Many of you now must be thinking, oh great, another women's rights activist, but I'm not really. My issue is that I believe a great deal of women are raped and abused because of the misconceptions men have about women. Just sitting in the cafeteria at night, I can hear the loud voices of men speaking disparagingly of women. Most people just roll their eyes and don't give it a second thought, but being a women it scares me to think that some men really think of all, or at least most, women as an item they need to possess. Yes, many women I know like to be pampered and loved by their significant other, but a woman is a person too, not a piece of clothing.
Even I on occasion jokingly say something like, "Men!" classifying all males into one group. Men do it too. But it's when the joking stops that the awful occurrences tend to happen. A few males like to think, that if they please one woman, the next would just want to fall right into his lap, and in a couple of cases that I've heard of, women end up being beaten, or even raped because they are unwilling to do what another may have. When it comes to sexual intercourse, a woman means no when she says no. Sometimes even, women are too scared to say no because of what may happen to them if they do. This too is rape.
I'm not classifying men as a whole here, I'm just saying a few men are like this. I, like many of the women at this school, have mostly male friends, and I would never believe any one of them capable of doing horrible things to women. I'm just hoping that Tom Balistrieri's articles allowed some people to see the errors of their ways. Actions speak louder than words, but words do have a large amount of influence on what we believe as a society.
Jessica Morgan
Graphics Editor