This is something I think about a lot. It brings up issues of blame, communication styles, raunch culture, and of course, my favorite topic, slutty clothes.

It seems to be a favorite topic of people I meet when I tell them what I do. It goes likes this:
“the clothes girls wear these days….”
“at my school, the girls used to keep score of how drunk they got…”
“seriously, what message do they think they’re giving out when they dress like that?”

My reaction is usually along the lines of the speaker in the “My short skirt” monologue in The Vagina Monologues. As in, their short skirts have nothing to do with the men staring at them. Maybe they just like short skirts. (I do, and I am not lying when I say it’s because they’re easier to walk in and make me look taller.)

But then I read something like this. The quote that really got me was this person’s:

“I, perhaps unconsciously, observe women to try and determine how they want to be treated. When I see girls at a party who seemingly have no self-control, I’ll admit that it’s really tough to visualize them as ‘ladies.’ It’s as if they, solely through their own actions, have lowered my expectations, lowered my standards of behavior.”

I have a suggestion. Try using words. Remember Mae West? “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” How about “Is that skirt/tube top/translucent toga for me to remove or are you just feeling warm tonight?”

An ongoing discussion I have with people in the field of violence prevention is a debate over how much of campus sexual assault is due to perpetrators “who really didn’t know what they were doing was wrong, who made a mistake” and the perpetrators in the model of David Lisak’s Undetected Rapist. I’m from the Lisak school of thought on this one. You know why? Because this isn’t semaphore school. We don’t communicate just with flags people. College students may be young, as susceptible to culture as anyone else, as nervous and insecure, but we know they can put a sentence together; they have to for admissions essays. So I don’t think I’m holding anyone to too high a standard when I expect them to talk to each other and understand basic phrases like “I don’t want to.”

There is one caveat to this of course, and some people will object. I am in the above, primarily referring to the instigator of the sexual act in question. This is about power dynamics. If a person feels threatened, afraid, communication can be difficult. If you are bigger, stronger, or in some other way more powerful than your partner, for god’s sake take that into account and remember that there is one flag here that should be recognized. Silence. If you don’t hear a yes, folks, that’s a no.