The War Against Women: College Campuses and American Culture [View all]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/32308-the-war-against-women-college-campuses-and-american-culture

Unsurprisingly, some of the worst offenders are boys clubs: military, police, fraternities, etc. These entities are professional generators of sexist attitudes and violent behavior towards women.

In the military, we used to refer to female marines as "WMs," or "Walking Mattresses." Our drill instructors and infantry training gurus used to call women "cunts," "skirts," and "cum dumpsters." Hence, we shouldn't be surprised that over 1/5th of female veterans report military sexual trauma(MST). Much like women on college campuses, female veterans vastly underreport their traumatic experiences.

The story is similar for female police officers in the U.S. For example, "In Miami Beach, at least 16 police officers — including two former high-ranking officials — are under investigation for hundreds of racist, pornographic and offensive emails spent between 2010 and 2012." The lewd and disturbing emails were described as "juvenile behavior" by state attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, who describes a "locker room mentality" in the police force, fomented by former Miami Beach police chief Raymond Martinez.

Again, none of this is new. Back in 1993, the "Los Angeles Times" reported that Gary Herron, a self-defense instructor for female police officers in Orange County, turned in a video tape of a stripper performing "at an Orange County sheriff's training facility" to the television program "A Current Affair."

According to the "Los Angeles Times," Herron "grew increasingly concerned about what the two-year-old videotape showed after hearing stories from women in his classes who said they had been abused and raped, and also about the Irvine Police Department investigation into an alleged sex club formed by officers there."

Again, university fraternities are no different. Jessica Valenti, writing for the "Guardian," notes that, "These are not anomalies or bad apples: numerous studies have found that men who join fraternities are three times more likely to rape, that women in sororities are 74 percent more likely to experience rape than other college women, and that one in five women will be sexually assaulted in four years away at school."

Clearly, institutions that are male-dominated and created within a culture based on male-dominance will produce dreadful, often deadly results for women.