Earlier that school year, in September 2007, I was raped. I reported it to Public Safety, but because it happened at an off campus event and I did not know the attacker, they did nothing, and certainly did not report the incident to the college community as they did on the February rape that started all this mess talked about on the blog. I never came forward to the campus community, was not then and still am not now ready for that. However, I did help SAFER and IC Feminists with their efforts in changing the policies. This was a little over a year ago. Funny how people seem to forget, everyone was so up in arms about this last school year, but no one talks about it anymore. Another rape was reported this year, but even our newspaper failed to follow up on it…

Provided, of course, that damages can be proven and the statute of limitations hasn’t run.

In so many ways we’ve improved so much over time, but we’ve obviously gone downhill since de Toqueville complimented the U.S. on punishing rape with the death penalty … at least people took it seriously.

Rape was a different crime then, though. Rape was… well, let’s let Senator Douglas Henry explain it for us: “Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman, against her will, by some party not her spouse.” Rape of a chaste woman was taken seriously because raping somebody’s chaste daughter or wife was considered damaging somebody else’s property. If she wasn’t chaste, however, she was already “damaged goods”, so it wouldn’t matter if she was raped. And of course, a husband who raped his wife was just treating his property as he saw fit. The fact that the woman was harmed by rape was not why it was illegal. So I think we have come forward, not backward from then, even if there’s still a long way to go.

As you said, this kind of thing can happen anywhere. But that it happened in a very liberal place like Ithaca does indeed help to drive that message home. On the other hand, maybe it should almost be expected because Ithaca is such a big college town. The sad thing is that we even have to have a conversation about where we can and can’t “expect” this kind of horrible thing.

Ithaca isn’t some tiny little rural town in the middle of some state in the deep south where, sadly enough, it might not be surprising to hear this kind of story.
Ithaca is known for being a little bubble of progressives in the otherwise pretty conservative region of central NY.
the college is pretty insular, but not so insular that it’s got a much different reputation than the town.

i can’t say i’m surprised, of course. but i think it says a lot that this perfect example of the rape culture happened in this place that’s supposed to be such a bubble of progressive safety.

When I found the story through SAFER and saw the headline “Because smoking pot is worse than raping someone,” I thought that the two had to be slightly less related. Like, perhaps, that someone else had lost their job for possessing pot a few years ago, but now the rapist gets to keep his.

That was my thought on reading your headline, too. This whose thing is so fucked up. When I started reading your blog, I thought you were pushing it with all your claims about “rape culture,” but it’s really just true: apparently our culture really just is O.K. with rape, as long as the word “rape” itself isn’t used. (And when the word “rape” is used, the objection is to the use of the word, not to whatever act prompted it.) I don’t get it. In so many ways we’ve improved so much over time, but we’ve obviously gone downhill since de Toqueville complimented the U.S. on punishing rape with the death penalty. (Not that I support the death penalty for this or any other crime, but at least people took it seriously. What happened?)