When I walk home down Grand Avenue after my night class gets out at 9:15 p.m. or after an evening of watching TV with my friends, I carry pepper spray in one hand and a folding knife up my sleeve on the other side. I also text my mom when I get home; that way, if she doesn’t hear from me, she’ll know to call the police. Many women I know carry keys sticking out from between their fingers like brass knuckles.

When I go out somewhere with my best friend, we have a code word to use if a guy is bothering one of us. We aren’t old enough to drink alcohol, but when we are, I plan to buy some sort of device to help detect roofies in a drink.

I don’t want to do any of those things. I don’t want to shell out my money for pepper spray, knives and special drug-detecting devices like the nail polish developed by a group of researchers at North Carolina State University this fall. I will, though, because if I don’t and I become a victim of sexual assault, I am afraid I will be told I did not do enough to protect myself.

TommieMedia Opinions Editor Elliot Polsky recently wrote a piece claiming that the new drug-detecting nail polish does not promote rape culture. In this piece, Polsky wrote, “This is applying the universal moral principle that we have an obligation to look after our own safety to the real-world fact that there is a need to look after our own safety.”

In fact, this sentence itself is one example of how the nail polish does promote rape culture. Yes, I may have an obligation to look after my own safety, to a point. Obviously I shouldn’t run into traffic or ride in a car without a seatbelt or eat food I found on the ground. Those things are common sense.

But to act like arming myself for a two-block walk home or putting on a special nail polish before going to a party is a natural extension of looking after myself the way I should demonstrates a lack of knowledge of what women go through every day. We’re always looking over our shoulders and taking extra precautions, and the idea that that is natural needs to stop.

When men say that women have an obligation to prevent their rapes, they are demonstrating a massive lack of understanding of what we go through every day. Once, when I was waiting at a bus stop after dark, I began to count the seconds between cars passing by. I wanted to know that if I was attacked I would be able to run into the street for help and have a car pass by in time. I have never met a man who has to do the same. Is this what Polsky would call “looking after your own safety?”

In the end, the pepper spray, nail polish and other so-called prevention methods probably won’t do any good anyway. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, a majority of rape survivors knew their attacker. Roughly 51 percent of female survivors were assaulted by a current or former intimate partner, and 41 percent say they were raped by a family member. We’ve been conditioned to see men in strange bars and dark alleys as a threat when the real danger is at home.

If there was a way for women to stop rape, we would have done it by now. Polsky wrote that “while the world is still imperfect, we aren’t wrong for looking for ways to protect ourselves from the criminals.” But a lot of the time these “protections” don’t work; if they did it wouldn’t be true that nearly one in five women will be raped in their lifetimes. Our culture needs to stop hiding behind gimmicks and recognize that schools, police, the justice system and men themselves are the ones with the responsibility to stop rape. Not pepper spray, not nail polish and not the victims.

Grace Pastoor can be reached at past6138@stthomas.edu.