It is essential to question our beliefs. This attitude of curiosity helps us to find the truth and not fall victim to echo chambers that only serve to reinforce rather than question our opinions. Part of questioning our beliefs is being able to engage in friendly discourse over the issues with people who disagree with us. However at Westminster, stating anything that opposes the feminist dogma is likely to get you assaulted on Facebook by the GEAR club. That is something I’d rather not deal with, after seeing how angry the GEAR members get about dissenting opinions. Nevertheless, I still wanted to tell the other side of the story, so I chose to stay anonymous.

Rape culture is defined as an environment in which rape is prevalent and sexual violence against women is normalized, excused, or even glamorized. Rape culture exists in Somalia. Rape culture exists against men in prison. Rape culture does not exist in American universities or at Westminster. The statistic that 1 in 4 women will be raped in college is based on a poorly designed study. When the National Institute of Justice and the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics researched the issue by surveying more than 4000 students, they determined that in a school year roughly 1.7% or 1 in 58 female students would be raped. Any amount of rapes is too many, but to assert that there is a rape culture on college campuses is false, and this assumption has become a mainstream belief. I challenge you to find any college with a substantial population of males that glamorizes or excuses rape. On the other hand, 1 in 25 men are raped within one year of being in prison. However, this gets little attention, and prison rape is even joked about. Beyond the claim of rape culture on college campuses, I have heard the assertion that rape culture exists at Westminster. The claim that Westminster students, implicitly males, perpetuate a rape culture is an affront to the reputation of both the school and its students. Westminster male students do not accept or glamorize rape in any shape or form. They realize that such crimes, including sexual harassment, are inexcusable offences. To think that there are people at the school who believe that their male peers are rape-defenders is idiotic and insulting.

Men and women are different. Even at one year of age, long before any social conditioning can take effect, male babies and female babies show their differences. For instance, the one-year-old boys are more active and exploratory than their female counterparts. One-year-old boys generally prefer to play with masculine toys such as toy cars, while one-year-old girls generally prefer to play with feminine toys such as dolls. Naturally, with such psychological differences present at birth, it would make sense that men and women pursue different career paths. This is proven by the majority of men who major in scientific or mathematic fields compared to the majority of women who major in fields related to social and artistic pursuits. The fact is: men and women work in different fields because they want to, not because women lack the opportunity to work in male fields. This idea is proven in Scandinavia, where women are encouraged to enter male fields such as engineering, 90 percent of engineers are still men. This is a higher percentage than in many gender-unequal, second or third world countries. This is not to say that no women wish to enter scientific fields, simply that fewer women than men wish to enter these fields. The women interested in these fields should feel encouraged to join them, because there is no broad-based sexism keeping them out of their desired workplace. As for the 77% gender wage gap, it is a myth. Women without children between the ages of twenty-seven to thirty-three earn 98 percent of what men of the same age without children earn. 93 percent of the gender gap can be explained by women’s choices to become mothers and leave the work force or work part-time. While there may be isolated instances of sexism, institutional workplace sexism simply does not exist. Before mindlessly agreeing with the general stereotypes regarding rape culture and lack of equal opportunities in the workplace, I suggest at least listening to the other side of the story.