I was shocked. First, because the play gives me a direct personal view of Em’s (played by Meg Houck) inner world, who was a victim of campus sexual assault. Her friend Cassie, who was dedicated to broadcast police record of violence against women on her blog, got injured on the head. I never identified myself as a victim or a friend of victim, or imagine sexual assault to be part of my life. Watching this play, I realized how prevalent sexual assault is among normal people’s life.
The first question in my mind is how was Em. What was she thinking? What kind of help did she need? I observed that, throughout the whole play, Em cared a lot about the cause, motivation, and detail information of Cassie’s injury that ignited the attention on campus sexual assault. It turns out Cassie was lying about her injury to get the attention on the subject of campus sexual assault. On the other hand, Em revealed her personal views on the subject. Her close examination led the seemingly black-and-white sexual assault to some gray areas. She said that: “I wanted to get rip-shit drunk…And I said give me back my shirt, please don’t. But they didn’t believe me, and somewhere, deep inside, I didn’t even believe me, drunk in the basement without a shirt and sweat and heat and what do you say about girl like that?” She was not a victim depicted as an innocent lamb who got raped by horrible people. She wanted sex; she had desires. Her case is way more complex than the way people can understand it. The comments majority made in the play, as well as the in the real life are that girls should protect themselves better. They should not put themselves in a dangerous position, like being drunk in the basement of boys. While it’s intuitive to protest that girls should feel comfortable to dress what they feel like and free from the shackles of being determined by other people, it is more important to share this lesson to the persecute than the persecuted. The fact that girls who dress little doesn’t mean consent and the fact that both parties have equal rights in giving consent to sex are being said yet not brought on action. Within the subject of sexual assault, the most chocking part for me is that the justice point should be that girls own autonomy over dressing and people respect people free of social judgement; yet the fact is that could-be-prosecuted party who act on this theory got hurt, got raped. People are being punished on doing the right thing.
Connecting this to HUM, I find that the dilemma is similar to objectification on people. You can read my Paper one, which discussed the similar objectification between male-female and capitalist-proletarian structures. Human express themselves through language and body. Perceived by the outer sources, one’s language and body expression could be interpreted different as originated. While one is treated as determined, as being decided, as valuable only instrumentally, in relation to some function, one is objectified. Back the night provided another example of objectification on female. With the intricate natural of objectification, which requires the more powerful party to volunteer to act on humanities, the revolution on objectification is never easy.
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