While students understand the events that mark Tequila Sunrise as the most widespread college drinking weekend of the year, where participating bars open their doors at 6AM, to coincide with Homecoming events at Northern Arizona University, less realized is that this weekend is also commonly characterized by an increase in sexual assaults.

This year was different because the spike never quite subsided. People, mostly women, were being drugged and sexually assaulted throughout the month of November. Stories about what Myra Ferell-Womochil, director of community education at Northland Family Help Center, refers to as “non-alcohol drug facilitated sexual assaults” continue to be circulated across town.

“We are basing the increase in non-alcohol drug facilitated sexual assaults purely from word of mouth and informal disclosures …Women are simply coming forward and telling us or telling someone who is close to them, who then shares with us, that they have been drugged while being at a bar.”

Flagstaff DJ Emmett White, who spins regularly in many bars downtown, comments on how widespread sexual assault is. “A majority of the people I know in this town, including myself, have been drugged and/or targeted for sexual assault, and that’s not confined to the bar scene. It happens at house parties, it happens on campus, it happens at restaurants.”
While Mr. White regards the recent increase in sexual assaults stemming from downtown bars as cause for concern, he believes it is also a good opportunity to engage bar owners and bar staff, as well as patrons, in these issues.

Northland Family Help Center, Northern Arizona Center Against Sexual Assault and the Flagstaff Police Department have been working together for the last three years to assist the bars in making sure they have the tools they need to meaningfully address a few realities.

1) Alcohol is the most commonly used substance to facilitate date rapes and sexual assault.
2) Sexual assaults can and often do happen at any bar in town, all year round.
3) As bystanders to the potential for violence, bar staff who have been trained in prevention strategies can play a critical role.

This past Tequila Sunrise marked the third year in a row where NFHC offered sexual assault prevention training to local bar staff, and through their partnership with NACASA and the Flagstaff Police Department, also delivered posters to bars for the event with sober messages about watching your drink, looking out for your friends, and the popular “in your hands, you hold the power to stop rape,” which is intended to be placed above urinals in the men’s bathroom.

The Green Room was the only bar in town that had these posters hung up in the bar on the morning of Tequila Sunrise. Community educators for NFHC, Ms. Ferell-Womochil and the author of this article surveyed patrons on their reactions to the posters. We wanted to get a sense for how these messages were being received.

Despite one very intoxicated guy who was upset by the messages, slurring, “I don’t come to bars to have to hear about this kind of sh*t, I come to get my rape on,” most people appreciated the messages. Women shared stories of being drugged, harassed, and assaulted. Many men were appalled it happened it all. “If people feel the need to hang these posters” said one guy, “it is clear there is a problem, and that is really sad.”

When owner Rand Jenkins heard word his bar was being victimized, his response was “Shock and dismay, the typical ‘I never thought this could happen to me’ response. Then anger and frustration with the world, followed quickly by problem solving and crime fighting.”

Ms. Ferell-Womochil praised the bar for what it already does and his commitment to have his staff trained by NFHC’s community education staff. “Rand is really trying hard to create a climate within his bar that is not conducive to sexual assault. He is re-educating his staff.”

Says Mr. White: “There seems to be a sort of silent inaction on the part of most bar staff and owners when it comes to this, I think because they are afraid that addressing it will affect their business, and also because it requires a sea change in the mentality of people that work in the bar.”

At 1PM on February 28, The Green Room is hosting the first of three sexual violence education and prevention trainings given by community educators from NFHC. The trainings are specifically geared toward bar staff to meaningfully and appropriately combat sexual assault, highlights the important role bars can play in creating a safe space for their patrons, and are open to the public.

“I think that this education will hopefully start some conversations, raise awareness, and dramatically reduce the chance of this happening,” says Mr. Jenkins. “One of the biggest reasons why I decided to go into business for myself was the belief that I could help the community.”

As a DJ, Mr. White understands the role he plays in setting the mood, and recognizes the responsibility he has as a bystander with a microphone. “Some guys in particular think it’s cool to stand in groups at the edge of the dance floor and ogle the girls as if it’s a show or something, or to continue to pursue a dance or conversation after someone has said ‘no.’ All of these things contribute to an atmosphere I don’t want to be a part of, so … I’ll change the music, play something you can vogue to, that can do the trick.”

“If the creep factor in the room gets too high, you can feel it, something shifts in the air. I’ve been known to stop the music and point ‘em out, and remind people that they don’t have to be sleazed upon, that if someone is being creepy or predatory, to let me or the bouncers know, and we’ll get them out of the bar, no questions asked.”

It is important that men become active bystanders to the potential of sexual assault. Says Mr. White: “I’ve witnessed people trying to take advantage of the most clearly wasted woman in the bar. In this situation I’ll intervene and ask the woman if she wants this person around and if her friends are nearby, or if I can get her a cab.

“In cases where the person is too drunk or maybe even drugged to be coherent, I’ll try to get the perpetrator 86’ed or at the very least make sure the bouncers know not to let them leave together. These situations are tough because sometimes they are too out of it to even remember their address. For this reason and more, I hope people adopt and stick with the buddy system.”

Mr. White continues: “Men, join The MARS Project* (men against rape and sexism) on campus. Talk to other men about consent. Don’t be afraid to take things seriously and stand up for what’s right. Know that these problems are not going to disappear anytime soon, but if we don’t continue to talk and implement effective and creative ways of dealing with them, they will stay the same or get worse. To affect cultural change takes decades, and knowing what is right, educating yourself and others, and sticking to your guns can make it happen.”

• Someone cannot legally give consent if that person is intoxicated. Legal consent can only be given if it is: Verbal, Sober, and enthusiastic.
• If someone is intoxicated and “accidentally” rapes someone, that person is still accountable for the rape. It is not an excuse.
• Most drug-facilitated rapes involve alcohol, despite what is happening in the bars now.
• Most sexual assault victims personally know the perpetrator; most sexual assaults do not involve strangers.
• It is never a victim’s fault for being raped.
• Friends don’t let friends sexually assault someone. There is an important place for the bystander.

Resources:
Northland Family Help Center (24-hour crisis hotline): 928/527-1900 or
877/634-2723
Northern Arizona Center Against Sexual Assault (NACASA): 928/213-6112
Flagstaff Police Department: 928/774-1414
NAU campus Police: 928/523-3611

*women can join the MARS Project too!

Yelp, it’s that time again. Spread this around.

Attention Flagstaffers,

The MARS Project (men against rape and sexism) is having another “fest.” We had a great turn out last year and I’m happy to announce that MARSfest 2 has a date.

April 12th
3-8 (ish)
Murdock Center (On Brannen, across the street from BiciMundo)

I’m happy to deal with the women there than that guy who owns The Hive.

Among other exciting festivities, Summit Dub Squad and Babies as well as a series of poets are on board, ready to dazzle.

If you are a band, a poet, a magician, a singer, a performer, an artist, a juggler, or an interpretive dancer and you are down with the cause and interested in being involved with this, please hit me back here or any of these places:

kyle.boggs@nau.edu
kyle@undertheconcrete.org

In composing/researching this thesis, I learned more about myself as a writer and thinker than through any other project I’ve ever undertaken. For those that don’t know, I wanted to figure out a way to discuss rhetoric, masculinities, and the environment within one central theme: I chose pickup truck advertising. There are still a lot of problems with it, I think. Though I’m going to work this semester to glean material from all of this to produce two solid scholarly journal articles: masculinities will be the focus of one, and environment (greenwashing, sustainability…etc.) will be the focus of the other.

With this project, I was able (hopefully) to illuminate the ways in which feminist and environmental activism are constrained and affected by the same power structures, the same issues of entitlement, control, and dominance. This year, I’m hoping to put some of this into action, forming coalitions between my work with The MARS Project (men against rape and sexism) with local environmental groups. If, for some reason, there is anyone who wants to read the whole thing (like 95 pages), I’d be happy to send it through email as long as all the copyright stuff is respected.

The entire thesis is called: Power Under the Hood: Pickup Truck Advertising, Hyper-Masculinities, and Denial in the Age of Ecological Apocalypse

Members of American culture would be hard pressed to imagine an advertisement for a pickup truck that didn’t display a rugged individual behind the wheel, navigating his new mud-splattered F-150 through towering canyons, his truck clawing its way over jagged boulders and rapid streams—spitting up water and gravel along the way—only for it to rest at an impossibly jagged cliff among the desolate, pristine wilderness that lays before him. The other dominant image depicted in these advertisements, of course, is a construction site. In this advertisement the viewer catches up with the same rugged individual as he finishes loading his new Silverado with 2 x 4’s; he hops into the cab, leaving the construction site in a cloud of dust, just in time for a catchy, masculine slogan to run across the screen such as “built Ford tough,” “size matters,” “like a rock,” or “high performance starts here.”

In this world, pickup trucks—and the men in them—are invincible. They are in the driver’s seat, paving their own destinies. They are in control, they are steadfast, they are confident. Such a man is just as much a part of the truck as the truck is a part of him. There is nothing a man and his truck cannot conquer in the world created by pickup truck advertising. It is a world not affected by the environmental impacts of combustion engines, or the destructive wake of heavy off-road tires. It is a world where men are fueled by aggression and sustained by power, control, and dominance over alternative masculinities, women, and the natural world.

Analyzing the rhetoric of pickup truck advertising reveals intersections between rhetoric, masculinity, and the way our relationship to the natural world is constructed. An analysis such as this is crucial in that it allows us to rediscover what it means to be authentic, autonomous, and fully human members of a culture outside of generic and confining gender roles. Once we sift through the negative effects of the cultural norms, deep-seated within the rhetoric of advertising, we can begin to uncover what it means to be fully human and, thus, interact with one another and the natural world in a way that is truly meaningful and reciprocal. In order for this to happen, a careful examination surrounding the discourse on sustainability and so-called “green” automobiles must be interrogated as well. If our culture is, indeed, in the process of a transformation to a sane and sustainable way of life, the disconnection between ideology and action must be united. The world illustrated in the rhetoric of pickup truck advertising gives members of American culture false and harmful representations of masculinity. By portraying the dominant masculine ideology as virtuous in the rhetoric of pickup truck advertising, a myth is further propagated that, through the implementation of domineering technology, man can transcend the needs of the natural world. In the narcissistic world of pickup truck advertising, violence, aggression, control, and domination are portrayed as innate, as natural and predictable as the setting sun.

Meanwhile, in the real world, nearly one-third of American woman will “report being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point during their lives” (Katz 21). Approximately one in four or one in five women will experience an attempted or completed rape in college (Katz 21). Over 99% of the perpetrators of rape are men (Katz 5). But men don’t just attack women; “Between 50 and 70 percent of men who abuse their female partners also abuse their children” (Katz 21). The dominance of patriarchy—and particularly a masculinist ideology— also fuels a strong sense of homophobia in our culture. In 2005, 13.8% of all reported hate crimes were motivated because of sexual orientation (FBI). Of the 1,213 victims targeted because of sexual orientation bias, 61.3 percent of the victims were homosexual men (FBI stats). Though the FBI doesn’t list statistics on how many of these crimes were perpetrated by men, “the Bureau of Justice Statistics say that over 85% of violent crimes in the U.S. are committed by men” (Katz 79).

We also live in a world where roughly three percent of old growth forests remain intact in the United States (San Francisco Chronicle). An average of 150 species of animals go extinct every single day (BBC News). According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there are carcinogens in every single stream in the United States (U.S.G.S.). Ninety percent of all the large fish in the sea are gone (National Geographic News). It is predicted that by 2030, a quarter of all the earth’s mammals will be gone, forever (Podger). There are, of course, many systematic and institutional reasons for these striking figures, but most of them can be summed up as due to increasing loss of habitat. This is particularly true if, in the definition of habitat, we include drinkable water, breathable air, and sustainable food sources. Much like the trucks described above, as our culture has extended its colonization of wild habitats, it has destroyed, in whole or in part, everything in its path.

In short, our culture is very violent. Statistics support the notion that this violence can, in part, be attributed to the dominant masculine ideology, which functions as a cycle from which narrow, and, indeed, harmful interpretations of what it means to be a man are encouraged throughout development, reproduced in the media—particularly through advertising—and ultimately rewarded in the capitalist society at large. Like a fish unaware of its own liquid environment, it is important to recognize the difficulty inherent in questioning the impact of one’s surroundings and how these surroundings influence behavior, world-views, and motivations. This project is particularly concerned with the role that advertising in the mainstream media plays in the construction of world views. Long after the marriage between production and promotion, products have been linked symbolically to the “world of social values,” whereby accepting the “selling message is to accept the values it presupposes” (Wernick 23). By looking critically at today’s advertising, we can begin to understand what is being “sold” or “promoted” beyond the product itself.

So why, one may ask, have I chosen pickup trucks and not, say, SUVs? I am deliberately omitting SUVs, insofar as I can, from my analysis and, instead, focusing specifically on pickup trucks for two main reasons. First, though many women do drive pickup trucks, advertising, by and large, is generally geared towards men. In fact, a Chevrolet marketing campaign from 2005 called, “Long Live the Truck,” was according to the marketing director, “aimed at men, who make up 87 percent of the full-sized pickup’s buyers” (Geist 1). Rob Schwartz, creative director for Nissan, specifically identified the full-sized truck market as a “male-dominated category” (Halliday 2). Further, SUVs are a relatively recent phenomenon while pickup trucks represent a long tradition of masculinity and men’s roles in American culture.

Before such a formal analysis of these commercials as cultural texts can take place, however, it is important to get a sense of the way advertising works and how the focus of advertising has shifted from logically-based appeals to those that attempt to exploit our deepest emotions. Further, it is crucial to understand how these appeals to emotion specifically reinforce, and thus promote, traditional gendered stereotypes and worldviews characterized by false and limiting dichotomies. This will lead into a demonstration of the way in which this mindset negatively affects men’s relationships with women and alternative masculinities. In addition, I shall examine how the consequences of this hegemonic gendered identity alongside the rhetoric of pickup truck advertisements converge in a manner that justifies the on-going destruction of the environment.