Shades of gray
1 he

Yale He raid
October 14, 1994

As a young girl I always liked playing
with the boys.
And I still do. Lucky for us, matronly
women no longer lock up college girls in
dorms at night. Today, women can drink and

Against the Current
by Neomi Rao
run around with the wildest of the boys. But
with freedom from social constraints comes
new responsibili1ies- responsiliili1ies
which are all too easy to ignore.
Not a year passes without the confusing,
bitter, and problematic question of date rape
arising on campus. Incidents i11volving the
"DKE rapist" and David Bialsky have
shown how the battle between the sexes has
no easy answers.
In the most recent case, a woman
accused a brother of Sigma Alpha Epsilon
(r.AE) fraternity of rape, and filed a complaint with the Yale Executive Committee-.
After drinking at l:A E's Kamikaze party,
the woman willingly returned with the male
student to his residential college room
where he allegedly sexually assaulted her.
The woman claims that she was deliberately
served more alcohol than she asked for, and
wants all fraternities
to take part in awareness-raising sessions
on date rape.
Just the mention of
such a case shou Id set
off warning bells for
the campus crisis 10
come. Clear! y. if the
male student forced
the woman to have
sex against her will,
then he should be held
responsible. Yet the
role of alcohol severely complicates
the scenario. People
often drink precisely
so that they may limit
their responsibility.
They want to forget
about their papers and
their problems. They want to have fun, and
not think so hard.
So when two drunken students return to
a room and have sex, did the man force the
women against her will? Did the woman
have regrets the morn ing after and deny
giving consent? After a beer-tinted night can
anyone really remember what happened?
Since the case rests only upon the testi mony
of the students who were involved, who decides the truth? A woman makes an accusation, a man denies it. At Yale, this gives the
Executive Comtnittee another opportunity
to exercise their particular brand of judgment. (Yes, that's right-the same people
who allowed a student to be brutally beaten
on campus w_iII now j11dge whether a woman
was raped.)
No one will ever really know what happened that night between the two dru nken
students. Some will quickly jump to the defense of the woman , supporting the protec-

lion of her body against the allegedly forcible male intrusion. In order to exone~te
the man involved, others will similarly
point to her willing return to his room, or her
decision to drink excessively as an indication of consent.
It's easy to take sides based on gender
politics, but when considering questions of
responsibility and consent, an investigation
rarely yields a black and white solution.
Students usually begin wearing different
colored ribbons because they start to find
truth in the shades of gray.
I've been to a lot of fraternity parties on
this campus. It has always seemed selfevident to me that even if I drank a lot, I
would still be responsible for my actions. A
man who rapes a drunk girl should beprose~uted. 'At the sanie time. a good way to
avoid a potential date rape is to stay reasonably sober.
It seems that this female student acknowledges the role of alcohol in the alleged rape, because she attributes heroverconsumption to the fraternity. Can the liberated '90s woman freely choose whether to
drink or not? Unless someone made her
drinks undetectably strong or forced them
down her throat, a woman, like a man.
decides when and how
much to drink. And if
she drinks 10 the point
where she can no longer
choose, well, getting to
that point was part of her
choice.
Implying that a
drunk woman has no
control of her actions,
but that a drunk man
does. strips women of
all moral responsibility.
It creates a culture of
victimization in which
men are prowling and
uncont roll able, and
women are weak and
helpless. Any self-respecting person should
cAMHOANG/'IH
be troubled and offended by such id~s.
Battles over date rape reinforce the antagonistic gender sterotypes which justified
the old systems ofoppression. It was argued
that women needed protection from male
desire. For example, in most Islamic countries, women are kept in the home, and
appearpubliclyonlyunderdark veils. Each
careful demarcation serves as a constant
reminder of the temptation of the female
body, and the need to keep man's appetite
for sex and violence at bay.
Few women or men would want to
implement such measures in America, yet
protective nonns are based Qn the very
thinking contained in the hysteria over date
rape. I hope that we can ask for something
more than suspicioJ! and resentment in relations between the sexes. Being treated like
a lady is not something to be laughed at. We
are all beneroffliving with social structures
which encourage mutual respect.
. But I still like playing with the boys.