Tepid Resolutions to Rape: Film Sends Mixed Messages to Freshmen

by CLAIRE GORDON

October 2009

Photo: Streeter Philips

Yale landmarks pan across the screen to the romping beat of Kings of Leon: Phelps Gate, Harkness Tower, Old Campus… and the Women’s Table – a montage of its cascading font. Fade out.

At this fall’s Freshman Orientation, the film Relationships: Untitled replaced the traditional “Sex Signals” program. After 2008′s Zeta Psi incident, when a group of fraternity pledges posed outside Yale’s Women’s Center with the sign “We Love Yale Sluts,” the Women’s Center submitted a report to the administration critiquing the sexual culture on campus. One chapter urged reform of sexual harassment/assault prevention training.

A committee was formed. Another report was written. The cogs of the Yale Machine creaked forward. A year and a half later, a new sexual harassment and assault prevention program filled two hours of the freshmen’s first few dizzying days.

The 40-minute student-made film presented scenes based on three real cases of sexual assault that have been brought before Yale’s Executive Committee. Complete with sweeping shots of Toad’s and a freshman screw dance sequence, the film situated sexual assault in a Yale-specific context. This specificity was meant to resonate more with its freshman audience than the generic scenarios enacted by the “Sex Signals” skits of yore.

Female alcohol abuse is presented as a key factor in sexual vulnerability; the cast of stumbling “drunk girls” seem almost complicit in their comical sloppiness, while male drinking is hardly featured.

Relationships: Untitled intended to depict the uncertainty and spotty memories of college hook-up culture. Female alcohol abuse is presented as a key factor in sexual vulnerability; the cast of stumbling “drunk girls” seem, in their comic sloppiness, complicit in what happens, while male drinking is hardly featured. However, the film did present the ways in which alcohol complicates consent, spotlighting the film’s key theme: ambiguity.

Freshman Counselors were responsible for addressing the film’s unresolved questions in small post-screening discussion groups. The intimacy and reciprocity of these forums is an upgrade from the eye-rolling and back-row heckles inevitable in the SSS lecture hall that hosted “Sex Signals” for several years. But it also placed a heavy onus on FroCos to unravel the film’s ambiguities appropriately, and to provide concrete instructions about how to respond to sexual assault – information excluded from the film, lest it jeopardize the ethical limbo carefully crafted by the script.

But the genre of infotainment rarely paints complex issues in the suitable shades of gray. One of the scenarios fell cheaply into the violent-attack-by-stranger stereotype; the guy leering from his first on-screen appearance, squinting his eyes at his soon-to-be victim and eventually pinning the girl amid quick-cuts and resistant screams. Unfortunately, evil music will not begin to play in TOAD’s when your rapist lurks around the corner.

Audiences do not see the female victim’s wrenching walk to Yale Health Services the morning after. They do not see a medical examination, an STI screening, or the $28 shelled out for Plan B.

Unfortunately, evil music will not begin to play in TOAD’s when your rapist lurks around the corner.

“Where were the rape kits? Why weren’t there any rape kits? GUYS, RAPE KITS!” said Alice Buttrick, Public Relations Coordinator of the Women’s Center, after viewing the film.

The victim does not meet with her Dean, the Sexual Harassment Grievance Board, or the Executive Committee—let alone the police— about the violent crime committed against her. She doesn’t even seem angry; instead, she simply dashes away from her rapist after an uncomfortable exchange of glances in Bass Café.

This may be an accurate depiction of the culture of silence that tragically surrounds sexual assault. Especially in college, when your rapist is a friend of a friend or an upstairs neighbor, recourse can be socially devastating and accusations met with skeptical ears.

But the tepid resolution of this scenario, and all the film’s storylines, both represents and dangerously reproduces this silencing culture, normalizing nonchalance to sexual victimhood. The lesson to freshman females is not, “Rape happens; here’s how to deal,” but rather, “Rape happens, so deal with it.”

The girl in one storyline does receive counseling from the SHARE Center’s Dr. Carole Goldberg, who helps her cope with a blackout sexual encounter. After the Freshman Screw, this girl’s sweet-seeming date walks her home and tends to her as she lapses in and out of consciousness. Cut to the next morning, when the boy sneaks out from under the covers, dresses, and exits— leaving his hung-over screwed date to wake up alone, without clothes or any memory of the night.

Audiences do not see the female victim’s wrenching walk to Yale Health Services the morning after. They do not see a medical examination, an STI screening, or the $28 shelled out for Plan B.

After a rather unambiguous case of date rape (to this viewer), the girl explains to Dr. Goldberg that she’s eating okay, having trouble sleeping, unsure of what happened, and uncomfortable placing blame. The solution: more counseling. “You don’t have to feel anything you’re not ready to feel,” Dr. Goldberg consoles. The only feelings she seems ready to feel are confusion and sadness, disempowering emotions not easily channeled into concrete action.

The third scenario, unlike the others, involves a committed couple. The mechanics of the case are indeed ambiguous. Girl and Boy are in bed. Girl says she does not want to have sex, but initiates making out. Boy penetrates. Girl says “Stop” softly. Boy continues; Girl says “Stop” emphatically. Boy stops.

But the representation of the boyfriend throughout the film as a paragon of gentility, and the girlfriend as unstable, make her claims of rape (the only direct claims of rape in the film) seem bitchy and hysterical. The message: They were dating, after all. And this guy was totally awesome.

The film collages three isolated incidences, unified only by the shared theme of sexual discomfort. The original Women’s Center report, however, highlighted the inadequacy of “Sex Signals” as part of a more holistic examination of Yale’s sexual culture. It is a culture, according to the report, which permits, even celebrates, the objectification, harassment, and assault of its female students, specifically female freshman.

While not inclusive of most Yale men, it is a culture often incubated in all-male settings, like fraternities and athletic teams. It is a culture in which a fraternity can laughably circulate an email ranking the fuckability of girls in their first week of college. It is a culture in which respecting women and having sex with them are mutually exclusive things.

The lesson to freshman females is not, “Rape happens; here’s how to deal,” but rather, “Rape happens, so deal with it.”

Feminism teaches us to understand sexual assault as a reinforcement of inequality. Perhaps it is unrealistic to expect a Yale orientation program to grapple with the MacKinnonist concept of rape-as-terrorism or to mention rape’s shocking statistical prevalence on campus. However, an injection of Feminism 101 into the screenplay could have expanded the three “ambiguous” examples into an unambiguous comment on the lived reality of gender and sexuality at college today.

The lingering shots of the Women’s Table that opened the film promised a more empowering message than just a semi-accurate dramatization of college sexual mistakes. The gap between Relationships: Untitled and the reform imagined in the pages of the Women’s Center report parallels another incongruity that has unfolded in the last month.

The SHAPE report, which landed in every undergraduate inbox at the start of this year, emphasized Yale’s intolerance of harassment—a sentiment echoed by a note from Dean Miller. This administrative response to Zeta Psi’s “Pre-season Scouting Report” is nothing but a verbal wrist-slap. It seems the only thing more ambiguous than the sex lives of drunk Yale students is the university’s genuine concern about it.

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UPDATE: Relationships: Untitled is being re-screened on Nov. 3rd at 7 p.m. in Rosenfeld Hall. The screening is co-sponsored by the Yale College Dean’s Office and S.H.A.R.E.

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Claire Gordon is a senior in Yale College.