Photographer : MarenYumi
On a Saturday night, some months ago, a group of my friends were standing outside a popular pub in the West End of Adelaide. With them was Kate*, an acquaintance who, on this occasion, wore a dress so low-cut as to make us more modest girls wonder exactly where she had hidden her nipples.
Adelaide’s West End mostly comprises high-end bookstores, funky vintage outlets, cool indie clubs and the occasional sex shop or strip club. At 2 am on a Saturday night, beer runs thick in the veins of the revellers who spill out of Hindley Street’s pubs, clubs and seedy bars. Maybe it was alcohol, or maybe it was idiocy, or maybe it was a combination of Jim Beam, idiocy and disrespect for women that prompted a loutish pair who passed by Kate to enquire loudly as to the authenticity of her mammaries. Or, in less elegant English: ‘hey, are your tits real?’
A (male) friend asked her if she would let them talk to her like that. He was discharged from hospital at 9 am the next morning.
Aussie blokes with ‘stop rape, say yes’ plastered across the rears of their cars. A contestant on Australia’s most popular reality television show exposes himself while massaging a female contestant’s back. Two later contestants on that same reality show restrain a girl as they rub their groins in her face, then defend it as ‘horseplay’. An ad for P&O cruises depicts scantily clad women on sun lounges with the caption ‘Sea Men Wanted’. Models of Aussie male virtue, footballers, hauled to disciplinary courts for assaults on women. That the most offensive of all swear words refers to a woman’s anatomy (it also rhymes with ‘James Blunt’). And, most recently, a high-ranking Muslim cleric compares women to meat, and a group of Victorian teenagers sexually assault a developmentally delayed schoolgirl, film it, post the footage on the Internet and when the scandal breaks say they’d do it all again.
But it’s not only reality TV celebrities and sporting heroes who misunderstand the nature of sex crime. Forensic physician and sexual assault specialist Dr Lesley Shorne says these incidents indicate wider acceptance of sex crime: “People have lots of really mistaken ideas … that seem to obscure the perpetrator"
“We’re all responsible as a society if we don’t challenge (these ideas"
That means zero tolerance for the kinds of attitudes expressed by the men mentioned above (excluding James Blunt). It means looking after friends, and ensuring they make safe choices. It means correcting the 30 per cent of young men who believe there are situations where it’s OK for a man to force a woman to have sex with him. It means understanding the effect a seemingly harmless comment can have on a person’s self-esteem and their feelings of safety.
Maybe the drunken taunt to Kate was just a show of red-blooded, Aussie masculinity. But my friend—the one with the fractured face—showed more courage, more ‘manliness’, than any pig who shouts at a girl in the street, gropes her on the dance floor, takes advantage of her drunken state or drops something in her drink to get her to come home with him. Despite what Sheik Al-Hilali and the little boys from Werribee might think, women can wear short skirts and take pole dancing classes, and still not deserve the label ‘slut’, ‘whore’ or Mark Latham’s favourite, ‘skanky ho’. No woman ‘deserves’ or ‘asks for’ sexual assault, and noone has the right to vilify, humiliate, or abuse her because of something so insignificant—often literally—as the dress that she’s wearing.
*names have been changed
How do I know this?
Miletic, D 2006, ‘Outcry over teenage girl’s assault recorded on DVD’,
The Age, 25 October,
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2006/10/24/1161455722271.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
Moodie, R 2006, ‘Male myths hard to kill’,
Online Opinion, 31 October,
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5077
Reach Out!,
Drink Spiking,
http://www.reachout.com.au/default.asp?ti=1288
White Ribbon Day,
http://www.whiteribbonday.org.au/
Wo Magazine,
http://wo-magazine.com/blog/
Yarrow Place Rape and Sexual Assault Service,
http://www.yarrowplace.sa.gov.au/ 
