Johns Hopkins University: Misogyny That Hurts

This post is written by Yelena Tsilker, president of the Johns Hopkins’ Feminist Alliance. If you’d like to write a guest post for SAFER’s blog about what’s going on at your school, please contact us).

Last week, my school’s student-run publication The Johns Hopkins News-Letter ran two particularly offensive articles: “Local Bison Bear All at Phi Kappa Psi’s Annual Lingerave” by Greg Sgammato, a fat-shaming Opinion piece in which “fat chicks” are referred to as animals and “it”, and “Banging under the influence: The ups and downs” by Javier Avitia, a piece that, at best, normalizes rape in situations where alcohol is involved. Since then, the News-Letter has issued two apologies: one non-apology essentially stating that its satire was simply not understood by all the insecure readers out there, and one real apology that acknowledged the harm done, the mistakes made, and retracted the articles. Granted, the new apology was hidden on page A10 and didn’t even make the front page of the News-Letter site beyond a tiny link at the bottom of the screen, and Sgammato has yet to resign, but.

It’s progress. At least, in regards to the News-Letter.

Perhaps the worst—and, ironically, best—part of these articles is that they provide a very tangible view into the everyday culture of Johns Hopkins University. Although women make up just under half of the undergraduate student body, the campus has an undeniably apathetic and even hostile attitude towards women.

On a good day, Johns Hopkins can be referred to as a ‘boys’ club’. As a research university, most of its science professors are men, including one who, many years ago, told a professor of mine she would not be able to pass his class due to her gender (she got an A). Last year alone, our parody paper, The Black and Blue Jay, posted an article about the humorous side of gang rape, and then, despite a large outcry and many students’ best efforts, Tucker Max was paid $15,000 of students’ tuition money to come speak. Judgment of women by body type, by clothing, by how much they’ve had to drink, is par for the course—and, at the same time, so is the idea that there is nothing wrong and, if there is, it’s somebody else’s problem, not worth talking about, go back to your work and wait for it all to blow over.

In other words, these articles were nothing new.

What these articles did do, however, was hurt. Not just the ‘insecure,’ as the first apology implies, but women across the campus. Women who felt like they were being dehumanized, judged, depicted as automatons who existed—who even chose their friends—solely for men’s pleasure. Who, according to one e-mail the Feminist Alliance received, no longer felt safe on this campus.

It is hard to feel safe in a place where you aren’t respected just because you’re a woman, where our sexual assault policy is vague and, at best, behind the times. Where Hopkins reported no rapes to the FBI in the past 3 years on the undergraduate student campus, even though reports of sexual assault to the Counseling Center went up. Where some huge scandal regularly throws misogyny out into the open, but because of humor, because students are busy, it all just gets buried over again.

I hope that this time will be different. That we’ll be able to carry the momentum from last year’s Tucker Max incident and this year’s News-Letter incident to make lasting change on this campus, change that we desperately need.

Because as a woman? I am not proud to be a student at or future alum of Johns Hopkins University. I know that we can do better, and the fact that we’re not? That, too, hurts.

(Cross-posted at Change Happens)

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