on college campuses.
And with that sex, the prevalence of rape and rape culture. At least once a week there is a story in the student paper about another sexual assault or a "rape alert" warning female students to "be careful." But those are just the rape rapes; not all other rapey sex that happens in dorm rooms and fraternity basements-the sex that is rape but that is never reported to the police. Rape, like sex, just seems like another part of college life.
That is perhaps why I wasn't too shocked when a recent study from the University of North Dakota revealed that more than 30 percent of college men said they would rape as long as they knew they could get away with it ... and if you didn't call it rape. The survey asked men both if they would force a woman to have sex and if they would rape a woman. While only 13 percent responded that they would rape, 31 percent said they would force a woman to have sex, suggesting these young college men don't really understand the definition of rape. They see forced sex as just sex.
Clearly the "no means no" or even the "yes means yes" campaigns aren't working on our college campuses. These messages aren't ringing true for kids, especially not young men raised on a diet of sex equals masculinity. They don't see themselves as rapists; they see themselves as men who can stay part of that hypermasculine tribe only if they have sex with more women through whatever means necessary.
If we want to decrease sexual assault on college campuses, we need to work with our young men to help them unyoke masculinity and sex. Rape culture isn't a woman's issue-it is really a hypermasculinity issue.
Beyond teaching our young men that their gender identity is not tied to the amount of sex they can coerce, we also need to change how we teach kids about sex. The University of North Dakota study also found that men who intended to use force to get sex also tended to score high on sexual callousness, meaning they were detached during sex and saw sex as a depersonalized act instead of something intimate.
In a way it makes sense. We teach sex in a disconnected, dispassionate way. We talk about reproductive organs and put condoms on bananas. We create strict lines and boundaries on chalkboards that nowhere resemble what actual sex looks like.
We don't teach our kids how to talk to their partner during sex, how to listen to their bodies or their partners' bodies, how to ask for sex, how to say "slow down" during sex, how to stop in the middle of sex, how to start again. We don't teach them about the maybes of sex, the negotiations, the connection or the intimacy. We teach sex as mechanical, a matter of logistics, not what it actually is-a highly emotional, complex act between two (or three or four) people.
We need to teach our young people that sex can be this fun, healthy, silly, sexy thing. It isn't as big as we make it to be. It isn't unspeakable. The more we break the silence about good sex, the easier it will be to stamp out the bad.
Niki Fritz is a RedEye special contributor.
