We are not saying that individuals in the Georgetown University Grilling Society are sexist, but the marketing tools that the Grilling Society and other organizations on this campus choose to employ systematically serve to demean women. The decision to associate their week with “Girls Gone Wild” and their initial decision to sell a t-shirt that read “GUGS, Grade A, Size D,” was a combination of marketing tools that we found offensive. There is a fine line between humor and sexism, and this line has been blurred—especially for the average Georgetown student.
We applaud the Grilling Society’s decision to pull the t-shirt from their week in response to the growing criticism they received from students, staff and alumni from their own organization. Nonetheless, the Grilling Society continues to shy away from any conversation regarding the issue of sexism in their marketing, and they will be selling the shirt at an undisclosed date.
We would like to capitalize on this opportunity to invite the Grilling Society to a dialogue in an open space, open to the campus community—including students, faculty and administratorsshy;—because we believe that there are legitimate arguments on both sides of the issue. While there have been individual conversations, we believe it is important to take this to a public venue and include the campus as a whole in this conversation.
It was never our intention to prevent the week of events that the Grilling Society would like to have. However, we have exercised our right to raise an issue that we feel is relevant to address as a campus community.
We never envisioned it reaching this venomous level, and we want to take this dialogue back to a civilized discourse because we are all adults capable of sitting down and having a rational conversation with each other.
Facebook is a public domain that everyone uses as a marketing tool; both the Grilling Society and the Grilling Society Action have set up pages. Some individuals have regrettably taken it upon themselves to turn what was a civilized conversation into inflammatory comments that are aimed to offend and to hurt.
This indicates a larger culture at Georgetown that continually devalues women at this campus. This issue is not just about the Grilling Society and it’s not just about women that are “bitching.” There is a broader issue of sexism at hand. People’s public responses on Facebook pages have been bringing out into the open individual sexist perceptions and opinions. This stems to a larger conversation that needs to be had on this campus about censorship and individual opinion. This type of individual attack is not tolerated on this University campus because it breeds a discriminatory culture.
We are confident in our peers that we can find a constructive way to work together.
With Frances Dávila, Joshua Guzmán, Flávia Menezes, Hemly Ordóñez, Julia Shindel, Shamisa Zvoma on behalf of the Grilling Society Action.
