Office for Women's Affairs should not be closed

As Indiana University considers closing, consolidating or restructuring the Office for Women’s Affairs, which for 40 years has strived to empower women in academia and combat gender inequities on campus, we should turn our attention to the possibility of reforming OWA to better deal with gender issues on campus today.

There is no question that an office such as OWA is needed at this University. Many of OWA’s initiatives are beneficial to everyone, such as the IU Working Moms program, which works to provide a more family-friendly and convenient work environment on campus.

OWA provides networking tools and advice for new female faculty members, combats sexual assault through student-led workshops and more.

We should take this opportunity to reassess OWA and find potential places for improvement. Perhaps the most significant area in which OWA might reevaluate its approach is in some of the workshops for its Savant program, a peer-educator group that has seminars on issues such as bystander intervention, intimate partner violence and sexual assault.

Groups such as this are vital to combating rape and sexual assault by teaching students how to intervene in situations of sexual violence.

The approach of such groups is often built on the male-on-female violence paradigm, and Savant does a great job of busting these stereotyped roles (male as predator and female as prey, in exclusively heterosexual relationships) in its presentations by talking about sexual assault in a non-gendered way.

However, OWA’s Savant workshops “Beyond Excuses: The 411 On Treating All Women With Respect and Dignity (for men only)” and “Talking Back to Sexual Pressure (for women only)” provide an example of programs that could be changed to better deal with gender issues on campus.

The issue isn’t that men haven’t been told to respect women. To be perceived as sexually desirable, men cannot treat women respectfully — they must be heartless players or studs.

The issue isn’t only that women don’t know how to say “no,” it’s also that women who emphatically say “yes” to sex are considered sluts or whores. Women and men alike are in a double bind when it comes to sex, and having workshops that are based on these stereotypical roles is not conducive to dismantling rape culture.

A suggestion for reform would be to merge these two workshops and make them open and applicable to all genders (e.g. “Treating All People With Respect and Dignity and Understanding Consent”).

OWA might also consider eliminating its Savant workshop “Exploring the Empowering Sensuality of Celibacy,” which seems to promote abstinence “as a refreshing alternative to the campus sex scene.”

A program such as this has no place in an office fighting sexual assault and rape, as it implies abstinence is a viable way to combat sexual assault.

Rather than promoting a certain view of sexuality, OWA should be more concerned with ensuring that all sexual experiences are consensual, safe and healthy. OWA should remain an integral part of IU and evolve its approach and programs to deal with the issues of an increasingly complex world of gender and sexuality.