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February 25, 2008
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Take back the reasonable person standard
Writing at City Journal, Heather MacDonald has some vital things to say about the incoherence--and hypocrisy--of campus attitudes toward student sex.
The campus rape movement highlights the current condition of radical feminism, from its self-indulgent bathos to its embrace of ever more vulnerable female victimhood. But the movement is an even more important barometer of academia itself. In a delicious historical irony, the baby boomers who dismantled the university's intellectual architecture in favor of unbridled sex and protest have now bureaucratized both. While women's studies professors bang pots and blow whistles at antirape rallies, in the dorm next door, freshman counselors and deans pass out tips for better orgasms and the use of sex toys. The academic bureaucracy is roomy enough to sponsor both the dour antimale feminism of the college rape movement and the promiscuous hookup culture of student life. The only thing that doesn't fit into the university's new commitments is serious scholarly purpose.
MacDonald rehearses the history of how the fallacious "one in four" statistic was produced and institutionalized, and charts how it has given rise to vast self-perpetuating bureaucracies, manufactured problems, gross injustice, and ideological dishonesty. She also shows us the insane human costs of institutional fetishization of that massively overbroad category, "date rape"--which too often obscures and diminishes the horror of actual rape, sidesteps the role alcohol plays in "he said-she said" scenarios, casts horny young men as predators, and treats young women as if they really are too dumb and too weak to behave responsibly or control themselves. This is not to say that date rape does not occur--only that as many campuses define it, it's anything the accuser, who may or may not remember what happened, who may or may not have encouraged and even assisted her "attacker," wants it to be. And that's a problem.
The whole article is well worth reading, but of particular value is the case study of William and Mary:
Anyone who still thinks of sorority girls as cashmere-clad innocents, giggling as they wait by the phone for that special someone to call, won't understand much of the campus "date rape" scene. A few incidents at the College of William and Mary, a pioneer in sexual-assault awareness, may correct lingering misconceptions.In October 2005, at a Delta Delta Delta formal, drunken sorority girls careened through the host's house, vomiting, falling, and breaking furnishings. One girl ran naked through a hallway; another was found half-naked with a male on the bed in the master suite. A third had intercourse with her escort in a different bedroom. On the bus back from the formal, she was seen kissing her escort; once she arrived home, she had sex with a different male. Later, she accused her escort of rape. The district attorney declined to prosecute the girl's rape charges. William and Mary, however, had already forced the defendant to leave school and, even after the D.A.'s decision, wouldn't let him return until his accuser graduated. The defendant sued his accuser for $5.5 million for defamation; the parties settled out of court.
The incident wasn't as unusual as it sounds. A year earlier, a William and Mary student had charged rape after having provided a condom to her partner for intercourse. The boy had cofounded the national antirape organization One in Four; the school suspended him for a year, anyway. In an earlier incident, a drunken sorority girl was filmed giving oral sex to seven men. She cried rape when her boyfriend found out. William and Mary found one of the recipients, who had taped the event, guilty of assault and suspended him.
But in the fall semester of 2005, rape charges spread through William and Mary like witchcraft accusations in a medieval village. In short succession after the Delta Delta Delta bacchanal, three more students accused acquaintances of rape. Only one of these three additional victims pressed charges in court, however, and she quickly dropped the case.
A fifth rape incident around the same time followed a different pattern. In November 2005, a William and Mary student woke up in the middle of the night with a knife at her throat. A 23-year-old stranger with a prior conviction for peeping at her apartment complex had broken into her apartment; he raped her, threatened her roommate at knifepoint, and left with two stolen cell phones and cash. The rapist was caught, convicted, and sentenced to 57 years in prison.
Guess which incident got the most attention at William and Mary? The Delta Delta Delta formal "rape." Like many stranger rapists on campus, the knifepoint assailant was black, and thus an unattractive target for politically correct protest. (The 2006 Duke stripper case, by contrast, seemingly provided the ideal and, for the industry, sadly rare configuration: white rapists and a black victim.)
Stranger rapes also provide less opportunity for bureaucratic expansion. After the spate of "date rapes," William and Mary's vice president for student affairs announced that the school would hire a full-time sexual-assault educator, in addition to its existing sexual-assault services and counseling staff and numerous sexual-assault awareness organizations. Freshmen would now have to attend a gender-specific sexual-assault awareness program. None of this new apparatus--for instance, the "Equality Wheel," which explains the "dynamics of a healthy relationship"--has the slightest relevance to stranger rapes.
However, the cross-currents of campus political correctness are so intense that they produce some surprising twists. William and Mary's sexual-assault resources webpage invites visitors to "listen to what people affected by sexual assault are sharing." It then offers ten audio accounts of sexual assaults, exactly half of which are male. "My experience came very close to killing me," one man reports. One would need the skills of a Kremlinologist to interpret this gender lineup, and the site doesn't explain who exactly these voices are--but it's hard to escape the impression that William and Mary has admitted either a huge gay community or some very beefy women. Diversity politics, gay politics, and the sexual-assault movement produce strange bedfellows.
MacDonald is in many ways reprising--with more research and more restraint--many of the things Katie Roiphe had to say in her 1997 The Morning After. Roiphe was vilified for that book--and I would expect MacDonald to receive similar treatment from certain predictable quarters. That doesn't make her message any less important, though. It only says that the past ten years have seen the patterns Roiphe described a decade ago become even more damagingly entrenched.
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I read the entire MacDonald article at the City Journal site. She is an excellent writer, who is, at times, surprisingly funny, given the serious nature of her subjects (the myths of widespread campus rape, endemic racism in big city police depts., etc.). The article reminded me of Daphne Patai's book, Heterophobia, which detailed the anti-male animus that exists in many campus bureaucracies. As I recall, it had more to do with faculty members getting charged unfairly with being a harasser. It was a well-researched work, and on the basis of that research, she claimed there was a Sexual Harassment Industry or SHI for short. She has the facts to back up the claim. The MacDonald piece reinforces my belief that Patai was correct.
It is interesting that people like MacDonald and Patai were once on the other side of such issues. Patai is a former Women's Studies professor (but an expert in Latin American Lit, not WS), and as a Yale undergrad, MacDonald drank the literary deconstruction Kool-aid, but came out of the coma and lived to tell about it. I don't think the writers share the same politics, but each can see the danger and waste that manufactured hysteria causes in our culture and on our campuses. I know a good number of politically liberal profs who personally disdain pc language and projects, but they would pay a heavy price for speaking their minds publicly, so they don't. And, of course, conservative critics are always angry, misogynist racists just being their backlashing selves.
It's good to see so many smart people writing about bringing back the reasonable person standard, but I don't think the pc bureaucrats can be beaten any time soon. They've been criticized for a long time now, but their insipid programs are burgeoning. Why was it that the mid-90s "girl crisis" - academic feminists claiming that girls are turned into bimbos in middle school because of patriarchal prejudice and never achieve their full intellectual potential - was widely taken to be fact in the face of 30 years of massive evidence showing an exactly opposite trend in the education of females?
Campus units such as the ones MacDonald mentions are a colossal waste of time and money and do take attention away from what is most important - academics. Too many K-12 and higher education professionals simply have their minds on the wrong things. But how can they be stopped? Every year more of these programs bloom.
With power over other people should come a sense of responsibility. Women have sexual power over men, and this is especially true at college age, when the male sex drive is very high and the female sex drive has usually not yet peaked.
But the idea that women should exercise this power RESPONSIBLY, ie in a way that does not damage other people, seems to be getting lost, at least among attendees of "elite" colleges.
I'm not sure that Heather McDonald draws the correct conclusion that those activities are always not rape. There are many women who have not consented to sex, yet have woken up to sex, or woken up after sex. It is still rape, still terribly traumatic, and is fundamentally different from quasi-consensual sex while inebriated.
Campuses do not want to do anything about these issues for the simple reason that it would have to advocate for a very conservative sexual viewpoint. There really is no principled way to say that sex is fun, that only repressed people aren't having that fun, and then to ask that men secure sober consent before going ahead with the act. After all, if there is no principled basis upon which to refuse sexual intercourse (i.e. emotional aspects of the act), then there is no principled basis upon which women may refuse, save a whim.
Too bad the facts don't support MacDonald. She's been thoroughly debunked at Salon.com:
http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2008/02/25/rape/index.html
My daughter has told me about some things that have been going on in one of the freshman dorms at her school, causing distress to students and faculty when they came out. I have to say that back in my day, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, when there were no coed dorms, and people of the opposite sex were not allowed past the lobby, these things simply didn't happen. They couldn't have.
I am appalled at the fact that people send their 18-yr-old offspring away to college with apparently no preparation for dealing with the opposite sex in an unsupervised setting. Or maybe it's that those kids are way too immature to be away from home. I know people who have had their kids live at home and attend community college for the first year or two because they simply weren't mature enough to handle the independence. Colleges do not take responsibility like they did in my day, and whether that's a good or a bad thing, parents need to be aware of that and take it into account. I know the parents of the girls my daughter told me about had no intention of their having the experiences they apparently have had.
The idea, though, of women having sexual power over men and having to exercise that responsibly strikes me as being somewhat absurd. Presumably men always have the power to just walk away. They deal with women's sexual power in Saudi Arabia by forcing them to wear burkhas in public. I'd rather ask the men to learn some self-control. And I don't mean the self-control of getting to third base and then stopping; I mean the self-control of walking away from a situation that looks like danger. Like women used to know they needed to do.
Here's an analogy: Suppose you leave an expensive laptop on your carseat and walk away from your car without locking it. You return to find that it has been stolen. The person who took it was wrong to do so; he knew it didn't belong to him and wasn't meant for him. Your leaving it unsecured in no way means that you participated in the theft. But if you value your laptop, you don't leave it like that. And if you go to the police and complain, they will reasonably assume that you can't be that torn up about your laptop, since you treated it so casually. I think it's magical thinking typical of teenagers, that "I can do whatever I want and other people are obligated to act in a scrupulously correct manner at all times". This is the kind of immature thinking that ought to signal that a kid is not ready to be on his/her own.
Agree with Laura.
The Salon article has a few problems; it assumes that anyone who advocates for sexual restaint engages in victim-blaming:
She actually argues that "greater sexual restraint would prevent campus 'rape.'" If only she hadn't worn that skirt, walked down that dark alley, had something to drink, smiled his way, she wouldn't have been "raped." In the very same breath, she bizarrely goes on to rail against sex-positive workshops on college campuses. (Apparently a campus workshop called "Sex Toys for Safer Sex" amounts to an endorsement of "recreational sex" -- and, one might assume, rape-in-quotation-marks -- "at every opportunity.")
The author, in her hysterical, chastity-shaming auto-rant, misses a few key points:
1. Sexual restraint, here, applies to both men and women. It is NOT about how women dress (see Laura's comment regarding burkas), but rather about how men and women interact.
2. Men who rape do not think that they rape. They assume consent, because sex is normal, healthy, and fun. Why would a normal, healthy young woman not want to engage in a normal, healthy, and fun activity? Getting men to the point where they can acknowledge valid reasons for a woman to say "no" - so that their default position is that there will not be sex - is impossible in a culture filled to the brim with sex toys and hook-ups. In order to acknowledge the validity of "No," one must acknowledge that there is something to sex that is more than fun, like playing softball.
Unfortunately, Salon perpetrates the culture that allows rape to happen with such regularity: there is no sin greater than that of even mentioning sexual restraint, because all sexual restraint is victim-blaming.
Give me a frickin' break.
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