Meghan Warner, a senior at UC Berkeley, serves as the director of the university’s sexual-assault commission and is part of a federal complaint against the school for its mishandling of assault cases. She’s appeared in a Glamour issue honoring college women who are about to change the world. And she says there were men who wouldn’t approach her or date her after recognizing her, or learning of her work.Just black knight and eject. "I'm sorry, I need to leave RIGHT NOW. I don't want to talk-rape you."
“Nobody ever explicitly said, ‘Oh you’re a survivor, we can’t date,’” she told me. “But they’d assume that I was just doing this for attention, or more frequently they didn’t want to deal with it. It was too much. They assumed I’d have a lot of needs.”
Then there were those who were a little too eager to make it know that they would never, ever assault a woman. “Their first response is ‘I’m not one of those guys, I would never do that,’” she said. “I mean, what, should I be carrying gold stars now?”
Chrissy Keenan, a UCLA senior, is the president of Bruin Consent Coalition, a campus group that works to raise awareness regarding sexual assault on campus. “When people know of me but they don’t really know the work, they hear the term ‘feminist’ or ‘sexual-violence prevention,’ they think, ‘super-extreme, bra-burning feminism,’” she explains, which often puts people on the defensive.
Keenan herself, though, sometimes finds it hard not to go on the offensive. She’s so used to laying down the nitty-gritty details of consent that she's been known to open romantic interactions with a spiel that feels straight out of a student handbook.
She animatedly tells a story about a recent Tinder rendezvous: “One time, I agreed to meet with this guy at 8 or 9 at night. Before we met, I said to him, ‘This is the work I do, I know the chief of police ... so, don't try and get creepy; I know all my rights.’ And five minutes later, he was like, ‘Actually, I'm really not OK with how you just assume I'm a bad guy. And I get very bad vibes from that, so we shouldn't hang out anymore.’”
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