My housemate Jen is new to Madison this year. She showed up at the end of August, spent a few days figuring out how to get around, unpacked and settled in, and then, on one of her first nights out in her new hometown, went to the Terrace with some friends and ran straight into a celebration of macho sex.
\On September 5th there was an open mike,"" Jen said. ""Some bands were performing, and then they cleared the stage for an organized event. It was supposed to be like 'The Dating Game.'"" Apparently an emcee asked for freshman men and women to volunteer and then selected one ""bachelorette"" from the female volunteers by audience applause. She was then seated in front of three male ""bachelors"" and given scripted questions to read. At the end, she was supposed to pick one guy from the rest based solely on his answers.
I remember watching ""The Dating Game"" in re-runs as a child, and finding its smaltzy Eisenhower-era sexual innuendos (""How often do you and the wife make whoopee?"") offensive even then. The UW version, apparently, made the original actually look progressive. In front of a crowd of jeering students, the lucky contestant got to read off questions like ""At what angle would you insert your cock into my mouth for greatest penetration?,"" and ""What's the maximum frequency of thrusting you've achieved in oral sex in cycles per second?"" Most of the questions related to oral sex, or should I say fellatio'none of the contestants were asked to describe his aptitude at performing oral sex on a female partner. As a concession to the orientation week theme, all of questions related to some course of study.
""I found it really disturbing and so did my friends, but almost everyone else there, including some of the women in the audience, were cheering,"" Jen told me. ""All of the questions were male-centered, like about the various ways they were going to stick their ""cocks"" in her mouth'and some of them were really violent. One of the guys bragged about how his penis was supposedly so big his girlfriends called him ""the cervix boxer."" We kept waiting for one of the guys to say something like ""Gee, I guess I'd ask her what she wanted,"" but none of them did. Then, when one of the male contestants finally started acting like he was kind of uncomfortable with the questions, the emcee got everyone to boo him. At the end they actually made the girl pick one of them. We were screaming NONE OF THEM, DON'T PICK ANY OF THEM."" But she said one of the numbers like she just wanted to get the hell out of there.
OK, so the lesson from today's column is...that crap is just not OK.
First, pulling some girl up on stage and making her read off questions about going down on a group of strange men while simultaneously being heckled by a crowd is, well, awful. I don't know her, so I don't know how she felt about it. Maybe she thought it was fun, or maybe she was scared and humiliated. Point is, she wasn't warned beforehand.
Second, glorifying violent macho sex on a campus where sexual assault is already so prevalent is unwise. It helps to create what sociologists call a ""rape culture""-that is, a culture in which male conquest is seen as a natural feature of sex and in which men are assumed to be sexual predators and women sexual prey. In other words, men are sexual agents and women are just objects. The goal for men is to ""score"" as often as possible, by almost any means necessary, regardless of what their female partners want. Sound familiar?
Finally, and this should be common sense, women are sexual agents too, not just receptacles for the glorious male cervix boxer. Focusing only on fellatio implies that, for the people who wrote those questions and for the men who answered them, sex is about the guy getting off while her pleasure is utterly irrelevant. Some women view sex as an expression of intimacy, others, like some men, just see it as fun. Either way is fine, so long as both partners treat each other with respect, and as long as it's about what they both want, not just what he wants. Get it?
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