There’s been yet another college protest focused on an “against-the-sexual assault-narrative” speaker, this time Slate’s Emily Yoffe at Dartmouth.
Apparently, some of Yoffe’s articles — titled “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk,” “The Problem With Campus Sexual Assault Surveys,” and “The College Rape Overcorrection” — miffed around twenty students who showed up with pickets at the writer’s talk.
A few of the placards read “My Voice is NOT the Problem,” “Victim Shaming is Rape Enabling,” and “Rapists Are Not Victims.”
Protest organizer Tori Nevel said, “The way that she wants to fix the problem is by saying, ‘If women stop drinking, then the problem will be over.’ Telling a woman to change her behavior to avoid being raped is putting all the impetus on the victim to protect themselves, and in the same breath it is saying don’t let yourself be raped, but let someone else be raped.”
Nevel said she and other students created the signs partially in order to help represent those who were not there, but also to inspire discussion.
“We want to engage in dialogue the whole time, and that is how we are going to do it,” she said.
The students remained silent during the presentation and would raise their signs when Yoffe would make what they perceived to be controversial statements, such as when she said that there was a generational gap that has resulted in the current generation of women being weaker than the women who came before them.
The presentation was 90 minutes long, half of which was a question and answer session. During many of Yoffe’s answers, the audience laughed at some of her responses.
Yoffe said she approved of bystander training — such as that under the Dartmouth Bystander Initiative — but said training could never replace a woman knowing her limits.
She also said that the federal justice system should play a much larger role in sexual assault accusations, as opposed to colleges having to get involved.
Need the query be pointed out as to how, exactly, advocating that women take measures to help themselves not be a victim, and noting that even accused rapists have due process rights … is controversial?
Not to mention, catch the contradiction: The article states that, for Nevel, the “decision to invite Yoffe was described as a ‘disappointment.’”
A sentence later, Nevel says “The point of the protest was not to censor Yoffe, or anyone, but rather to express disagreement with her views.”
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