The Cavalier Daily
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KISER: De-deviling the details

Emotion and logic are both necessary to produce change

“After we march down Rugby Road and chant and vent our anger to the world, we must lay down our picket signs, sit down at our computers and educate ourselves about the complexities we are dealing with. Read the new sexual misconduct policy. Read about Title IX. Read about how to be a victim’s advocate. Come to the discussion table and listen to other people’s opinions.”

-From the Managing Board’s editorial, “The devil is in the details.”

I chafe under the implication that a visceral response is somehow at odds with being an informed student. The Cavalier Daily’s managing board has it backwards: our emotions are not something that we have to “vent,” not a hysterical fit we need to get out of our system before making progress. In fact, these emotional responses (the disgust at the disrespect of women, the anger at rapists and administrators, the hope of reform) are the engines that make change possible. When one researches the sexual misconduct policy, when one reads about Title IX, one should not be satiated. The heightened understanding of our situation should not dissuade protest, but encourage and improve it. It is not, as the Managing Board suggests, a process of catharsis followed by edification. Rather it is a perpetuated cycle, in which every protest provides direction for research which, in turn, informs protest. Emotion and logic are two sides of the same coin, both necessary for action; to deny one and glorify the other is a crippling error.

Furthermore, there is a dangerous implication in the above editorial. The Managing Board imagines protest is an uninformed action, when really, the opposite is true. The best protesters are the most informed. Thus, rallies led by faculty members are not only large in scale, but are well-honed and enriched by research. This editorial supports a false dichotomy between information and demonstration.

Of course, I advocate for in-depth research into the sticky policies of Title IX and sexual misconduct, as well as the nature and history of Greek life. But when research reveals that the Sexual Misconduct Board has never expelled a student for rape, should we be comforted by what we learn? When it is proven that boys in fraternities are more likely to adhere to “traditional” ideals of gender as well as engage in coercive sex, should we stay complacent? Should we be glad we put down our pickets? On the contrary. The deeper we go into these policies the more we should recognize that, despite all these amorphous and evasive complexities, the intangible rape culture has very real roots and very real manifestations. Just because it is not an easy thing to understand, does not mean women are not raped in actual frat houses, nor that the Sexual Misconduct Board has humiliated and muted myriad survivors, nor that Greek life, as a whole, is complicit through money and cathexis in a system of privilege and entitlement. To ignore these symptoms in deference to the spectral disease is not only poor medicine, but poor logic.

I have heard time and time again that it would be a mistake to punish any individual or specific frat because the underlying cause is too pernicious or too pervasive to address. But this is ignoring the fact that rape is committed not by rape culture, but by individual rapists. When people advocate for cultural shifts instead of changes in policy (or, worse, instead of punishing the guilty) they exchange action for concept, and through inaction, feed the culture they intend to kill.

To channel blame from the physical to the abstract is a self-defeating sublimation. Rape culture can only be upheaved through actual means. The Managing Board argues for inaction under the guise of edification. But without action, education is limp. And if, through your research, you fail to uncover the systemic ills that link rape culture and the culture of the University, I suggest you go deeper.

Drew Kiser is a second-year in the College.

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