"No Means No"? Not in N.C.
By Sarah Powell, Contributing Writer
We are told that when it
comes to consent, “no means NO.”
Title IX states, “When a student has
experienced a hostile environment
such sexual assault or severe,
pervasive, and objectively offensive
sexual harassment, schools must
stop the discrimination, prevent its
recurrence, and address its effects.”
Even society tells us,as women, have
the right to say “no” at any time
during intercourse and if the partner
continues, it’s rape. Right? Wrong, at
least in North Carolina.
It is hard to know which year
we are living in when it comes to rape
because there is no such thing as
saying “no” if, at first, a woman says
“yes,” according to NC law. In 1979,
the Supreme Court of North Carolina
ruled in State v. Way, “if the actual
penetration is accomplished with the
woman’s consent, the accused is not
guilty of rape,” even if she says no at
any moment during sex. The state
still has not overturned this 41-year-
old court case.ruling. Why are we the
only state with this type of standard?
Senator Jeff Jackson has
been working for the past four
years to change this law and has
introduced legislation to amend the
law. Senate Bill 553, Sen. Jackson’s
Revoke Consent for Intercourse
Bill, would make it a crime for
anyone to continue to “engage in
sexual intercourse after consent is
withdrawn.” Moreover, the proposed
amendment is worded in a way that
includes all forms of intercourse;
victims would no longer be limited to
just women. SB 553 has yet to make it
out of the Senate Rules Committee.
Last year, it was pushed to the back
The Easiest Language
By Cro Owens, Staff Writer
A while.back, I saw a post
online that read something like,
“English beats up other languages in
back alleys and rifles through their
pockets for loose grammar.” Having
now studied four different languages,
I really can’t argue. But what, I have
been repeatedly asked, is the easiest
language to study of those I’ve
learned? The conversation and my
reasoning is difficult at best: modern
Greek comes naturally to me, since
I’ve been studying it since I was ii.
The alphabet and pronunciation
aren’t difficult, but nouns take one of
three genders...a weird concept if you
speak English. For example, a chair
is just a chair in English. In Greek, a
chair is a feminine word and you use
a different word for “the” if you want
to say “the chair.” H Kap£KA.a.
I started Arabic a year-and-
a-half ago, and the alphabet is brutal.
Each letter has four different forms—
for example, the letter “gh” looks
like I by itself, at the beginning of
a word, j^i in the middle of a word
and at the end of a word. The
script is cursive, so the letters have to
connect—and some connect to letters
on both sides, others on only one side
and some don’t connect at all. The
connection is often what tells you
what letter it actually is: a long “a”
sound and an “1” will have the same
shape in the middle of a word, but
the long “a” will not connect to the
letter on the left side. That’s the only
way to know.
I just started studying
Chinese this semester. If you google
it, you’ll find Mandarin Chinese
on lists of both the hardest and
easiest languages to learn. What
makes it easy is that there is no verb
conjugation—no “I go, she goes, I
went” business. It’s always just “go”
and you can put words.like yesterday
or tomorrow nearby to show if it’s
past or future tense or a pronoun in
front to show who is doing it. The
language (as far as I have learned
it) is quite simple. What’s not so
simple? Pronunciation. I still don’t
know how to pronounce some of the
sounds, and it’s a tonal language.
burner for the third year in a row.
It is hard to believe that
anyone could seriously defend this
law, but it has still been applied in
recent cases. This past year, a woman
testified against her estranged
husband after he showed up at her
apartment drunk, demanding she
have sex with him. As she told WRAL
News, since he was getting angry she
figured it would be safer to agree to
the sex. When it got violent and she
begged him to stop, he wouldn’t. In
every other state, he would’ve been
charged with rape and served a
much longer sentence. But because
of the 1979 ruling, his charges were
lowered to misdemeanor assault on
a female, to which he pleaded guilty
and served a lo-month sentence.
The perpetrator can be charged with
other related crimes, but not rape.
meaning that the inflection of your
voice changes the meaning of a word.
“Ma” can mean mother, hemp, horse
or scold, depending on the way you
pronounce it. The Chinese character
system is what tends to scare people
the most, though. While the Arabic
alphabet is complicated and cursive,
Chinese simply doesn’t have one.
There are some characters that are
vaguely pictographic and if you
know what th^ syrhbols in a larger
character mean you might be able
to dissect its meaning (though rarely
its pronunciation). But ultimately,
you have to memorize how to write
every individual word in the Chinese
dictionary to become fluent.
I went to Kenya last summer
and therefore studied a bit of
Swahili—by far the easiest on this
list for an English-speaker. There’s
no new alphabet, easy to pronounce,
fun to pronounce (my favorite word
in Swahili is bell pepper—pilipili
hoho). But Swahili is not the first
language on people’s minds when
they think of an easy language. One
The Ultimate Winter Break Bucket List
By Abigail Ojeda, Assistant to the Associate Editor
gingerbread house (or just fail at
making a gingerbread house and call
it haunted to justify the appearance).
While there’s no telling how
much we would bribe other people
to take our finals so winter break can
start early, an entire month without
school also means going several
weeks without binging The Office
with your best friends or making
late-night Cookout runs. If you’re not
working or traveling a lot over the
holiday, then it’s important to stay
busy until you return to the 919. Here
is your ultimate winter break bucket
list:
In the belated yet ever-present spirit
of Halloween, make a haunted
If you need a gift for the friend who
has everything...there’s one thing
they don’t have...a photo album of
all the embarrassing photos you’ve
taken of them.
Take the microwave turkey prank
to the next level and ask a parent
how to decorate an upside-down
Christmas tree by taking a picture of
your Christmas tree and rotating it.
Reenact your entire fall semester
for your family using your elf on the
shelf.
If anyone asks you deep questions
that you don’t want to answer,
respond (in all seriousness) with a
line from the movie Elf. If nothing
else, find out their favorite color.
Take your Christmas caroling to the
next level by singing songs entirely
unrelated to Christmas. Start with
- Beyonce.
If you live in the South and there is
Even if things get ugly, even if
things gel violent, even if someone
gets hurt, once consent is given...
there’s no stopping it, legally.
This is not the first case
to highlight the loophole in the
1979 N.C. Supreme Court ruling.
Numerous cases have produced
the same outcome: a lesser
sentence for the perpetrator.
There is an unambiguous ethical
obligation to change this law and
bring more awareness to it. It is
important that we are aware of our
rights and that we seek to uphold
our rights. There is no reason for
this law to remain for another
day, let alone another year or two.
North Carolina needs to change
this law and implement a new one,
’one where “no”’ actually means
“no,” at every point.
of the first to come to mind might
be Spanish—however, I beg to
differ. I haven’t ever studied it, and I
only occasionally read the Spanish
version of instructions to see if I can
pronounce the words correctly, but
Spanish seems so hard to me...not
because the language itself is hard,
but because I don’t really have an
interest in learning it.
Those who ask me what;,.
the easiest language to learn is will
usually hear me go on and on about
Arabic. That’s not because it’s easy,
that’s because I love it. I will defend
Greek and Arabic and Chinese
(and Swahili, too, if anyone ever
claims it’s difficult) to the death,
constantly encouraging people to not
be scared by the foreign alphabets '
and grammar and to embrace the
possibilities of learning a language
so unlike English. Ultimately, what
makes a language easy or hard is not
the grammar—it’s your willingness to
learn.
no snow in the month of December,
shake a snowglobe and it will
immediately start snowing...in the
snowglobe.
Drink water. While this is one of the
most boring activities possible, it is a
highly useful life skill.
If there is an obscenely hot day, make
instant mashed potatoes and have a
food fight with your siblings outside.
When your family asks about
significant others, show them a photo
of you and your favorite pet.
STAFF
Sarah Kiser, Editor-in-Chief. Mimi Mays, Associate Editor.
Abby Ojeda, News Editor. Caroline Garrett, A&E Editor. Rebecca Dowdy, Opinon Editor.
Micah Clark, Cartoonist. Cro Owens, Social Media Coordinator. Nikki Wertz, Layout Designer.
Staff Writers: Carolina Brust, Rachel Crawford, Kathleen Daly, Hannah Flood, Yajaira Ramos-Ramirez, Huma Hashmi, Olivia Slack.