Just Ask

Alexa Slaughter
Aug 27, 2017 · 3 min read

It’s not that hard to ask someone if they want to dance. It actually takes less than 30 seconds of your time to get consent before touching the body of a person you probably don’t know in the darkness of a party, so why don’t people do it?

Well, probably, because they don’t think they have to. They’ve likely dealt with plenty of people who didn’t openly say they were bothered by it, or were fine with not being asked, which is understandable, but neither of those things really matter because when you do try to address the issue, it’s dismissed. When I ask men why they don’t intervene when they see their friend making someone clearly nervous or uneasy the responses have been telling. I’ve been met with the classic “I can’t mess up my bro’s game” and a variety of different ways of them saying their bro code is more important than the other person’s safety.

I don’t know, there’s this weird problem we have where we don’t think about how our actions affect someone else before we do it and then don’t care much afterwards. Even on a liberal campus where people claim to care about the feelings of others somehow a cognitive dissonance occurs when it’s your (or your “bro’s”) actions negatively impacting someone else. Suddenly, the empathy and the push to do what’s right don’t apply.

In theory, most decent human beings know it’s bad to make someone feel unsafe, but in practice, a lot of us fall short. When it comes to the way some boys act at parties, I feel like they understand the statistics about sexual assault on college campuses, but then there’s a stark drop off in comprehension or willingness to comprehend when it comes to real life application. They don’t care to understand the fear of having to pull your friend away from a drunk, horny boy at a party. They don’t care to understand the fight or flight instinct that kicks in when you try to walk away from someone and they forcibly pull you back.

I’m not going to sit behind this computer and scold a population of people who need a crash course in what consent means, but I want you (read: anyone who lingers on the outside of circles of friends dancing at parties waiting for a chance to grab someone, the people who don’t let go of visibly uncomfortable people when they want to stop dancing, or the boys who don’t check their friends when they see them making another person feel unsafe) to know how dangerous your behaviors are. It may seem silly to stress how crucial it is to ask someone before you engage in any sort of activity with them, but the problem is not just a dance at a party. The problem is the underlying entitlement people feel to someone else’s body.

There are endless jokes on college campuses about being triggered and needing safe spaces but for a victim of sexual assault, being touched without consent can be literally traumatizing. You never know what the person you won’t let go of when they try to walk away has been through. You never know if they are one of the one in six women who have been a victim of an attempted or completed sexual assault. You never know what happened the last time someone thought they didn’t have to ask.

No matter how many people said it was okay to not get consent, you don’t have a right to touch me or the person after me or the person after that. Being at a party doesn’t give you an excuse to abandon courtesy and a few moments of communication can mean the difference between having a good time and messing up someone’s night.

At some point, hopefully there can be a shift in the culture of college campuses, but for that to happen, we have to stop rationalizing toxic behaviors in an effort to convince ourselves there isn’t a need for a change.

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Alexa Slaughter

Written by

don’t worry | harvard ‘20

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