F-Bomb

by Lauren McKeon

  Upon hearing the guilty verdict, Caleb collapsed on the floor. He needed his lawyer to help him get out of the room. He was a puddle, said Warner-Seefeld, and once he saw her it got worse. “He alternated between rage,” she told me, her voice wobbling, “where he was just unloading what happened in the hearing and then collapsing and sobbing on the floor. And then up again and raging about again, and then sobbing on the floor. It was horrific. I would never want to see it again.” Even now, five years later, she blinked back tears as she recounted that day, throat bobbing and eyelids rapid-firing, and apologized for losing composure. It’s hard, she told me, to get over remembering that part.

  Today, she assured me, Caleb is thriving. Even though the university later reinstated him, he never went back. In the two years it took to overturn his expulsion, he got a job that paid more than his mom’s salary as a teacher. While her son was making bank, Warner-Seefeld took her personal battle and made it national. Fueled by the perceived injustice, she joined forces with two other moms of accused sons and together they officially launched FACE in 2014, with the major goal of getting due process cemented into school tribunal hearings for sexual misconduct and rape cases, making them similar to proceedings within the justice system. If this happens, it will certainly make it harder for a university to come to a different conclusion than police about any alleged rape or assault. Currently, accused men are allowed to have lawyers present during the hearings, but they may only advise or consult with their clients; they cannot speak on their behalf. In most cases, that’s up to the accused men themselves. If FACE wins, the school tribunal will resemble a courtroom, with all the same rights to legal representation and also, likely, all the same pitfalls. (May the richest, whitest student win!) With this push comes FACE’s less trumpeted, unofficial, but far scarier goal: the constant work to reshape the discourse on what is and isn’t rape and sexual assault. It’s hiding underneath every lobbying and outreach effort—a red sock in a basket of whites—ready to bloody the laundry.

  “To me, you’re being raped if you are being penetrated when you are very obviously not wanting it,” Warner-Seefeld told me when I asked how she would define rape. Given her outrage that unwanted kissing currently equaled sexual assault, hers didn’t seem to match my definition at all. “I mean very obviously not wanting it,” she replied. “Not because you’re too tired to say no, because that has happened. Not because you got bored in the middle of it. Not because of all these silly things. But you are like, ‘No, I don’t want to have sex.’ You are like, ‘Get away from me.’ ‘No.’ You are very, very clear. And there’s no ambiguity for this guy.”

  She’s not the only woman I spoke to who feels that way. Hanna Stotland is a Harvard-educated lawyer who voted for Barack Obama. She runs her own business as an admissions consultant for students who are applying to university. About half of her clients are special cases—students who have, for instance, been expelled from their original university—and a growing percentage of those special cases are men who have been expelled under Title IX violations, i.e., those deemed by the university to have committed rape or sexual assault, even if the justice system has cleared them or declined to prosecute them. Stotland coaches these men through the reapplication process and helps them get back into school, though not necessarily the school that expelled them. A big part of her job involves co-crafting the best possible version of her client’s rape story. She never encourages a client to lie and always gets them to own up to what they did wrong, whether it’s cheating on their girlfriends or drinking too much the night of a hook-up. But it’s always a hook-up, never a rape.

  Like Warner-Seefeld, Stotland invoked feminism; she believes it’s good but it’s gone too far by arguing that rape is everywhere, that we should, as a matter of course, believe the accuser. Stotland, who admitted she has never been raped and, therefore, could not know how a woman reacts while being sexually assaulted, nevertheless told me, “I’m speaking for myself, but I don’t find it an imposition to say no when I don’t like what someone is doing.” She feared the current brand of feminism encourages passivity and silence. The “yes means yes” trend, she reasoned, sets up both men and women for failure. Instead, she felt we need to teach women to own their desire—to know it’s okay to want, or not want, sex, but above all, to know what, exactly, they wanted. Women, she assumed, didn’t say no when they wanted to say no not because they were “idiots” but because they are taught it’s their job to please men. “I don’t think anybody is that stupid. I don’t think that they behaved that way without instruction,” she said, her voice strained tight—whether that instruction is from our hypersexual society, from history, from their own upbringing, or some other pervasive narrative.

  I found myself thinking she wasn’t entirely wrong. I’m sure many women have sexual interactions they don’t want because they feel pressured to have them—that they ought to do it if they want approval, whether it’s from specific men or the vaguely omnipresent capital-M men. I’d been under the sheets as a younger woman, doing things I wasn’t jazzed about because I was desperate for a dude to like me. But to me that’s not feminism gone wrong. The grin-and-bear-it bedroom games we should never have to play are a horrifying and precise symptom of rape culture.

  I was, however, baffled that two self-proclaimed feminists (albeit one who was a conflicted and possibly former feminist) were still putting the blame for rape on the victim for not enacting the perfect protest. To me, their feminism didn’t support women’s rights; it actively undermined them. I asked both women what they’d want campus gender equality to look like today. “To me, it would look the same as it did in the 1970s and ’80s,” Warner-Seefeld responded. Sigh. Of course it would. That means no campaigns on consent, “yes means yes” messaging, or “believe survivors” advocacy; no “Dear Colleague” and no broadened scope for Title IX; but also, in many cases, no on-campus sexual assault centers, no safewalk programs, no on-campus blue-light security phones. FACE and groups like it are at the head of a move to rewind rape legislation and public attitudes back several decades. Like Stotland, Warner-Seefeld sees today’s push for affirmative, enthusiastic “yes means yes” consent as relieving women of their choices and robbing them of their independence.

  Later, when I went back over my notes from these interviews, I saw that I’d carved angry circles into my notebook without realizing it, evidence of the effort it took to not lose it while talking to both women, to not unleash a tirade of emotion, a lifetime of what it meant to be a survivor. As I transcribed the audio from our conversations, though, I let loose, shouting angrily into the air, startling my cat out of his afternoon bask. Both women wanted to divorce their work from rape culture, but I couldn’t escape the link. Not only were those links there, they felt like an iron-strength chain that could rope the world.

  I’m not sure that, had I yelled at them, either woman would have done more than blink benignly at me, like my cat. They were so convinced. Even if the new standard of consent worked, stressed Stotland, universities needed to give men time to adapt. Why was expulsion the first step, she wondered. Couldn’t schools just summon accused men to the dean’s office and give them a good scare? Her voice took on a gravelly Dick Tracy I’m-gonna-whup-you drawl to illustrate: “If you break this rule again, you’re out on your ass, buddy. You got that?” Most men who found themselves in the “rape pickle,” she added, weren’t monsters. They were teenagers who didn’t even know the girl didn’t want sex, men who cried when told what they’d done, men who’d stop if the girl said a louder no.

  Rape culture doesn’t happen in a bubble. It happens because women like Stotland and Warner-Seefeld are telling other women their experiences, while unpleasant, could have been stopped if only they’d said no, emphatically. It happens because, as a larger society, we’re telling women they could have stopped nice guys from making mistakes if only they were more responsible. It happens because we slut shame and invalidate and pressure survivors. It happens because it is
terrifying to think our loved ones are capable of rape, that you don’t have to be an evil, midnight bush-lurker to cross a line. It’s so much easier to confirm a centuries-old status quo and blame women. But it’s only ever men who benefit from this.

  In a controversial September 2014 Canadian court decision, a federal judge acquitted a 240-pound man accused of raping a small, drunk, and homeless nineteen-year-old woman. Among many things, Justice Robin Camp, a man, told the alleged victim (he bizarrely kept referring to her as “the accused”) that because she was drunk, the “onus [was] on her to be more careful” and “sex and pain sometimes go together, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.” He also asked her why she didn’t keep her knees together and, when Crown prosecutors objected to his outdated and illegal views, he admonished the lawyer that the law doesn’t prevent him from thinking. Get it? HE’S A THINKING MAN, WOMAN!

  Camp did give the accused a stern talking-to, something Stotland and others suggest is a reasonable punishment in such cases. In court, Camp said: “You’ve got to be really sure that she’s saying yes . . . So remind yourself every time that you get involved with a girl from now on and tell your friends, okay?” He added that men have to be very careful, because sometimes women make things up out of spite: “Is there not a possibility that a very unhappy thing happened here? Two young people made love, and somebody came afterwards and poisoned the girl’s mind?”

  An official complaint was launched in 2015. Camp strenuously resisted efforts to have him permanently removed from the bench (his only concession to wrongdoing was to take “gender sensitivity” courses, and he took the unprecedented step of asking the federal court to halt the Canadian Judicial Council’s deliberation of his case), but he has recently accepted the decision of the council and resigned. The accused in the case was retried and acquitted; the prosecutor in the case has said the Crown may appeal.

  Stotland, Warner-Seefeld, and their cohort acknowledge victim blaming is real but are adamant they’re not doing it. They truly believe their toughen-up-buttercup approach will stem on-campus rape. Still, it’s difficult to see how the “but he didn’t even know he was raping you!” defense doesn’t blame the victim. I mean, can we just stop for a moment and think about how ridiculous this is? Never mind that a dude’s tears aren’t magical unicorn drops that guarantee his innocence—he might be crying because he was caught, or because he’s overwhelmed, remorseful, acting, about to shit his pants. A deeper problem is at work if a man can’t tell if he’s committing assault, and that’s not a woman’s fault. I doubt a stern lecture will stop this type of man, someone who so obliviously thinks he has a right to a woman’s body. And, frankly, how dare we tell his victims they could have done more to stop or educate him?

  Yet both Stotland and Warner-Seefeld adamantly believe the modern anti-rape movement encourages women to abandon responsibility for their choices. Bad sex, Warner-Seefeld said, does not equal rape. Regretting sex after a drunken hook-up, she said, does not equal rape. Not enjoying sex but still finishing it, she said, does not equal rape. She allowed that it was rape if a man had sex with an absolutely incapacitated woman incapable of giving consent or even knowing what was happening to her. It’s also rape if it is forceful and violent. Prior trauma, added Stotland, can muddle a woman’s view of what’s actually happening to her, causing her to confuse her current lover with her prior rapist. Flashbacks do happen, but many studies (and my own experience) attest they don’t happen like this; survivors can usually tell with whom they’re having sex. “You can make a good faith mistake about whether you were raped,” Stotland assured me, presumably benevolent, like a fairy godmother of victim blaming.

  Warner-Seefeld, Stotland, and their ilk seem hell-bent on ignoring the numerous studies that have shown it is extremely rare for women to lie about rape—it happens in less than 10 percent of cases. In other words, flocks of women are not equating bad sex or regretful hook-ups with rape. That’s an idea that’s ludicrous at best and laden with slut shaming at worst. Warner-Seefeld laughed when I confronted her with this criticism, admonishing me for thinking women don’t lie. “I don’t know a young person in my school who actually doesn’t laugh at that,” she told me. “Because they literally know people who have done it.” I’d rather we didn’t blame and shame women based on the questionable authority of a high school rumor mill. Rape occurs in many different situations, but it all comes to down to simply this: a woman hasn’t consented to sex. If she doesn’t want it, or can’t tell a man she does, it’s rape. Full stop.

  Emily Lindin, founder of the anti-slut-shaming project UnSlut, told me, “People don’t believe there is such a thing as consensual sex for women.” If that statement sounds bold, consider this: the ugly idea persists that if you were, as a woman, to have consensual sex and enjoy it, then you would deserve to be called a slut, which is just about the worst thing ever, so instead of being shamed, you lie about it and say it was rape. It’s a giant shame vortex: we don’t believe women who say they’ve been raped because we believe they should feel ashamed for having sex—so ashamed that they’d rather say it was forced. It’s why police still ask women who make rape claims if they have boyfriends or husbands. But, as Lindin argues, a woman who has consensual sex is much more likely to just go on minding her sexy business than to call the police.

  Warner-Seefeld was careful to say that FACE doesn’t work with men’s rights activists (MRAs). She has kept MRA groups at a distance because she believes they’re radical and any alliance would keep her organization from getting a seat at the tables where legislative change happens. Stotland similarly scoffed at the groups, though she warned that the strange bedfellow syndrome—the partnership in ideology between MRAs and those who do work like hers and Warner-Seefeld’s—means feminists are seriously getting the rape question wrong. FACE has received hundreds of calls from families who have sons and need help. She received three calls from families the day of our interview. She doesn’t know what will happen to them—if they’ll be expelled, stay expelled, or be acquitted. She’s not willing to jeopardize that work with radicalism. It’s worth mentioning, however, that much of FACE’s literature references major MRA organizations and their work. For an organization that claims it wants to keep its distance, it both reinforces and applauds men’s rights rhetoric.

  One FACE document, titled “Title IX’s Other Victims,” quotes several blog posts from A Voice for Men, including one that says, in reference to the accused, “He sees very clearly that very few believe him while nearly everyone believes the woman. The system and our culture are failing him. His pain is invisible while hers is treated with reverence, even though she is lying.” The article goes on to say that most women are believed, no matter what. We know that’s blatantly false. Studies show only one out of about every one thousand rapes results in jail time, and conviction rates have decreased from 15 percent to 13 percent in the past three decades. That’s not to mention the skeptical and downright hostile reaction that often greets accusers. And yet, as a society, we’re primed to believe droves of women are unfairly sending men to jail. In a way, Lindin told me, she gets it, and I do, too. It’s incredibly difficult to admit that our athletes, our brothers, our sons, our friends, our idols are capable of rape. It’s so much easier to believe the girl’s a slut. She’s a liar. She made a mistake. She wanted it. But that doesn’t make it right—in the sense of justice or accuracy. What it does make is a slippery slope, down which decades of the feminist reframing of rape is plummeting.

  So what would the aftermath of my rape look like today? It’s likely I’d have waited even longer to tell somebody what happened, knowing my own assault didn’t fit into a perfect box. Back then, as a competitive kickboxer, I knew enough self-defense to make it stop immediately, but my brain turned off. I didn’t fight hard enough to end it fast enough, which would have been instantly, clicked off like a TV. I struggled, but my body didn’t catch up to my brain, because I couldn’t process what was happening. My shock and my fear o
vertook me. And what if Warner-Seefeld had been my high school teacher? Would I have squashed the voice that said it wasn’t my fault? Would I have been convinced I’d just made bad choices? That it wasn’t rape at all? And even if—if—she hadn’t convinced me it wasn’t rape, would I have been too afraid to tell any authority figure, knowing my relationship to my rapist could have been used against me? After all, in many of the seventy FACE-backed lawsuits, prior text messages between the accused and accuser comprised a major piece of evidence, as if talking to a guy is blanket consent for sex and an exoneration of rape. When the victim-blaming voices are reaching rock concert decibels, how would I, or any other victim, be able to step forward, especially when the loudest of those voices belong to other women?

  It would have been so tempting to stay silent.

  Mary P. Koss is a University of Arizona professor who is a leading voice in sexual violence research. In 1982 she worked with the Ms. Foundation, which runs Ms. Magazine, and feminist icon Gloria Steinem to conduct the first ever US national survey on campus rape. Koss has been studying rape on campus for longer than I’ve been alive, and yet she told me the researchers have made little progress. On the whole, she said, studies that show rape on campus exists and is a proliferating problem, but not much funding or time has been put into figuring out a way to reduce campus rape numbers. In other words, she lamented, we keep proving and re-proving rape is a problem to satisfy naysayers, but we never do anything about it.