The College Fix

Last week, my fellow Fix contributor Anna Swenson penned an article framing the increasingly common practice of colleges and universities banning smoking on their campuses to a hypothetical college administration encouraging its female students to refrain from wearing skirts or dresses. The link between the two, Ms. Swenson asserts, is that colleges ban smoking to prevent its students from developing cancer and that a college might ban its female students from wearing skirts in order to prevent them from being raped.

I hope you immediately recognize how silly this argument is. It’s almost immediately dismissible for at least three reasons.

First, the analogy Ms. Swenson attempts to draw hinges on a shared similarity between cancer and rape—namely that there is a direct correlation between smoking and developing cancer and between wearing skirts and being raped. This is patently false. Ms. Swenson attempts to mislead her readers into believing there is such a similarity. There is not, and because this is the keystone of Ms. Swenson’s argument, I’m going to spend a fair bit of time explaining why it’s false.

The first article she attempts to use as “evidence” to back this claim (between skirts and rape) is a Wall Street Journal article detailing how police are encouraging young women in Brooklyn not to wear skirts at night—or shorts. Yes, you read that correctly. Police are also encouraging women not to wear such rape-inducingly sexual items of clothing as a t-shirt and shorts. It’s worth noting, however, that the police never provide a direct explanation for why wearing shorts or skirts (or dresses, as the article also points out) makes a woman more likely to be raped. But, if you do agree with the article in presuming that the police know something that we, the general populace, do not, then Ms. Swenson’s claim that skirts cause rape is directly refuted by the evidence she presents in support of it, as then, it’s not only skirts that cause rape, but also full-length dresses, shorts and t-shirts. Or, if you reject the notion that police are correct in such suggestions by fiat, clearly, further proof is needed.

Even if there is some correlation between skirts and rape, it is obviously situational. If I, a 6’6” muscular man, were to don a skirt when going out with the guys, I’m going to go ahead and guess I’m not increasing my likelihood of being raped. If Ms. Swenson were to put on a skirt and sit quietly alone in her bedroom doing homework, she would not be increasing the likelihood of her being raped. If, however, she and I were to light up some American Spirits anywhere, anytime—in any situation—we would both certainly be increasing the likelihood of each of us developing lung cancer. To draw a correlation between such vastly disparate scenarios is short-sighted at best and intellectually dishonest at worst.

Next, when you light up a cigarette, you are choosing to light up a cigarette. You are making that choice knowing full well that you are, at no one’s will but your own, increasing your odds of suffering a self-induced negative consequence (lung cancer). Nobody is breaking any law, unless you’re under the age of 18. This is not the case with skirts and rape. Even if there were some direct connection between skirts and rape—and there isn’t—when you put on a skirt, you are not increasing your odds of suffering a self-induced negative consequence because being raped is not a choice that the victim makes: it is a choice that the attacker makes.

Finally, and this really, gets at the crux of the argument, there’s this thing called secondhand smoke. It is has also been directly, scientifically linked to increased odds of developing lung cancer. And luckily, not even Ms. Swenson has the audacity to claim that by merely being friends with a girl who wears skirts you are more likely to be raped—though if one to truly follow her analogy, that conclusion would not be far-fetched. Not only does wearing a skirt not harm you, it does not harm anyone around you—this is not the case for smoking cigarettes: just ask anyone who grew up with parents who were heavy smokers.

I generally agree with her conclusion that, “A free society should not dictate what its members think, say, write, read, eat, grow, carry, care about, or pursue — or smoke, or wear.” Yet, by drawing a false link between wearing skirts—something that doesn’t harm anyone—and smoking cigarettes—something that not only harms smokers, but also those around them—she engages in a careless, irresponsible and deliberately misleading comparison that harms all who wish to live in a free, educated society, where citizens may also be free of such injurious claims.

Zach Wahls is a contributor to The College Fix.

Photo credit: Ollie Crafoord (Flickr Creative Commons)

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