On June 24, while the California state auditor was giving UCLA and three other state universities a string of criticisms about the inadequacy of sexual assault education on campus, I was at the movies.
When a lineup of male celebrities appeared on the screen after a cute attempt to convince us to turn off our cell phones and before a trailer for some Keira Knightley romance, it seemed fairly routine at first.
Steve Carell is on the screen. Steve Carell is sitting in an office chair. Look at all of Steve Carell’s facial hair. I wonder what he’s up to now?
And then, suddenly, Carell and his cohort of male celebrity buddies – including comedian Seth Meyers, Gus from “Psych” (Dulé Hill), James Bond (Daniel Craig) and, of course, the president of the United States – are asking the men in the theater to take responsibility for stopping sexual assault.
So this is what Steve Carell is up to.
If I were so presumptuous, I might say these assorted macho, chivalrous celebrities are vowing to one another to protect me while I sit in this big, dark and mostly empty movie theater – the negligible “C” in an obviously “A and B” conversation.
This is weird.
This is not what I paid for.
Launched late April by the White House as part of its “1 is 2 Many” campaign to end sexual assault, this public service announcement came as a blow to the gut for me as a first-time viewer, particularly following the state audit report released on June 24 criticizing UCLA’s sexual assault education and awareness efforts. It was a sadly ironic embodiment of how the incorrect tone can discount key audiences in important and necessary conversations about sexual assault – something UCLA should take note of as it comes up with its response to the audit in the next 52 days.
Specifically, the male-dominated PSA’s call to support anonymous “hers” is an affront both to the entirely absent women whom the men seek to support as well as to the no-less-significant population of male sexual assault survivors.
What’s more, largely and inappropriately driven by a call for male chivalry, the PSA’s well-intentioned but still really, really creepy message inadvertently victimizes women as damsels. It feeds into rather than knocks down the patriarchal dynamic commonly associated with rape culture. Sexual overtones or not, I can’t count how many times I have felt unsafe under the supposition that another person’s strings-attached act of chivalry makes me in any way obligated to him or her.
This is a conversation about supporting the women affected by sexual assault and I, a woman, have never felt so excluded.
The state audit’s findings at UCLA and the other California schools voice just another loop on a broken record: It is more important than ever to create safe spaces for sexual assault survivors at our universities and everywhere else, too.
But in the next 52 days, University of California leaders must be mindful of the approach they take in creating those spaces. Implementing more frequent sexual assault education, as the audit recommended, is not a solution by itself. Staff and student training has to strike the right tone, too.
Here, the “1 is 2 Many” campaign can serve as a cautionary tale. Just as a nationwide effort to end sexual violence and harassment is not inherently productive based on the scope of its outreach, a campus-wide effort to educate students and faculty is not an automatic improvement if the appropriate, inclusive approach is not found and executed.
While the state auditor’s recommendation for more adequate training and greater visibility of sexual assault policies in residential halls is a reasonable start, the university must be careful not to target certain audiences as if the problem is an isolated one. The rhetoric that is used in trainings and on educational materials is critical to get right – sexual assault is everybody’s problem, and we all have the agency to help alleviate it. Broadly patronizing entire groups as victims or similarly stigmatizing entire groups as neglectful or even as perpetrators is a counterproductive blame game.
In effectively isolating parts of an audience, we may silence the uncomfortable. That would be an unmistakable setback for the university, especially when first attempting to start a dialogue about sexual assault.
This is something I know, whether a commercial featuring a new, bearded Steve Carell endorses it or not.