The Gatekeepers

I was reading the On Language article on student slang at the University of North Carolina in the Sunday New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/magazine/31FOB-onlanguage-t.html?_r=1&ref=on_language.

I was particularly interested in the term "sketchy." I remember one of my SAT tutoring students got a question wrong using the slang definition of sketchy rather than the standard dictionary definition.

As I read on, I was blindsided by a throwaway line about halfway through the article. The linguist studying slang said, "female students are putting themselves into more dangerous situations than they did in my day..."

WTF? Women are putting themselves in dangerous situations. So the dangerous people are just sitting around waiting to see who shows up to be victimized; they can't help themselves. Then there's the comparison of what students did in her day--apparently they didn't put themselves in dangerous situations. In contrast, the female students today are reckless, stupid, slutty or all of the above.

As I said this was a throwaway line in the article. But this kind of attitude is prevalent in society. This is the type of attitude that leads to blaming victims for being raped. "What was she doing being there, wearing that, doing that?"

Why are women responsible for situations around them, the things that happen to them? Why are they the gatekeepers? It doesn't make sense.