Today Ohio Republican governor John Kasich presented a “solution” to sexual violence that is more flawed than his losing presidential campaign. At a town hall in Watertown, New York, he told a female college student that to avoid “sexual violence, harassment and rape” she should not “go to parties where there’s a lot of alcohol”.
His flawed logic should not be surprising. After all, Kasich’s comments are only the latest in a long tradition of Republican victim-blaming, which includes Todd Akin’s idea of “legitimate rape” and more recently, Ben Carson’s opposition to abortion for sex assault survivors. Yet the fact that so many influential men still fail to grasp the basics of rape culture is both intellectually baffling and incredibly dangerous for women. To decrease the rates of sexual assault, we need men to fight misogyny.
You’ve heard the rape myths before: women are raped because they show cleavage, drink too many coolers or twirl their hair flirtatiously at fraternity houses. In reality most sexual assaults happen in bedrooms, not at parties, bars or in alleyways. Some 80% of victims know their perpetrators and almost 20% of sexual assaults are committed by intimate partners. Any woman who has walked down a street is more than familiar with harassment.
Despite those inconvenient facts, rape is the only crime for which we blame the victim. We do not tell someone who was hit by a drunk driver that they should not have been on the road. We do not tell someone who gets shot that they should not have left the house. Why can Republican men understand this logic in scenarios that might affect their own safety, but not when it’s applied to female victims?
Parties that involve alcohol are a regular part of college life. Instead of telling women to avoid them, let’s raise boys who don’t rape.
We know that to stop rape culture, men – the very people who commit the majority of sex assaults – need to be involved. We need more men who believe survivors when they speak up and men who fight for laws that that protect victims in court. But most of all, we need men who tell their misogynistic friends to shut up.
Public role models could help create a generation of guys who empathize with women. These prominent men – whether police officers, judges or politicians – have an opportunity to teach boys that you can have basic respect for the opposite sex and still be a “cool guy”.
Instead, we have too many men like Kasich, who use their national soapbox to say women should prevent their own rapes.