Sexism at Exeter

This year, there have been quite a few large sexual assault cases on college and prep school campuses such as St. Paul’s case earlier this year and more recently the Penn State case that got on the news because of fraternity boys posting pictures on Facebook of half naked girls who had passed out or fallen asleep.

We haven’t really seemed to have any big sexual assault problem at Exeter—or if we have, they haven’t been as public. Even though this is a boarding school like St. Paul’s and similar to a college campus, somehow Exeter feels disconnected from these cases, at least for me—as if the Exeter community is too good or too strict for it to happen on our campus.

But recently, a student found a page on “Challonge”—a tournament site—that ranked all the girls in the class of 2016 against each other by attractiveness. This student posted the page on Facebook and soon after the site was taken down by whoever made it up or had control over it in the first place. Apparently, while most girls only had one to two “votes,” some had up to nineteen.

This isn’t a case of sexual assault, but the fact that someone on campus made this and violated their fellow classmates in this way shows that there are people on this campus who have problematic ideas about what is okay and not okay in terms of other people’s boundaries. This brings up the question: are we really a community that understands how to respect one another’s boundaries and respect consent?

In reality, Exeter is not necessarily some bubble or safe haven where sexual assault and other sex-related incidents will or can never happen. As has been reported in The Exonian, we have a “hook up culture,” and we have seniors who take preps to EP or dances, just like at St. Paul’s.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s website, “one in five female high school students report being physically and/or sexually abused by a dating partner,” so it’s more than likely that many people on campus, male and female, have been victims of sexual assault on campus.

But this isn’t something we talk about all that often. Principal Hassan and Dean Cosgrove have sent an email or two about it, and we had an assembly about consent last term, but in both instances sexual assault was addressed in a way that felt disconnected to Exeter. The emails addressed St. Paul’s School, or the expectation of consent on campus, and the assembly addressed consent as a broad, general picture.

But maybe we need to take a step back and ask what sexual assault and consent actually mean in the context of Exeter and our hook up culture. If some people are or were at one point taking part in ranking upper girls on their attractiveness without realizing how degrading and disrespectful that is, what does that say about how Exeter treats sex and sexual relationships between students? What does it say about how Exeter is educating us on what consent is and what respectful boundaries are?

We will have the new senior health elective coming up that is meant to help prepare seniors for when they go off to college, which is great, but what about the students who will be amidst Exeter’s culture for the next couple years? And even in the discussions during prep spring health we did get. From what I remember about prep health, those discussions felt very disengaged from the specific experience of Exeter students and students at boarding school.

A disconnected prep spring discussion about sex and consent and an overdue senior elective that is likely to become a joke among seniors who don’t want to have to take an extra course is not enough. We need to be aware as a community of what the “hook up culture” at Exeter is, the possible dangers of this culture and what it means for Exeter’s sense of community—we need to be able to talk about it openly and not let it continue to be ignored in our community.