January 11: Decreasing Rape Culture in Ultimate

For this event, we brought in people outside of the ultimate community to lead the discussion. Emma Glory and Taylor Stommel, peer educators with Project Survive and Expect Respect San Francisco,  have experience working with people of all ages on a diverse set of topics around reproductive health and sexual assault prevention. They helped us work through the basics of what does "consent" mean, what does it look like in ultimate, and how do California laws handle sexual assault? This event helped prepare us for our #HUCKYES campaign we unveiled later that weekend at LA Throwback and Lei Out, which works to reduce the amount of sexual assault at ultimate parties. 

We started off the discussion with looking at "who has power?" Later, we acknowledged that although "Rape Culture" would take a dissertation to define, those who have power are frequently supported by Rape Culture, a culture that people to get power and maintain it through domination in some form. Next, we looked at the words "Intersectionality" (how the layers of our identity overlap to create new perspectives) and "Salience", (how striking an event is), and how due to different intersections of identity, such as race and gender, or class and gender, can make some people more susceptible to more salient forms of rape culture than others.

Finally, we ended with a discussion on what consent is (active, enthusiastic and continuously given!), and how we can increase consent at tournament parties, and how to create more structure in the ultimate community to support those who have been sexually assaulted. A lot of the discussion circled back to this constant frustration that many people (particularly men) who are also affected by this topic were absent. The question moving forward will be, how do we increase awareness to the groups that need to hear it the most?