Pizza Diavola

Yale Women’s Center to sue fraternity for harassment? – Feministing.

Yale Daily News (YDN) article here, “Misogyny Claim Leveled At Frat”, and Yale Women’s Center op-ed here, “Women’s Center calls Zeta Psi’s behavior ‘inexcusable’”

Members of the Yale Women’s Center board threatened to initiate legal action Sunday after discovering a photograph posted on Facebook.com depicting 12 Yale students affiliated with the Zeta Psi fraternity posing in front of the Center with a sign reading “We Love Yale Sluts.”

The picture made its rounds through e-mail inboxes around Yale’s campus Sunday night, enraging some members of the University community offended by what they perceived to be its misogynistic overtones. The men photographed in front of the Women’s Center are Zeta Psi “pledges” — students attempting to join the fraternity.

…

Former Women’s Center Public Relations Coordinator Jessica Svendsen ’09 said she found a group of men chanting “Dick! Dick! Dick!” in front of the Elm Street entrance to the Center, which is located in Durfee Hall, shortly before midnight last Tuesday. Frightened, she decided to take a detour through the Center’s Old Campus entrance, she said.

“I stopped even before I got to Durfee, because I recognized that as a single woman facing 20 to 25 frat boys, I wasn’t going to be able to enter the Women’s Center,” Svendsen said. “This was my first experience knowing that misogyny does happen at Yale — and right in front of the Women’s Center door.”

Sadly, the comments to the YDN article and op-ed are filled with frat boy apologists and misogynist, anti-feminist comments. They’re worth a read, if you’re looking for something stomach-turning.

I hope to god that the Women’s Center does something beyond op-ed and getting the administration involved, because historically, Levin’s administration is complete crap at stepping up to these issues. If they can get the lawsuit off the ground, perhaps it’ll force people into taking the harassment and misogyny seriously. This incident is both, no two ways about it–to stand in front of the Women’s Center in a large body (it’s a small space) with a sign bearing a sexist slur, yelling at people who pass by and deterring women from going into the Women’s Center, is harassment outright. Those who deny say that it’s just a joke or just drunken antics. That’s an excuse, and not a particularly good one–a joke can be harassment, particularly when it’s predicated on intimidating and slut-shaming people.

The campus has a civilized veneer most of the time, but this, the annual racist chalkings on Columbus Day, the defacing of a sign to paint homosexuality as a sin and N.O.G.A.Y.S. on National Coming Out Day 2006, the Yellow Fever and anti-Asian articles in the Herald and Rumpus in 2006, and other events show that it’s only a veneer. What’s more, people generally dismiss these events and the victims–the queers, the Asians, the women, the Native Americans–are dismissed as overreacting and deserving what they got, because the ruckus they raise makes everyone else uncomfortably aware of the ugliness. The university–the student body, the administration, the faculty, the alumni–likes to pretend that misogyny, racism, homophobia, and classism couldn’t possibly happen within its posh, intellectual, educated boundaries, and so it shoves them underground and silences the victims. It’s a stupid, ignorant approach that reinforces said prejudices by not punishing the perpetrators and not airing all our filthy laundry out in the air, to avoid openly discussing why these events happen, what they are, and how we can prevent them in the future.

Fortunately, as an alumna, I have somewhat more power than I did as a student. Until Levin commits to acknowledging that this event was outright harassment and that the university will not tolerate it, I’m not giving them any money. He cares a great deal about the university’s PR, and so I hope you’ll contact the President’s Office and urge him to condemn the misogyny in this frat ’stunt’ and support the Women’s Center:

President’s Office
Yale University
PO BOX 208229
New Haven, CT 06520-8229

Email: presidents.office@yale.edu
Telephone: (203) 432-2550
Fax: (203) 432-7105

President’s Office student affairs contact:
Nina Glickson

When I was a student, I used to hate that the university ended up in the media all the time, mostly because the issues that popped up in the press were really stupid ones–Alexei Vayner, students having shower sex in Calhoun, soap dispensers in the bathrooms–and surely national news outlets had more important issues to spend their column inches on. Hopefully, this event will come to their attention as well and force Yale into taking actions for progress.