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Yes, Feminists CAN Believe In Personal Responsibility

Ashley Yang |
February 28, 2013 | 12:33 a.m. PST

Contributor

Personal responsibility and feminism are not mutually exclusive. (Julie Jordan Scott, Creative Commons)
Personal responsibility and feminism are not mutually exclusive. (Julie Jordan Scott, Creative Commons)
When I began to identify as a feminist in my junior year of high school, I immediately registered two main arguments against feminism’s legitimacy as a movement.

The first claimed that all of us were radical liberals who wanted to enslave men and destroy the social institution of the family, and the second alleged that feminism “absolved women from personal responsibility in their lives,” because we could blame all of our problems and failures on the nebulous construct of “the patriarchy."

I’m proof that the first claim is a poorly caricaturized straw man: I’m a dead-set political moderate, who leans conservative on several issues, who maintains close ties with traditional family structure and who shares strong platonic relationships with male friends.

But more importantly, I believe that feminism encourages women, especially college-aged young women, to critically examine the social forces around them, to identify how male-dominated and heteronormative attitudes contribute to the inequities they face and to assume the right amount of personal responsibility for their lives in the right circumstances.

A few days back, an aquaintance of mine phoned me up in the middle of the night and, without explaining why, asked me to take a cab Downtown to pick her up. She had met up with a guy on the Row and gone back to his apartment earlier that evening, leaving her wallet and her ID behind. We weren’t particularly close, so I referred her to some of our other mutual friends whom I thought would still be awake. She reached one of them, who called her a cab and paid for it when she reached campus.

The next day, she called me up and accused me of abandoning her. The situation the previous night had been worse than she had intially told me: the guy had tried to force her to have sex with himself and two other guys.

I was upset that she had been sexually threatened, but I also knew that it wasn’t my responsibility to take care of her. It seemed unreasonable of her to ask me, a physically small, 18-year-old girl, to get into a cab in the dead of night and drive Downtown into a potentially dangerous situation and one that I knew nothing about.

As unpleasant as this episode was for her and for me, it did raise broader questions about what college-aged young women, many of whom will have a similar experience, would and would not be responsible for in such a situation. The feminist in me says, and rightly so, that the woman is not responsible for the actions of her (attempted) rapist, because short skirts and drunkenness are no excuses for rape. Men are not animalistic, and are perfectly capable of controlling their sexual urges or understanding that “no” actually means no.

Safety should not be a luxury for young women. We shouldn’t have to tightly clutch our keys when walking through a dark parking lot, carry pepper spray or avoid walking around at night unaccompanied, for fear that some violent person will come out of the shadows and harm us. We shouldn’t have to expend so much energy on protecting ourselves from rape, because it shouldn’t be happening in the first place.

But all of these are normative statements. In a perfect world, violence, especially violence against women, wouldn’t be an issue at all. Unfortunately, the status quo remains grossly skewed, making women disproportionately the victims of violent crimes like robbery and sexual assault.

Therefore, it is the responsibility of not just every woman, but every person, to assess the risks behind every choice he or she makes under the belief that, even though bad things shouldn’t happen to people, they still do, every day. And—if put in an uncomfortable or potentially dangerous situation—to assess the situation and seek help through the appropriate channels. Sometimes, it makes sense to phone a friend, but if you feel that your life or welfare is under threat, the police are best suited to handle the problem. It may feel a bit extreme, but they are the designated authority, equipped to diffuse such situations without harm coming to anyone, least of all a friend trying to save the day.

There isn’t any harm in exercising prudence and using common sense. This is especially true in the context of college, where alcohol, partying and drugs, among other factors, can cause situations to quickly spiral out of control.

Until violence is no longer a critical concern for women (and I don’t suspect that our generation will see that day), we will bear the undue burden of protecting ourselves against victimization. It may not be fair, and it may not even be effective. But a few more question marks in your head before you make a decision will never hurt.

 

Reach Contributor Ashley Yang here.



 

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