Apparently Matt Sussman really enjoys a good rape!

In the July 2nd edition of the BG News, “Humor” columnist Matt Sussman shard with all the O-Reg students, parents, and the rest of the BGSU community the following perception of the difference between death and rape: “You can’t lay back and enjoy death, and even if you do, you can only enjoy it once.”

This quote is from an article that is actually a lengthy piece, poking fun at the death of Strom Thurman and actullay had nothing to do with rape. Sussman spent the majority of the article trying to defend his right to make fun of the death of someone, knowing that some people will find it offensive. What strikes me is that he acknowledged that making someone who lived in an extrmemely long and active life and who died of basically natural causes (Thurman was 100), is potentially offensive, but that saying people should actually lie back and enjoy a rape is not.

It must be nice to be so priviledged to have a life so unaffected by sexual assult to be able to have this attitude.

I understand that this was an attempt at humor (Sussman is the “humor” columnist, after all)–but I have a challange for him: Matt, you predicted in your article that your “future children (will) speak of [you] as a good father…” I challenge you to write your next “humor” article about how you will explain the realities of rape to a future daughter. Will you, I wonder, instruct her to lie back and enjoy it? Please write for us this article in your best humorous style. That way we can keep it in BGSU’s archives, and show it to your children when they get older. Maybe they will get just as big a kick out of it as the women our Victim Adcocate has accompanied to the hospital because they were raped. Please explain to me how this is funny. I’d like to know.

I find Sussman’s cavalier and flippant attitude about rape (a crime that statistics suggest has affected a least ONE woman in his life) disgusting. It is beneath the level of a BGSU student and human being. I wish that, as a man who spends his time trying to teach people the true realitites about rape, I could apologize to all the women he just slapped in the face.

I can’t. But Matt Sussman should consider doing that himself.

Heath huber

COMMUNITY EDUCATOR, THE TRANSFORMATION PROJECT