The Problem with Everything

by Meghan Daum

  A little over a year later, the Department of Education formally released its proposal. The policies were enough for the liberal apoplexia to reprise itself, but, upon inspection, not really enough to enact meaningful change. Schools would have the option of adopting higher evidentiary standards and cross-examining accusers, but not necessarily be compelled to. Still, the fact that the dictum was coming from DeVos made it resistant to reasoned reaction. “A woman appointed by a serial sexual abuser wants to make it harder to punish college sexual abusers,” Jessica Valenti tweeted. Alyssa Milano made a video in which she compared DeVos to the Grinch and referred to the rollback as a “shIXtty gift” that everyone should take and shove it right up her . . . notice and comment section.

  Democratic lawmakers, too, rushed in to signal their opposition on social media. Representative Maxine Waters of California tweeted “Betsy DeVos, you won’t get away with what you are doing. We are organizing to put an end to your destruction of civil rights protections for students.” Joe Biden wrote on Facebook that the proposal “would return us to the days when schools swept rape and assault under the rug and survivors were shamed into silence.” The American Civil Liberties Union, apparently confused about its purported mission of protecting the constitutional rights of all citizens, unleashed a tweet thread denouncing the rollback because “it promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused . . . We will continue to support survivors.” They later issued an official statement that was more comprehensive and hewed (somewhat) closer to their mission. Nonetheless, to hear the ACLU talking about “inappropriately favoring the accused,” even on a platform like Twitter, was nothing short of remarkable.

  To me, the nagging question was not just why so many people and organizations were willing to override fundamental democratic principles in order to show that they were on the “right side” of an issue. It was why the threat of danger on campus remained so compelling. Why were so many people so invested in the idea that women on college campuses or anywhere else are subject to male predatory behavior at practically every turn? If George Will was wholly and despicably wrongheaded to suggest that victimhood might on some level have a few perks, why do so many young women seem so willing to recast unpleasant or regrettable sex into violative sex? What are they getting out of it? Is there something more intrinsically satisfying about seeing yourself as a victim/survivor rather than a normal human capable of making mistakes that might result in unpleasant situations that leave you feeling icky for a while?

  * * *

  “If the alcohol is out and you’re in a room with a bunch of progressive social justice warriors who are women, someone’s going to start talking about sexual assault. My theory is that other people are kind of encouraged to share their own stories of being assaulted, whether or not these stories may be true.”

  This is Toni Airaksinen, who graduated from Barnard College in 2018 and with whom I had a series of conversations while writing this book. At the time of our first conversation, she was twenty years old and wrapping up her sophomore year. I discovered Toni through her articles for the Columbia University student newspaper, which showed a good-natured, fair-minded resistance to the left-leaning party line. She wrote about speech codes (she was against them) and men’s studies classes (she was for them). It was never inflammatory, just conspicuously against the grain.

  “I believe that our collective concern over microaggressions is infantilizing and detrimental and that we should definitely not have a microaggression reporting system,” she wrote in the Columbia Daily Spectator in the fall of 2016.

  When I contacted Toni in the early stages of working on this book (after having read her Spectator pieces), I assumed she was a member of the College Libertarians or at least some kind of flinty Alex P. Keaton type, rebelling from a crunchy bourgeois upbringing by pushing back against political correctness and liberal sanctimony. But what I found was the complete opposite, which in retrospect makes perfect sense.

  She grew up in inner city Cleveland in a poor family that received food stamps. Neither of her parents graduated from high school, and her mother, as Toni describes her, was “a very violent person,” from whom Toni and her younger sister are now legally independent. Toni managed to get herself into a public high school that had a dual-enrollment program with Cleveland State University, and she took buses and subways two hours in each direction every day to attend this school. She knew she was “bad in math and science, the things that make money,” and as a result wasn’t hung up on taking STEM classes the way a lot of kids trying to climb out of poverty might be. Instead her classes at Cleveland State included several women’s studies courses, and here she “drank the feminist Kool-Aid,” she says.

  While commuting to school, she says, she probably got catcalled and harassed on the street at least a dozen times a day. She grew up in neighborhoods where this was a constant, so she never gave it much thought. At least not until she took women’s studies class.

  “Someone saying ‘Hey, beautiful’ to you as you walk by them on the street, the chances that they’re going to lunge at you and attack you with a knife is almost zero percent,” Toni told me. “So you just kind of shrug your shoulders or smile or say things back to them or whatever. I never felt like it was a problem until I got to Cleveland State and they were teaching us that the patriarchy is everywhere. They taught us that street harassment is a sign of male oppression trying to keep women afraid. They taught us that Subway advertisements were sexist because they used the phallic image of the sub sandwich to sell their sandwiches.”

  Toni told me she was on board for these lessons. She became active in social justice causes around LGBT issues, having identified as a lesbian since early adolescence. She began dating men in college and suspects her previous gay identification was due at least partly to the Tumblr sites she followed in high school, which made being gay seem like the cool and social justice–minded thing to be. She applied to more than a dozen out-of-state colleges and chose Columbia University’s Barnard College because it offered enough scholarships and financial aid so she could attend debt free. Once she got there she became involved in a student organization that lobbied for resources for first-generation college students. It was 2014, the year a senior named Emma Sulkowicz was lugging her mattress everywhere she went in protest of the university’s decision not to expel a fellow student who Sulkowicz said had raped her. Classmates routinely showed their support by helping carry the mattress as they crossed paths with Sulkowicz, and Toni pitched in a few times. For her sophomore year, she applied for residency in Social Justice House, a dormitory for like-minded student activists.

  “I thought it would be great to go, and so I went,” she said. “And then I got cannibalized alive.”

  The incidents, as described, pile up so fast and from so many directions that Toni sometimes seemed to be skidding across them rather than recounting them. Though she claims she was active in urban relief and anti-poverty work and, as such, was the only one among her four suite mates who was doing “legitimate activism” rather than “armchair social justice,” she soon became targeted as problematic. For starters, there were the articles she was now writing for the Spectator, opinion pieces that, despite her self-professed commitment to liberal ideals, had headlines like “Rape Culture and the Problem with the 1 in 5 Sexual Assault Statistic” and “Lift the Ban on Student-Professor Relationships.” Then there was the stuff she posted on Facebook: for instance, an article by conservative New York Post columnist Naomi Schaefer Riley suggesting that campuses didn’t have a rape problem as much as a drinking problem. She was also sharing articles by libertarian writers like Cathy Young and Robby Soave, who were considered personae non gratae by many of her classmates.

  Later there was the suite mate who didn’t get out of bed for several days and, according to Toni, took Toni’s offer to get her orange juice or cough drops as a racist microaggression.

  “Maybe a few weeks later, she came back to me and said that b
ecause I had commented on the fact that she was in bed all day I was reinforcing the stereotype of people of color as lazy,” Toni told me. “She literally used the word ‘microaggressing.’ And by then there was this idea that people did not feel safe with me living in the suite because of the articles I wrote and the things I posted on social media. They were saying things to each other on Facebook like ‘I have an air mattress in case anyone needs to not sleep in the same room as Toni because Toni supports rape culture.’ ”

  Toni said she managed to keep her cool enough to not respond to the Facebook messages, but that occasionally students would approach her in person when she was working at her job at the front desk of the student center. She said she generally tried to avoid confrontation by saying things like “Sorry, I can’t talk now” or “Just shoot me a message on Facebook if you want to peacefully chat.” (She thinks maybe one person took her up on it.) At one point, she said, enough students had complained that her writing amounted to violations of the group rules of Social Justice House that she had to meet with a Residence Life officer.

  “I was fearful during that time,” she recalled. “Mostly of just completely losing my housing.”

  It’s worth noting that, during this period, the tone of the rape-culture conversation at Columbia had been set by Sulkowicz, whose mattress project was by then an international symbol of campus anti-rape activism. In 2013, Sulkowicz had filed a complaint against Paul Nungesser, a former friend with whom she periodically had sex, accusing him of forcibly sodomizing her and trying to choke her eight months earlier (the encounter had begun consensually but turned violent, she said). Columbia adjudicated the case and eventually cleared Nungesser of all charges. Sulkowicz subsequently filed a police report against Nungesser, but the district attorney found “lack of reasonable suspicion” and the case was not pursued.

  Unsatisfied with this verdict, Sulkowicz announced that she would carry her fifty-pound mattress on her back—from classroom to dining hall to dormitory—until Nungesser was expelled. An art major, she arranged to turn the endeavor into her thesis project, a piece of performance art called Carry That Weight. Over the year she carried the mattress, classmates routinely pitched in and helped her. Meanwhile, she appeared on the cover of New York magazine, the storied performance artist Marina Abramovic praised her, and art critic Jerry Saltz named the project one of the best art shows of the year, saying it “may make universities think twice before looking past the plight of women.” Soon the mattress moved beyond the realm of art and became the symbol of a movement, as women at colleges all over the country took to carrying their pillows in a show of solidarity.

  The idea that one in five women will be sexually assaulted during her time in college is by now an article of faith. It comes up routinely in the media, in activist communities, and, of course, on campuses themselves. President Obama and Vice President Biden cited the statistic repeatedly as they launched the “It’s On Us” public awareness campaign around campus sexual violence in 2014. As Biden memorably and dramatically put it, “We know the numbers: one in five of every one of those young women who is dropped off for that first day of school, before they finish school, will be assaulted, will be assaulted in her college years.”

  I like Joe Biden well enough (not necessarily enough to be the next president), but this is misleading at best and propagandistic at worst. Presumably he did not know—or chose to overlook for the purposes of narrative—the fact that the statistic is based on surveys taken in 2006 for a National Institute of Justice study called The Campus Sexual Assault Study. Respondents came from just two universities, and the questions were worded in such a way that “assault” could mean anything from forcible penetration to “unwanted sexual touching,” which could include something like getting groped at a crowded fraternity party (a punishable offense, but hardly the kind of assault that should be counted with rape).

  But just as there will probably never be a consensus as to the origin of the phrase “lies, damn lies, and statistics” (even though Mark Twain popularized it in his line about “three kinds of lies,” it’s been attributed to everyone from British statesmen to various newspaper journalists), it’s unlikely there will ever be a set of agreed-upon figures about campus rape. In 2015, an Association of American Universities survey narrowed the Justice Department’s one-in-five statistic to an even more alarming one in four. To confuse matters even further, a 2014 report from the Justice Department, this one focusing on violent crime, showed that between 1995 and 2013 the rate of rape or sexual assault among female college students was around closer to one in forty-one. That report, incidentally, showed that violent crime was on the decline across the board and also that females who were not enrolled in college were statistically at greater risk than those who were.

  The numbers can be parsed and massaged and spun for ideological purposes all day. This is especially the case because, again, many of the surveys, especially those with ratios like one in four and one in five, define assault as anything from forcible rape to an unwanted kiss to sexual activity when one or both parties are technically too drunk to consent. That last concept is, in and of itself, so subjective and abstract that it would seem like the opposite of anything that could be “defined.” While everyone would agree that people who are intoxicated to the point of obvious physical or mental impairment are no more able to consent to sex than they are able to safely operate a motor vehicle, what about people who are mildly intoxicated?

  What about those one or two or sometimes three drinks that a lot of perfectly well-functioning, cognitively mature grown-ups require (or at least wouldn’t turn down) before venturing into a sexual encounter with someone new? What about the significant portion of college students who have blackouts while drinking? They can behave normally and appear to be in control of their faculties and yet wake up the next morning with no memory of what happened (a Duke University study estimated that 51 percent of students who drink alcohol have experienced this at least once). Are would-be bedfellows supposed to pull out ophthalmoscopes to examine one another’s pupils in order to gauge the legitimacy of apparent sexual willingness? (And would that even work?) Are drunk men any more able to give consent than drunk women and, if not, why do most campus adjudication processes hold the male more responsible for his actions than the female for hers, even if he may have been the more intoxicated party?

  * * *

  Back at the University of Iowa, Joseph got lucky in the end, at least relatively speaking. Though he was initially barred from entering any classroom that his accuser was in—and this kept him from attending several lectures and taking several exams—he was eventually placed on non-academic probation for an entire calendar year. He was never told exactly what he was accused of and never faced his accuser in any formal hearing. He did, however, receive a forty-page report from the assistant dean of students. In an e-mail to me, Joseph described this report as a statement of “all the evidence from all angles of my case, which to my surprise contained some evidence that consisted of research he even did on his own.”

  Joseph wasn’t able to share that report or tell me much of the details, but in his e-mail he told me how hard it was to be barred from extracurricular activities, because “my status really held me back from securing roles on campus that I was offered.” All in all, though, he was doing great. He loved studying engineering and was involved in engineering clubs and conservative political organizations. Best of all, he said, “I have a wonderful girlfriend (together for 6 months today!) who knows me, my story, and what I stand for and treats me better than I could ever be asked to be treated.”

  I wish I could have interviewed the woman who had this experience with Joseph. I understand why he can’t give me her name or put me in contact with her, even for an anonymous chat. Even if he weren’t under strict administrative orders not to share any information about her, it would make sense that he’d want to protect her privacy, if only not to stir up any more trouble. But I hate that I can’t get
her side of the story. I don’t like that I’ve had to refer to her as Joseph’s “accuser” while relaying what he told me. That word feels impersonal and judgmental, as if the accuser is actually the accused.

  But when details are withheld, even for good reason, vocabulary can be found wanting. I wish there was a way I could more emphatically convey just how much empathy I have for this woman who, for whatever reason, left that dorm that night apparently feeling much different than she had when she entered. Knowing Joseph personally may allow me to give him some benefit of the doubt, but I’m almost certain that if it had been the woman I’d met first, her story would have equal or possibly greater resonance. As it is, even though I’ve only met one of them, I essentially believe both of them. I believe the woman had the experience of things going terribly wrong and I believe Joseph had the experience of things just being a little awkward. I could be mistaken either way. But if there’s anything to be learned here, it’s that mistakes aren’t often quantifiable.