MountainMornings

The talk of the town is last night’s article about Greek life and the nuanced acceptance of a rape culture at UVA. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campus-20141119?page=6

It’s a long and grueling read interspersed with an old Rugby Road drinking song which was only recently banned from football games. It tells the story of a First Year girl who was brutally gang raped at a Phi Kappa Psi fraternity party in 2012. She tells her friends and a Dean and is gently persuaded not to press charges for a myriad of reasons – her reputation, loyalty to the school and fear of not rushing a sorority, ruining the boys’ lives and on and on.

Last night that fraternity house on Rugby Road was vandalized. I imagine some group of angry young women was seeking revenge. President Sullivan has issued a statement that appears to be too little and way too late.

I was a freshman at Emerson College in 1966 in Boston. But we had a curfew in our dorms and the trolleys and underground MTA stopped working at midnight. It was a different age, but the drinking games at MIT across the Charles were the same. The consequences were a bit different. Girls got married quickly pre-birth control. Some obtained illegal abortions and had their fertility compromised. Some may have been raped, but I didn’t know or hear of anyone victimized in that way.

And Time wants to ban the word “Feminism.”

It’s hard to read that young men can still behave like they are entitled to sexual favors simply because they belong to an elite Greek brotherhood at this prestigious public university.