Rape culture reared it’s ugly head this weekend; this particular incident in Chicago. Two Merrionette Park firefighters, Marvin Buhle, 24, and Michael Haas, 20, (pictured below) were both charged with criminal sexual abuse and attempted criminal sexual assault. What led to the charges is not an unfamiliar story.

Both were attending a party in the Mount Greenwood neighborhood of Chicago where a couple were also in attendance. The victim and her boyfriend were not acquainted with Buhle or Haas before this party in anyway. Sometime during the night the young woman had too much to drink and her boyfriend brought her to a bedroom upstairs to lie down and rest while he returned to the party. As the party entered the early morning hours, Buhle and Haas told others at the party they were leaving but instead they went upstairs. Later on the boyfriend goes up to check on his girlfriend and finds the door which was open when he left, closed with Michael Haas standing guard. The boyfriend then opens the door to find Buhle in “push-up stance” over his girlfriend who was now naked from the waist down. Buhle attempted to flee before being caught and detained until police arrived.

If you were wondering what possessed Marvin Buhle to engage in such an act, he has the answer for you. She “had been making eyes at me,” he said and added that she invited him upstairs. Before we get into the entire “making eyes at me” bullshit, let’s just examine his claim that she invited him upstairs. Everyone reading should be asking themselves, “When I’m hooking up with somebody, do I bring my friend to stand guard outside while it happens?” and the answer should be a resounding no. Unless you’re cheating on somebody or banging a cheater and want to avoid a massive scene, there is no real reason as to why you have somebody standing at that door. When I read the “making eyes at me” comment, all I could think was that Buhle’s acute critical thinking skills mirrored the Highschool Freshman meme.

This meme as well as the College Freshman meme are premised on the idea that these students are know-it-alls, take things out of context and make poor judgment calls. To a degree, this pretty much sums up the perpetrators of rape culture. They think they know what woman want, how they want it and when they want it. Clearly Mr. Buhle observed that the victim was looking in his direction and came to conclusion that she wanted him. People think this all the time; “A girl just looked in my direction, think she is checking me out?” or “She laughed at one of my jokes, I’m totally in.” People take these as cues that the other party is interested, sometimes they are right and sometimes they are wrong. Maybe she looked at him and smiled to be polite or maybe this scenario didn’t happen at all and he made it up. This type of defense though is directly related to victim blaming and slut shaming. “She had it coming.”, “She was leading me on, how was I suppose to know?”, etc. In the end it’s never your place to decide whether another party wants to have sexual relations, it’s theirs or theirs only. A woman’s consenting to sexual relations should not be measured by the shortness of their skirt or the number of partners she has had. No means no.

Source material: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-06-16/news/chi-2-merrionette-park-firefighters-charged-with-trying-to-rape-woman-at-party-20130616_1_boyfriend-merrionette-park-victim