Harvard Club Says Excluding Women Prevents Sexual Assault

This campus club has unusual logic for keeping women out. (Photo: Corbis)

A storied Harvard institution is insisting that it shouldn’t have to admit women since not doing so is its way of preventing sexual violence on campus.

Yup: You read that right — the Porcellian Club, one of the “final clubs” that is the Ivy League school’s answer to Greek life, says it shouldn’t have to admit women since doing so would make sexual assault more likely. After all, it argues, what better way to stop rape on campus than keeping men away from women to begin with. These exclusive, all-male social clubs forfeited official university recognition in 1984 rather than begin to admit female students. Founded in 1789, the Porcellian is by far the oldest, most exclusive, and most secretive of the final clubs. Women are never allowed inside its doors.

Charles M. Storey, the graduate board president of the Porcellian Club, issued a statement to The Harvard Crimson, saying that “Given our policies, we are mystified as to why the current administration feels that forcing our club to accept female members would reduce the incidence of sexual assault on campus. Forcing single gender organizations to accept members of the opposite sex could potentially increase, not decrease the potential for sexual misconduct.”

In his statement to the Crimson, Storey notes that this is the first time since the Porcellians Club’s founding that it has ever made any public statement of any kind to the Crimson, but he felt compelled to do so out of “interest in privacy and the importance of the situation.” To back up his argument that it is essential that the Porcellian Club remain a male-only club, Storey notes that per Harvard’s own reports, 47 percent of women belonging to co-ed final clubs reported having experienced “nonconsensual sexual contact.”

There are, obviously, several things inherently problematic about this argument, perhaps the most notable being that men can’t be expected to not assault women. The onus of preventing sexual violence on campus, this argument says, can never be on men themselves. Rather, women should make sure to not be where men are if they do not want to be subjected to sexual violence.

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This logic is baffling and heartbreaking — and all too common.

Women have long been subjected to messages about “don’t get raped.” Long absent from this dialogue is telling men, simply, “don’t rape.”

The comedian Sarah Silverman caused a stir for calling attention to this latter point last year:

Fellow comedian Amy Schumer also called out this message disconnect on her show, Inside Amy Schumer, in a sketch that parodied Friday Night Lights, having the coach tell his players that, no, they couldn’t rape. The writer of the sketch, Christine Nangle, pointed out that while the sketch wasn’t meant to be about football directly — or mean to skewer Friday Night Lights itself in any way — “it wasn’t lost on me that these guys are trained to knock each other over while half-dressed girls jump up and down on the sidelines.”

Watch the Inside Amy Schumer skit below:

Which is why the members — and alumni, who are adult men functioning in our society — of the Porcellian Club might want to take a hard look at what they are really saying about men, women, and basic respect.

When you teach respect — and teach men to inherently respect women as peers and equals — you also teach accountability and offset the messages objectifying women and their bodies so prevalent in society. We’d like to think that would be taught at a university as well-regarded as Harvard.

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