Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 25, 1994 TAG: 9404260008
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: COURTLAND MILLOY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Freeze that frame.
I recently returned to Washington from a spring break for black college students at Daytona Beach, Fla. And last week, I attended a seminar at Howard University on abuse of women, where I told Lorna Lowe, coordinator of the event, about what I had seen.
She said she had witnessed the same degradation over the years, particularly at beach gatherings and fraternity festivities.
``As African-Americans, we're supposed to be coming to these events out of a sense of unity,'' said Lowe, a senior in political science. ``We talk about `protecting and respecting black women,' but all I see is abuse, even women subjecting themselves to it.''
Back to the beach.
Three women had lined up in a hip-flexing pose worthy of a ``2 Live Crew'' album cover. As a man with a camcorder lay in the sand, aiming his lens up at them, another man began rubbing one of the women's exposed buttocks the way one might wax a car.
``I'm in the zone,'' the cameraman screamed.
Suddenly, a horde of male gawkers descended on the women and began pulling down their bikini bottoms. Click. Exposing their breasts. Whirr. It began to look like a rugby pile, with dozens of hands groping for a feel.
The three women were still visibly shaken when I got around to asking them why they had posed in the first place.
``I didn't mind them taking my picture, but they had no right to touch us,'' one of the women said.
The women really seemed to feel that they should have been treated with more respect. But once they were confronted by a crazed pack of men, their feelings hadn't been worth the thread in their scanty, Frederick's of Harlem-styled swimwear.
Whose fault was that?
Nancy Turner, public policy advocate for the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and a speaker at the Howard seminar, said the women were lucky they didn't get raped.
``When you find men traveling in gangs, the dynamics are far more dangerous than when you're dealing with an individual,'' Turner said. ``Couple that with a reluctance by women to make waves or cause a scene, even when they get into an uncomfortable situation, and you've got one reason women get raped.''
Turner advocated that women ``trust their instincts'' and do what they have to do to protect themselves.
But what about women who have no instincts? There were thousands of women walking on the beach virtually nude. Their very demeanor, to say nothing of their dress, bespoke an absence of moral boundaries.
``Okay, you can touch, but when I say stop, you stop,'' a woman told a man who wanted to be photographed fondling her. When other men saw this, they got into the act. The next thing you know, the woman was playfully screaming, ``Rape!'' and the men stopped.
When it comes to violence against women - with one woman being battered every 15 seconds in this country - I just couldn't understand why so many women seemed so willing to risk abuse. ``I dare a man to put his hands on me,'' a woman declared. She had a serious glint in her eye. But her leave-nothing-to-the-imagination leather string bikini spoke louder than words. ``Let me get with that, baby,'' said the leader of a pack of men who stalked her along the beach. They did not touch her. But by the time she left the beach, the verbal abuse had become deafening.
The men were about power and control, manipulation and humiliation. They were actually paying more attention to themselves than the women - prodding one another to proposition women, laughing if a man got turned down.
Women, on the other hand, seemed to think they were really involved in something special.
``I like making the guys feel good,'' said a woman who had let a man aim his camcorder down inside her swimsuit.
``It's about attention,'' another said. ``I like getting attention.'' She had drawn a crowd with a see-through fishnet swimsuit. ``The ultimate root of the problem is a lack of self-esteem,'' said Grace Orcini-Mohammed, who runs a home for battered women called My Sister's Place. ``It's so hard for women to establish self-esteem with all the sexist messages in television commercials, in music, everywhere. Those women [at the beach] were probably doing what they thought was glamorous.'' The quest for acceptance at the beach had many women tolerating and perpetuating abusive situations. The reason for the seminar at Howard was that too many women had been seen walking on campus in sunglasses to hide their black eyes, Lowe said.
In one scene at the beach, a woman was overwhelmed by a crowd of men who stripped her clothes off and chased her as she fled in the nude. When a beach patrolman approached, the men scattered, leaving the woman to retrieve her clothes. Sadly, she had laughed through the entire ordeal, as if she was glad to have been noticed.
Courtland Milloy is a columnist for The Washington Post.
The Washington Post
by CNB