He: How do I compare with your boyfriend?
She: You were great
He: So you got off?
She: Yes, especially when I was on top
He: We should do it again, soon
She: Hehe
—A female student charged non-consensual oral intercourse. Her texts to the male both before and after positively referred to their experience, stating that she enjoys swallowing and “dirty boys who cum in [her] mouth.”
—Two students had a long-term sexual relationship. They broke up and the male started sleeping with another girl. His former girlfriend then retroactively charged him with sexual assault, despite the lack of any previous expression of dismay on her part.
These incidents almost certainly ended up in their school’s Clery Act reports.
* * *
If the rape industrialists are so sure that foreseeable and seemingly cooperative drunken sex amounts to rape, there are some obvious steps that they could take to prevent it. Above all, they could persuade girls not to put themselves into situations whose likely outcome is intercourse. Specifically: Don’t get drunk, don’t get into bed with a guy, and don’t take off your clothes or allow them to be removed. Once you’re in that situation, the rape activists could say, it’s going to be hard to halt the proceedings, for lots of complex emotional reasons. Were this advice heeded, the campus “rape” epidemic would be wiped out overnight.
But suggest to a rape bureaucrat that female students should behave with greater sexual restraint as a preventive measure, and you might as well be saying that the girls should enter a convent or don the burka. “I am uncomfortable with the idea,” emailed Hillary Wing-Richards, a psychology professor at James Madison University in Virginia who ran the school’s Women’s Resource Center and Office of Sexual Assault Prevention. “This indicates that if [female students] are raped it could be their fault—it is never their fault—and how one dresses does not invite rape or violence.… I would never allow my staff or myself to send the message it is the victim’s fault due to their dress or lack of restraint in any way.” Putting on a tight tank top doesn’t, of course, lead to what the bureaucrats call “rape.” But taking off that tank top does increase the risk of sexual intercourse that will be later regretted, especially when the tank-topper has been intently drinking rum and Cokes all evening. (In February 2018, a federal magistrate recommended that James Madison University reimburse a male student’s $849,231.25 legal costs spent fighting an unconstitutional and unjustified expulsion for sexual assault.)16
The baby boomers who demanded the dismantling of all campus rules governing the relations between the sexes now sit in dean’s offices and student-counseling services. They cannot explicitly repudiate their revolution, even on pragmatic grounds. Instead, they have responded to the fallout of the college sexual revolution with bizarre and anachronistic legalism. Campuses have created a bureaucratic infrastructure for responding to postcoital second thoughts more complex than that required to adjudicate maritime commerce claims in Renaissance Venice.
Procedures available to “victims” for bringing their complaints include “structured meetings” with deans, voluntary mediation with a trained professional, or formal adjudications before sexual assault boards. These options mutate constantly; the manuals describing them run for dozens of pages.
Out in the real world, people who regret a sexual coupling must work it out on their own; no counterpart exists outside academia for this superstructure of hearings, mediations, and negotiated settlements. If you’ve actually been raped, you go to criminal court—but the overwhelming majority of campus “rape” cases that take up administration time and resources would get thrown out of court in a twinkling, which is why they’re almost never prosecuted. Indeed, if the campus rape industry really believes that these hookup encounters are rape, it is unconscionable to leave them to flimsy academic procedures. “Universities are equipped to handle plagiarism, not rape,” observes University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors. “Sexual-assault charges, if true, are so serious as to belong only in the criminal system.”17
Risk-management consultants travel the country to help colleges craft legal rules for student sexual congress. These rules presume that an activity originating in inchoate desire, whose nuances have taxed the expressive powers of poets, artists, and philosophers for centuries, can be reduced to a species of commercial code. The process of crafting these rules combines a voyeuristic prurience and a seeming cluelessness about sex. “It is fun,” wrote Alan D. Berkowitz, one of the pioneers in the campus rape lecture circuit, in 2002, “to ask students how they know if someone is sexually interested in them.” (Fun for whom? one must ask.) Continued Berkowitz: “Many of the responses rely on guesswork and inference to determine sexual intent.” Such signaling mechanisms, dating from the dawn of the human race, are no longer acceptable on the rape-sensitized campus. “In fact,” explains our consultant, “sexual intent can only be determined by clear and unambiguous communication about what is desired.”18 So much for seduction and romance; bring in the MBAs and lawyers.
The campus sex-management industry locks in its livelihood by introducing a specious clarity to what is inherently mysterious and an equally specious complexity to what is straightforward. Both the pseudo-clarity and pseudo-complexity work in a woman’s favor, of course. “If one partner puts a condom on the other, does that signify that they are consenting to intercourse?” asked Berkowitz. Short of guiding the thus-sheathed instrumentality to port, it’s hard to imagine a clearer signal of consent. But perhaps a girl who has just so outfitted her partner will decide after the fact that she has been “raped”—so better to declare the action, as Berkowitz does, “inherently ambiguous.” A rape case at Occidental College, discussed in chapter 7, presents a near-identical situation.
The university is sneaking back in its in loco parentis oversight of student sexual relations, but it has replaced the moral content of that regulation with supposedly neutral legal procedure. The generation that got rid of parietal rules has re-created a form of bedroom oversight as pervasive as Bentham’s Panopticon.
But the post-1960s university is nothing if not capacious. It has institutionalized every strand of adolescent-inspired rebellion familiar since student sit-in days. The campus rape industry may decry ubiquitous male predation, but a campus sex industry puts bureaucratic clout behind the message that students should have recreational sex at every opportunity.
Consider one school event, which saw New York University’s professional “sexpert” set up her wares in the light-filled atrium of the Kimmel Student Center. Along with the usual baskets of lubricated condoms, female condoms, and dental dams (a lesbian-inspired latex innovation for “safe” oral sex), Alyssa LaFosse, looking thoroughly professional in a neatly coiffed bun, also provided brightly colored instructional sheets on such important topics as “How to Female Ejaculate” (“First take some time to get aroused. Lube up your fingers and let them do the walking”) and “Masturbation Tips for Girls” (“Draw a circle around your clitoris with your index finger”). In a heroic effort at inclusiveness, she also provided a pamphlet called “Exploring Your Options: Abstinence,” but a reader could be forgiven for thinking that he had mistakenly grabbed the menu of activities at a West Village bathhouse. NYU’s officially approved “abstinence options” included “outercourse, mutual masturbation, pornography, and sex toys such as vibrators, dildos, and a paddle.” Ever the responsible parent-surrogate, NYU recommended that “abstinence” practitioners cover their sex toys “with a condom if they are to be inserted in the mouth, anus, or vagina.”
The students passing LaFosse’s table showed a greater interest in the free Hershey’s Kisses than in the latex accessories and informational sheets; very occasionally, someone would grab a condom. No one brought “questions about sexuality or sexual health” to LaFosse, despite the university’s official invitation to do so. NYU was not about to be daunted in its mission of
promoting better sex, however. So it also offered workshops on orgasms—“how to achieve that (sometimes elusive) state”—and “Sex Toys for Safer Sex” (“an evening with rubber, silicone, and vibrating toys”) in residence halls and various student clubs.
Brown University’s Student Services helps students answer the compelling question: “How can I bring sex toys into my relationship?” Brown categorizes sex toys by function (“Some sex toys are meant to be used more gently, while others are used for sexual acts involving dominance and submission … such as restraints, blindfolds, and whips”) and offers the usual safe-sex caveats (“If sharing sex toys, such as dildos, butt plugs, or vibrators, use condoms and dental dams”).19 Oberlin College’s Sexual Information Center has offered sex toy sales.20 The 2017 Harvard Sex Week, underwritten by such bureaucratic principalities as the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, Sexual Health and Relationship Counselors, and the Office of BGLTQ Student Life, presented a workshop in “Sex Toys 101: Feel those Good Vibrations.”21
By now, universities have traveled so far from their original task of immersing students in the greatest intellectual and artistic creations of humanity that criticizing any particular detour seems arbitrary. Still, the question presents itself: Why, exactly, are the schools promoting orgasms instead of Michelangelo’s Campidoglio or Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin? Are students already so saturated with knowledge of Renaissance humanism or the evolution of constitutional democracy, say, that colleges can happily reroute resources to matters readily available on porn websites?
Columbia University’s Go Ask Alice! website illustrates the dilemma posed by a college’s simultaneous advocacy of “healthy sexuality” and of the “rape is everywhere” ideology. Go Ask Alice! is run by Columbia’s Health Services; it addresses both nonsexual health queries and such burning topics as: “Sex with four friends—Mutual?” and “Kinky Sex.” In one post, titled “I’m sure I was drunk, but I’m not sure if I had sex,” Alice takes up the classic hookup scenario: a girl who has no recollection of whether she had intercourse during a drunken encounter and now wonders if she’s pregnant. Alice’s initial reaction is pure free-love toleration: “Depending upon your relationship with your partner, you may want to ask what happened. Understandably, this might feel awkward and embarrassing, but the conversation might … help you to understand what happened and what steps you might decide to take.” Absent that pesky worry about insemination, there would presumably be no compelling reason to engage in something as “awkward and embarrassing” as a post-roll-in-the-hay conversation.
But then a shadow passes over the horizon: the date-rape threat. “On a darker note,” continues Alice, “it’s possible your experience may have been non-consensual, considering that you were drunk and don’t remember exactly what happened.” Alice recommends a call to Columbia’s Rape Crisis/Anti-Violence Support Center (officially dedicated to “speaking our truths about sexual violence”).22 Alice’s advice shows the incoherence of the contemporary university’s multiple stances toward college sex. It’s hard to speak your truths about sexual violence when your involvement with your potential date-rapist is so tenuous that it’s awkward to speak to him. And the support center can’t know whether the encounter was consensual. But Alice declines to condemn the behavior that both got the girl into her predicament and erased her memory of it.
The only lesson that Alice offers is that the girl might—purely as an optional matter—want to think about how alcohol affected her. As for rethinking whether she should be getting into bed with someone whom, Alice presumes, she would be reluctant to contact the next day, well, that never comes up. Members of the multifaceted campus sex bureaucracy never seem to consider the possibility that the libertinism that one administrative branch champions, and the sex that another branch portrays as rape, may be inextricably linked.
Modern feminists defined the right to be promiscuous as a cornerstone of female equality. Understandably, they now hesitate to acknowledge that sex is a more complicated force than was foreseen. Rather than recognizing that no-consequences sex may be a contradiction in terms, however, the campus rape industry claims that what it calls campus rape is about not sex but rather politics—the male desire to subordinate women.
This characterization may well describe the psychopathic violence of stranger rape. But it is inapt for the sexual contacts that undergraduate men, happily released from older constraints, seek. The guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one thing only, and it’s not a reinstatement of the patriarchy.
* * *
One group on campus isn’t fully buying the politics of the campus “rape” movement, however: students. To the despair of rape industrialists everywhere, many students have held on to the view that women usually have considerable power to determine whether a campus social event ends with intercourse.
“Promiscuity” is a word that you will never see in the pages of a campus rape center publication; it is equally repugnant to the sexual liberationist strand of feminism and to the Catharine MacKinnonite “all-sex-is-rape” strand. But it’s an idea that won’t go away among the student lumpen proletariat. Students refer to “sororistutes”—those wild and crazy Greek women so often featured in spring-break soft-porn videos. And they persist in seeing a connection between promiscuity and the alleged campus rape epidemic. A Rutgers University freshman noted that he knows women who claim to have been sexually assaulted, but adds: “They don’t have the best reputation. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that kind of stuff.”23
Rape consultant Lisak faced a similar problem in one of his sessions: an auditorium of Rutgers students who kept treating women as moral agents. He might have sensed the trouble ahead when in response to a photo array of what Lisak calls “undetected rapists,” a girl asked: “Why are there only white men? Am I blind?” It went downhill from there. Lisak did his best to send a tremor of fear through the audience with the news that “rape happens with terrifying frequency. I’m not talking of someone who comes onto campus but students, Rutgers students, who prowl for victims in bars, parties, wherever alcohol is being consumed.” He then played a dramatized interview with a student “rapist” at a fraternity that had deliberately set aside a room for raping girls during parties, according to Lisak. The students weren’t convinced. “I don’t understand why these parties don’t become infamous among girls,” wondered one. Another asked: “Are you saying that the frat brothers decided that this room would be used for committing sexual assault, or was it just: ‘Maybe I’ll get lucky, and if I do, I’ll go there’?” And then someone asked the most dangerous question of all: “Shouldn’t the victim have had a little bit of education beforehand? We all know the dangers of parties. The victim had miscalculations on her part; alcohol can lead to things.”
You can read thousands of pages of rape crisis center hysteria without coming across such bracing common sense.
Some student rebels are going one step further: organizing in favor of sexual restraint. Such campus groups as the Love and Fidelity Network and the True Love Revolution advocate an alternative to the rampant regret sex of the hookup scene: wait until marriage. Their message would do more to return a modicum of manners to campus male—and female—behavior than endless harangues about the rape culture ever could.
* * *
ROLLING STONE’S UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA GANG RAPE FICTION AND THE REAL WORLD
* * *
Skepticism should have greeted Rolling Stone’s now-infamous 2014 story about gang rape at the University of Virginia, which collapsed once Charlottesville police got involved. The story was patently the product of a delusional mind, depicting a level of grotesque violence that is unheard of on college campuses. According to the magazine’s almost sole source—the victim, a freshman called “Jackie” in the story—she was escorted into a pitch-black room in the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity during a party on September 28, 2012. A huge male student immediately tackled her and sent her crashing through a glass table.
A group of eight males then punched and gagged her, while one shouted: “Grab its motherfucking leg.” She is sexually assaulted for hours, including with a beer bottle when one of the frat brothers was unable to get an erection.
Afterward, bloodied and shaking, Jackie seeks help from her best friends. They tell her not to report the rape, however, because it will reflect badly on the University of Virginia and damage their own hopes of joining a Greek house and being admitted to high-prestige frat parties. The campus administrators responded just as callously, according to Jackie, allegedly conceding that they suppress rape incidents to protect the University of Virginia’s reputation.
If such a tale bore any relation to reality, parents would have demanded the creation of single-sex schools where their daughters could study in safety. And yet the Rolling Stone story was greeted with triumphant elation by the campus rape industry and with reluctant credulity even by conservative academics and journalists. Finally, we were told, we were seeing the ugly reality behind the fantastical statistics about college rape. The University of Virginia went into a paroxysm of self-flagellation; its president suspended all activities of its fraternities and sororities.
The demolition of the University of Virginia gang rape hoax drove a stake through Rolling Stone’s credibility. Its reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, ignored almost every journalistic canon, failing even to seek out Jackie’s alleged assailants in order to get their side of the story. It turned out that those assailants didn’t exist.
The Rolling Stone fiction was treated as truth, however, because feminists have convinced a large swath of society that we live in a “rape culture,” where women are perpetual victims and men are assailants in waiting. Indeed, so strong is the feminist lock on our culture that the Charlottesville police chief was unwilling to close the case, even though nothing was left of it.
The Diversity Delusion Page 15