The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/consent/)
Grappling with questions like these have me dwelling on just how complicated sexual stimulation and satisfaction can really be. But it also encourages me to try making some sense of feelings I’d found too confusing to bother confronting before.
Which segues us into the way overanalyzed and over discussed topic of sexy Halloween costumes. I am far from the first person to write about sexy Halloween costumes: I’m not even close to the first person to write about them in The Sun. But since this is a Feminist column, I thought I’d add my own two cents on the topic and how this year I had the world’s best Halloween costume.
Half of respondents reported having experienced some form of sexual harassment during their time at Cornell.
Is it ever morally permissible to risk the well-being of others for a higher purpose? In a recent “Chat in the Stacks” talk at Olin Library, Prof. Andrew Moisey, history of art and visual studies, admitted that he had taken such a risk with the publication of The American Fraternity (2018). The American Fraternity is an art book of photographs taken by Moisey at a UC Berkeley fraternity. It includes images of women passed out, nude and in compromising positions, their faces at times obscured. In the Q&A session, Moisey recognized that these images pose a risk to the women depicted, should the women be identified.
I had my mind set to write about non-invasive sex toys, but considering current events, it’s critical we discuss sexual consent. Even though it seems like consent is all we talk about some days, it is clearly not in our heads. We talk about sex in terms of baseball, and never has anyone mentioned consent in that analogy. When I had health class in school, we talked about STDs and protection, but never about asking permission. Consent is something I think about a lot.
People tell me I can’t complain about a hookup if I gave consent. They’ll tell you the same. And it’s so fucking stupid and wrong. In recent weeks, the question of whether or not sexual interactions fall under the definition of legal consent has become the center of our cultural zeitgeist. The realization that women and LGBTQ+ individuals have been forced to undergo a barrage of interactions that do not meet the definition of consent as we understand it has shocked our nation — especially because countless interactions have been in situations where power dynamics forced those individuals to be violated.
“At its very core, consent is simply a ‘yes,’” said Jenna Zitomer ’18, vice president of Cornell Consent Ed. “It is an active and enthusiastic, verbal ‘yes’ that is received the first time a person is asked. Consent is never the absence of a ‘no.’”
It’s especially scary when, on the front page of the news, there’s a mugshot of someone you frequently see in your dorm, the dining hall, parties or classes being charged with rape. My heart goes out to the courageous women who survived these ordeals and rightfully reported them. Whenever I hear about these terrible crimes, I cannot ignore the small voice that says, “it could have been you.” Sexual harassment is happening to us individually on the daily, even if we do not realize it, and we must realize this in order to truly help others. Wolf-whistling, cat-calling and lurid up-and-down gazes are so commonplace that most women just brush them off and move on but such sexual gestures indicate that regarding women as sexual objects still persists. Furthermore, it may seem like the recent highly-publicized Wolfgang Ballinger and Xavier Eaglin rape crimes are isolated exceptions within a peaceful, liberal and crime-free campus but the shocking fact is that 5% of women on college campuses in America are victims of rape or attempted rape every year (Kilpatrick, Resnick, Riggierio, Conoscenti, & McCauley, 2007; American College Health Association, 2013).
As Cornell students, we hear the word “consent” thrown around quite a bit. Most of us understand that sexual assault and the ambiguity of what constitutes “consent” is an issue, if not an epidemic, on our campus, yet disturbing statistics and headlines continue to loom over our heads. A study by the Association of American Universities in 2015 reported that 23 percent of female college students experienced unwanted sexual contact during their undergraduate years. This week, Cornell made national headlines for the second time this semester as a freshman basketball player was arrested on sexual assault charges. So yes, we, as students, can agree that sexual assault is a problem.