Claire Allison McGuire
Contributing Writer
Content warning: sexual harassment
Hunters have one universal ethical code: never shoot a doe. Since hunting season and mating season slightly overlap, any doe could be pregnant and give birth to a beautiful buck, a buck that will one day be mounted on the wall, packed in the kids’ lunches and turned into a new winter coat. Bucks provide; does procreate. But I am not a doe. To compare womanhood to an animal is belittling, especially considering there is no ethical code for how the hunter’s prey on women.
I have heard it since I was eight. The first time, it was a teacher making a joke about my teenage pregnant sister. Then it was the boys in school, telling me they wanted to do “that” to me when we were in high school. I was oblivious. As I got older, it got worse. I lost my humanity; I was just “that girl with the ass/boobs/waist.” Something about owning a body made me become a carnal need for men. My aforementioned sister said I should be happy that men saw me this way, that it would make them listen to me.
When I came to college, I assumed it would be better. I would not have to look for men wearing neon colors bearing bullets. At first, it was. I almost felt ugly because men were no longer interested in whispering the things they would do to me behind my back. But here, at the good ol’ College of Wooster, the whispers have evolved to gunshots themselves.
When you shoot a deer, you have to shoot it perfectly. If you miss the perfect spot, the deer will run off and the noise will spook the other game. My friends and I have been told we are dramatic, taking jokes too far, being stupid for expecting anything less. It is easy to internalize these words, but I have to ask, why defend the hunter instead of seeing the graze marks that cover our bodies from head to toe?
Not all men hunt (literally or figuratively), but all men should know the story behind the head on the wall; they should know that the words they fire are never just words. In the wrong mouth, words are threats, words are violence, words are flashes of every word ever spoken.
The College of Wooster has a hunting problem. Multiple of my friends did not even know what Title IX was until I suggested they report their sexual assaults. Some of my friends did not even have the chance to report their experiences themselves.
This, however, is not the issue. The issue is, despite the glitz and glamor of a liberal arts education, we still belong to a boys club. The problem is the men on this campus, the hunters, who are entitled to believe whatever they say will be consequenced by a simple finger wag. I do not have a solution to this problem and it is not my job to provide a solution to this problem. My job is to work for an education, but how am I to do that if I and everyone around me is wounded? How am I supposed to ignore it? All I know is my head is not mounted on the wall yet, I am not a doe made solely for recreating, and that if I do not say something, hunting will still be welcomed.
