Tunnel exhibit further oppresses

By Ryan Amante

The rain and my head cold made it even more oppressive -- and the statistics didn't help.

I walked through the Tunnel of Oppression on a rainy Saturday afternoon. To be blunt, I thought it was an average presentation.

For those of you who didn't get to go through the tunnel, it was a museum-like exhibit that snaked its way through the Benson parlors. It addressed issues of prejudice present in modern society through the use of tapes, cutouts, pictures, videos, T-shirts and other visual aids.

I was bothered by the imbalance of the topics, the wild statistics, the overzealous attempt at poignancy ... and the vacuum cleaner.

I tripped over the vacuum cleaner, which is why it was bothersome to me.

To be honest, the tunnel was very thought provoking. It was a good way to raise awareness for sexual violence, sexism, racism and other issues of oppression.

And I did think that bringing the topics closer to home by telling stories of Santa Clara students was a great idea.

What I didn't like was the way some of the topics were presented.

I entered the Tunnel of Oppression, and the first things I spotted were cutouts of celebrities in minimal clothing and a series of empty alcohol containers with Post-its denoting the amount of calories in each drink.

I didn't spend too much time there. It seemed like the body-image concept through the influence of the media had been done too many times before.

I found the next part, which addressed the topic of prejudice toward women, to be very well done. Listening to the tape of the two men making sexist jokes while I read the stories of women who'd risen above the stereotypes definitely compounded the emotional effect of being there.

It was the next section that bothered me the most.

After turning the corner, I was confronted by a human-shaped cardboard cutout that had a sign on it, reading, "I raped your best friend."

The sexual violence section of the tunnel was the most extensive, and the most compelling, except for the fact that it made me feel oppressed.

I was suddenly surrounded by the stories of men and women who had experienced sexual assault in one manner or another. To say that it was emotionally moving is putting it lightly.

There were so many things I'd never seen or considered.

However, there were also some things that were very wrong there.

I walked through that section with my girlfriend. And it made me feel more than a little uncomfortable, considering that there were signs all over the place saying, "I was raped by my boyfriend, and I'm still with him," or "My friend was raped by her boyfriend, and they're getting married this summer."

There's a line between raising awareness and making someone feel like they're not safe in anyone's presence.

On the right-hand side of the tunnel, pinned to the hanging black curtains, there was a large poster saying, "80 percent of people under the age of 30 have been sexually assaulted."

That seemed a little odd. But a bulleted list of statistics a little farther down clarified things for me. It stated that, "80 percent of people who are raped are under the age of 30," and I began to lose faith in the accuracy of the other statistics.

The exhibit lost some of its power after the statistics and the quotes became repetitive.

It definitely made me aware and, in truth, frightened at how local violence like that could be. But it also made me feel like I was having a finger pointed at me saying, "This is your sex's fault -- if you didn't always think about sex, this wouldn't happen."

I might have been able to understand it a little better if there were some testimonies of sexually assaulted men, instead of a wall of women's stories.

I realize that more women are sexually assaulted than men. But having all of these stories of women who were raped by their fathers, boyfriends, best friends and acquaintances was not something I could relate to. Instead, it made it sound like every guy was a sexual monster.

It might have been a great exhibit, but I was too busy trying to escape this mentally condemning cage they trapped me in to notice.

Ryan Amante is a sophomore marketing major.