Mon 28 Apr 2008
The Campus Rape Myth is a long an interesting read, especially as a male member of RASAN (the Rape and Sexual Assault Network). Make no mistake, it’s quite provocative.
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.
Context
The “Sex Signals” show mentioned in the article came to Williams as well, and I don’t think the writer was fair in her characterization of them, so take the article with a grain of salt. Follow the jump for more quotes.
A survey of sorority girls at the University of Virginia found that only 23 percent of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped—a result that the university’s director of Sexual and Domestic Violence Services calls “discouraging.” Equally damning was a 2000 campus rape study conducted under the aegis of the Department of Justice. Sixty-five percent of what the feminist researchers called “completed rape” victims and three-quarters of “attempted rape” victims said that they did not think that their experiences were “serious enough to report.” The “victims” in the study, moreover, “generally did not state that their victimization resulted in physical or emotional injuries,” report the researchers.
So what reality does lie behind the campus rape industry? A booze-fueled hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands. Students in the sixties demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. “We’re adults,” the students shouted. “We can manage our own lives. If we want to have members of the opposite sex in our rooms at any hour of the day or night, that’s our right.” The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora’s box of boorish, sluttish behavior that gets cruder each year. Do the boys, riding the testosterone wave, act thuggishly toward the girls? You bet! Do the girls try to match their insensitivity? Indisputably.
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.
Williams runs these sorts of things through RASAN, which is an student run, anonymous 24/7 call-in service with a number posted on every bathroom mirror with the Security extensions and other important numbers. I don’t think Williams fits the bill of the colleges discussed in the article, but it does paint an accurate picture of the usual RASAN case, if there is one: Someone calls in feeling weird about what might/might not have happened a few nights ago when alcohol was consumed. RASAN offers a chance to process emotions and connections to various resources for those who call.
The rule is consent: every new progression must be consented to, but the kicker is that consent cannot be legally given if any alcohol has been consumed. If both parties were drunk, then the “victim” is whoever goes to the police first. That’s the law as it has been described to me.
Although a member of RASAN, I’m not going to claim enough knowledge to grade the college or RASAN’s policies (though, again, I don’t feel Williams and RASAN are guilty of the article’s critiques), but it’s worth the read, especially when the college’s and RASAN’s policies have to be relevant to the campus social situation (and the small size of campus), but also accountable to the law(suits).
April 28th, 2008 at 5:22 am
Will,
FWIW, I believe I would be the first male member of what is now RASAN. Your post opens up a series of issues and “complexities” parallel to our language discussion, but far more intricate and difficult. I’m not going to produce anything that even scratches the surface of the issues, tonight.
When I was there, — as the only male — I generally received calls from women who wanted to talk to a male, a somewhat odd choice. In a small community, a good number of such calls were people who knew me, at least via what information others conveyed to them. I don’t know the situation now, but both the prevailing dynamic, and indeed the Rape Crisis Center’s founding, were intensely personal– a result of specific events and close relationships.
Even far after graduating, I also received far more contacts through personal networks, and the the Deans’ Office and Health Services, than the official Rape Crisis Center Hotline. (As I followed this as a professional calling, a good part of my life is still constructed around that network of relationships).
Among our training was the instruction that what we might have to deal with was not only the recent event that provoked a call– but its relationship to prior events in an individual’s history, so-called (at the time) buried or “repressed” memories.
As I followed the development of “psychoanalytics” at Berkeley, on one of my visits to Williams, I was quite pleased to hear the RCC members at that point in history discussing the incredible complexity and danger of those moments– the fact that we, as therapist/practitioners, could and did often “implant” and “construct” memories of events that never actually happened. (The initial RCC training had never approached or addressed this level of detail, difficulty and complexity).
Elizabeth Loftus did incredible work in explaining such “constructed memories” in relation to “rape”– and the background is Freud’s Dora (etc) and, (if you ever read his correspondence), his daughter Anna. I won’t attempt any summary here.
I just skimmed “The Campus Rape Myth” and the news article you posted, and am simply dismissive of such. “Nonsense.”
“Rape,” whatever it is, happens at Williams. Members of the community — male and female– engage in (sexual) acts that are destructive towards others, far (far) more often than we usually acknowledge. “Without consent” does not touch the difficult realities, and something like a “five second rule” trivializes the realities of men and women who have experienced a parent or relative forcing sex — and who confront a similar situation in a Mission bathroom. (I’ll be frank: the Deans had more in mind than is obvious, in making Mission frosh housing; the architecture of physical structures also creates and enforces security… ).
And equally, so do ‘false’ accusations exist, and assertions which “transfer” past, poorly remembered events onto more recent ones– with the added difficultly that our institutional and “therapeutic” responses often further distort, or construct, the perceived reality– to the worse for all parties. The very “inquiries” and “responses” — a sort of catechism– I was taught to employ in RCC training — have since been well-documented by Loftus and others, to produce “memories” and seeming certainties, about and of events which did not occur.
Every year or so– I get an email or call, which turns into “I want to explain…” From men and women, on both sides of the issues and the acts. Most of the judgmentalism I had as a student has washed away with time: in the play of “good and evil,” G-d and D’evil, I’ve found no individual who is one or the other; no simply innocent parties; and if I were to speak of my own actions and errors, and their consequences upon others, I would have no right to call myself better…
Yet to frame these complexities in the terms of the recent “culture wars” and so forth– to “exploit” such deeply personal events and difficulties and pain– to further a personal “ideology” or “agenda” or “…” — what terrible, inhumane folly.
April 28th, 2008 at 8:16 am
Will and Ken, thank you for your work on RASAN. We should get an alumni group together.
With all due respect to you, Will, the only reason this article is worth the read or the grain of salt that one might take it with is to understand how people deliberately misrepresent facts and arguments in service to larger agendas. Heather McDonald is merely the Katie Roiphe or Camille Paglia of this decade. Her op-ed was also published in the LA Times, and unfortunately, that was a venue for her to misrepresent several years of good scholarship and research on this issue. There was a cogent, intelligent response to her piece in that publication. (Sorry I still don’t have the hang of this formatting stuff.)
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-macdonald27feb27,0,6130673.story
While the College and RASAN’s policies should be relevant to the campus’s social contexts, they do not have to, nor should they be, controlled by it. If you’re interested, I can send you several studies on the importance of campuses creating—through policies and programming—a culture that is unfriendly to the sorts of perpetration I mentioned in an earlier post. The fact that Williams requires all entering frosh to attend Sex Signals (formerly Katie Koestner’s presentation, not sure if there was anything similar that preceded her) and then discussions facilitated by RASAN members lets students know from the day they get to campus that the College takes this issue seriously and will not tolerate sexual violence against students. Now, obviously, there has to be follow-through in other areas, but Williams is actually in the vanguard of best practices on this issue.
Where I believe this ties into the languages discussion (which, to be fair, I’ve been following only casually) is that campus culture is shaped not only by administrative policies response, but by the actions of students in the community. The prevailing sense that I got from some commentators (chiefly from male students and alums), was that jokes and comments and the use of words like c*nt are merely a part of fraternity (not in the Frank Uible sense) and not that big a deal because everyone knows that when push comes to shove, they don’t “mean” anything. I think the issue of sexual violence is where that laissez-faire attitude toward language is push coming to shove, so to speak. When we use language casually or cavalierly, it has an effect on how we see the world.
For example, when I was little and wanted to wear the same clothes I had been wearing at the barn all day to go to the grocery store or some other civilized social setting, my parents used to say I couldn’t because I would look like a Joad. I thought that Joad was just a regular word, until I got to 9th grade English and the Grapes of Wrath, and to this day, I can’t discuss Steinbeck without picturing his characters in my muddy boots and stained t-shirts. The point is, my parents were kidding and using a reference that I didn’t even really understand, but to this day, it has shaped the way I think about the people in those books. The same thing happens when we see our friends and entrymates call women c*nts, and a Williams College entry is not the first place where we’ve heard people use sexist or derogatory language; those comments are merely digging the associational pathways a little bit deeper.
April 28th, 2008 at 11:26 am
The prevailing sense that I got from some commentators (chiefly from male students and alums), was that jokes and comments and the use of words like c*nt are merely a part of fraternity
More likely sorority, in my experience. Occasionally guys will call other guys cunts, but most are pretty careful not to apply that word to a girl unless they are absolutely sure the context is appropriate. Girls, on the other hand, have far fewer reservations, probably because it’s harder to take offense when the person calling you a cunt is a girl themselves (similar to the affectionate use of “nigger” by a lot of black people).
April 28th, 2008 at 11:42 am
oops - that first paragraph should be in quotes, referencing another ‘05 eph.
April 28th, 2008 at 11:56 am
‘10…a word of advice. it’s the affectionate use of the term “n*gga”. The use of “er” is often seen as the sign of whether or not it is offensive or affectionate.
April 28th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
I said “fraternity” as a response to the discussion that was going on over on the language discussion, but perhaps I should have said “camaraderie,” because from my perspective, the use of c*nt (or b*tch, sl*t, n*gga or f*g or any of those words) are not acceptable in any context if you truly want to change the way thoughts and associations are translated into behavior.
May 3rd, 2008 at 11:57 pm
While feminism has encouraged women to be more sexually assertive, it has done a lot more work on encouraging men to be more sexually passive. Sexually assertive males are today considered the end products of the rape option.
When males are confronted by male hate it results in men feeling paralyzed, their masculinity whipped out from under them, and along with it, their agency for gentlemanlike behavior.
While feminism pressures women about men it paralyzes men in their relationships with women. When men engage in sex, it institutionalizes rape. When men cannot rape, they are trapped. Enfeebled. To be possessed of man is to be raped. To be seduced and overwhelmed by a man is natural and male specific.
When I have a woman, I possess her and I rape her. I take the woman for my own. To deny this basic instinct in man is to deny maleness.
To rape indiscriminately, that is, to take a woman without her open or implied consent is wrong. Women who provoke men’s sexual emotions are apt to experience the rapture of the male’s autonomous need to ravish once aroused. To punish a man for a woman’s folly is wrong.
Feminism then should encourage women to be less assertive sexually, and diminish the quality of their messages in a manner that does not provoke a man’s reaction. Women should remain respectful of the provenance of the male and his being.