From 2020:
Bad Vibrations: The Lies Universities Tell Their Students about Sex
Universities today bombard students with two contradictory messages
about sex, effectively encouraging them to carry a dildo in their
pocket, while lugging a fainting couch behind them.
On the one
hand, universities have returned to a quasi-Victorian concern with the
unique fragility and vulnerability of college women in matters of sex.
This belief in the frailty of college women flows from a lineage of
feminist theory, whose foremost representative is probably Catherine
MacKinnon, in which “structures of power” hold down women as inherently
unequal partners in sex. These structures, the argument goes, must be
reformed to correct historical wrongs, to reward and encourage the right
sorts of individuals and activities, while punishing and suppressing
the wrong ones.
On the other side of the campus sex ledger is the
dildo raffle. At “Sex Week” festivities and other gatherings nationwide,
colleges and universities actively promote sexual libertinism. During
Sex Weeks, campuses routinely host BDSM demonstrations, and rhapsodise
over orgasms, anal sex, sex toys, and more. The University of
Wisconsin-La Crosse hosted a teach-in entitled “Clitoral Masturbation and Free Vibrator Giveaway.” It is considered repressed and repressive to criticize this cornucopia of carnal delight.
This hearkens back to other feminists of the 1980s, such as Gayle S. Rubin, who railed against
“moral panics” and “erotic stigma” as “the last socially respectable
form of prejudice,” functioning “in much the same ways as do ideological
systems of racism, ethnocentrism, and religious chauvinism.” This makes
the dildo a powerful weapon, a literal spear thrust at the prudish soul
of bigotry.
What’s less obvious is that the dildo and fainting
couch are part of one and the same campus dialogue. To their credit,
campus activists want to banish the bad old days, when universities
swept sexual assault under the rug, protecting or even aiding and abetting sexual assault in athletic programs.
Accordingly, the Ohio State University puts on seminars about sexual
violence and assault right alongside programs on “Kink 101” and “Sex
Toys 101.”
Monitoring and coordinating this intellectually
incoherent movement are the campus student-conduct offices. Through
these budget-busting bureaucracies, universities impose byzantine rules
regulating students’ sex lives. The message is: test the outer limits of
sexuality! But be aware, a hall monitor is always watching!
Most universities today define sexual assault differently from how it’s
specified in law. Colleges now define “sexual assault” so it includes
lawful conduct that couldn’t be prosecuted under the criminal law in any
state—whether red, blue, or purple. It includes missteps that, in years
past, would likely have been considered just messy, “live and learn”
encounters between inexperienced (and often inebriated) young people.
When pressed, campus administrators justify their new definitions of
sexual assault by asserting the right of educational institutions to
teach “new values” to the student body. While some judge this an
unqualified good, the reality is more complicated.
Certainly, increased awareness of sexual misconduct has made bad
behavior less acceptable everywhere, from fraternity parties to
boardrooms. And maybe “Sex Weeks” have encouraged more honest
discussions among partners—these are no doubt positive developments. If
women come away more assertive and more certain about what they want,
who could argue with that?
But the redefinition of sexual
misconduct, and its enhanced policing by campus administrators,
frequently has catastrophic consequences. Students are coming of age in a
climate that seeks both to outdo the sexual experimentation of the
1970s and to impose an atmosphere of neo-Victorian surveillance. Campus
investigators interrogate inexperienced students not only about whether
they had consent for sex, but how they knew they had affirmative consent
for each separate act of physical intimacy—each touch, each kiss, each
penetration, and each position assumed while performing the latter. The
neo-Victorian thus atomizes intimacy into microscopic bits.
Students—particularly those who are socially awkward, sexually
inexperienced, or have conditions that impair their understanding of
subtle social cues—are routinely punished for conduct they genuinely
believed was consensual, but that transgresses new campus rules. This
has led to a wave of litigation by students who allege they were wrongly
accused: since 2011, more than 600 such lawsuits have been filed.
At the same time, female students—although not exclusively—are advised
that encounters they may initially perceive as regrettable but
consensual were, in fact, non-consensual “sexual violence.” At
Washington & Lee University, for example, the Title IX officer put on a presentation about an article entitled “Is It Possible That There is Something In Between Consensual Sex And Rape… And That It Happens To Almost Every Girl Out There?”
In the article itself, the author argues that a large category of
legally consensual sex is “rape-ish” (she describes no coercion or
violence). Campus sexual misconduct officers take it one step further
and redefine regrettable choices—in which women have agency—as acts of
“sexual violence” perpetrated against them by another. In these the
administration must intervene, discipline, and punish.
This has important psychological ramifications, explains social
psychologist Pamela Paresky: “The ability to make choices is how we know
we are free, and no free person gets through life without making
choices that in hindsight they would make differently. Knowing the
difference between making choices and being forced to do things against
our will is essential, not only to learning from our mistakes but
maintaining psychological integrity and being truly free.”
The
campus courts occasioned by this movement have also led to systemic
violations of accused students’ due process rights, undermining the
integrity of the whole project. Victims can find their cases overturned
either on appeal or by a court when the accused sues the university over
procedural violations.
Increasingly, plaintiffs, both women and men, are winning. A woman
sued the University of Kentucky when it repeatedly botched her
disciplinary proceedings by neglecting the rights of the student she
accused. This kind of kangaroo court benefits no one, neither the
alleged victim nor the accused. The woman finally took the university to
court for its deliberate indifference to her serious complaint of
sexual assault, and the court held that “the University bungled the
disciplinary hearings so badly, so inexcusably, that it necessitated
three appeals and reversals in an attempt to remedy the due process
deficiencies.” This, it concluded, “profoundly affected [her] ability to
obtain an education.”
We think these problems stem, at least in
part, from the impossible tension, under the tutelage of campus
officialdom, between the dildo and the fainting couch. The history of
campus activism in matters of sex suggests a more sensible solution.
University surveillance of the student body has, in some ways, come
full circle. The college administrators dissecting the minutiae of
students’ sex lives walk in the footsteps of the 19th century
administrators of Victorian universities. At that time, the institutions
scarcely expected students to be adults, certainly not in matters of
sex. Campus sex was prohibited. Students were also forbidden to marry
and expelled if they did.
Deans and faculty were substitute parents—in loco parentis.
The earliest surviving handbook of Yale College, from 1887, reflects
the assumption that students could not behave as adults. It even
admonished them to clean their rooms: “students may be excluded whose
rooms have been reported to the Faculty for disorder at any time…” Other
rules even forbade them from “sit[ting] on the College fence on
Sunday”—an apparent red flag of loutishness.
In parallel with contemporary “cancel culture,” the Victorian
university proscribed insulting others. Yet the call to be “woke” would
doubtless have befuddled bluebloods in the Gilded Age; likewise, the
assertion of a civil right in the recognition of personal pronouns,
“micro-aggressions,” and many other academic trends loosely associated
with identity politics. But 19th century gentlemanly honor codes placed
just as much emphasis on validating students’ subjective feelings as
would any present-day identitarian code of conduct.
Yale’s code
was meant to make these young gentlemen feel safe on campus: “If a
student interferes with the personal liberty of a member of another
class, or offers him any indignity or insult, he may be permanently
separated from his class.” The cardinal rule could be summarized: ACT LIKE A GENTLEMAN!
This became Law Number 1, added to a 1901 revision at Yale: “Students
will be held accountable for violations of the ordinary rules of good
order and gentlemanly conduct, whether the particular acts are
specifically forbidden by the College rules or not.”
Unsurprisingly, the colleges of the Victorian era didn’t have many
sex rules. They didn’t have to, because most excluded women, and when
such rules initially appeared they were straightforward. The first to
address women at Yale appeared in 1923: “Ladies may not be entertained
in College dormitories except by the written permission of the Dean.” No
phalanx of university administrators was needed to enforce rules like
this. Women were simply banned.
Even early coed universities had
simple rules. At Brandeis University in the 1950s, socializing between
male and female students was limited to a few hours per day in common
rooms. University regulations even barred fathers and brothers from
women’s dormitories—unless they were helping to carry luggage, in which
case their presence was announced by a shout of “Man on the hall!”
These rules changed dramatically as sex desegregation hit the campus. But in loco parentis
held on in parietal rules, “parietal” meaning literally a “wall”
between the sexes, designed to keep students from having sexual
intercourse. Campus rulebooks also quadrupled in girth—though modest
beside the tomes handed down by campus “judiciaries” today.
Student
activists led the campus co-educational revolution of the 1960s and
1970s to dismantle these regulations. But the movement would be scarcely
recognizable to 21st century student demonstrators. Rather than
demanding greater regulation, the students of the 60s and 70s bridled
against the oversight of their private lives.
At Yale College, Junior Aviam Soifer spearheaded a student committee
that pushed for a “Coeducation Week at Yale” in 1968, against Yale’s
administration. The students organized the visit of approximately 300
women from women’s colleges to spend a week in the male dormitories of
Yale. The presence of 300 female students (as opposed to the numerous
working women) was considered so disruptive that the police increased
the officers on night patrol.
When Yale finally admitted its first women’s class in fall 1969,
protests quickly erupted over administrative obtuseness. President
Kingman Brewster, Jr. announced to students that Yale wouldn’t house
women in any buildings with men. Students quickly shouted him down and
“deplatformed” him. Fearing for his safety, President Brewster preserved
himself by speedily capitulating to student demands. Yale distributed
its first female class of 250 among the different residential colleges.
Even so, there was a separate entrance for them, “with a guard and
parietals” in place. The Yale student handbook still strictly controlled
“visiting hours” for women.
Despite similarities to contemporary student radicalism, however, there
were significant differences. Students largely asserted their freedom
from campus bureaucrats’ supervision, rather than asking to be
protected. They did not demand ever-more complex restrictions to govern
their sex lives, nor call for sensitivity training. They were rejecting,
flaunting, and breaking the rules—sometimes daring administrators to do
anything about it.
The social upheaval of the late 1960s and 1970s—not to mention the
widespread availability of the Pill—transformed sex on campus in ways
that became permanent. It’s difficult to imagine any secular American
university returning to “open door, one foot on the floor” policies. Yet
although premarital sex among students is now the norm, it’s subject to
increasingly confusing rules, policed by an ever-expanding campus
administration. The pearl-clutching of yesteryear has been replaced by
clipboard-clutching bureaucrats.
Where did these rules come from?
Surprisingly, they came from a groundswell of student activism. It
wasn’t an overreaching federal government that first imposed them, as
critics often complain. In 1991, at the prompting of a group called “Womyn of Antioch,”
Antioch College in Ohio adopted a sexual misconduct policy that
redefined what it meant to consent. According to the Antioch policy,
“[t]he person(s) who initiate(s) the sexual activity is responsible for
asking for consent,” and “[t]he person(s) who are asked are responsible
for verbally responding.” Not only was verbal consent required, but
“[e]ach new level of sexual activity requires consent.” Previously,
campus policy focused on whether someone said “no.” Antioch focused, by
contrast, on whether someone affirmatively said “yes.” The eventual rule
had no fewer than 14 elements defining the unambiguous “Yes.”
An
eruption of ridicule greeted these new sex rules in the early 1990s. The
idea of requiring verbal permission for each step of sexual activity
spawned countless jokes. Saturday Night Live even aired a sketch featuring a quiz show at Antioch called, “Is It Date Rape?”
Over the years, however, the concept of “affirmative consent,” so widely
ridiculed back then, became the norm in college sexual misconduct
policies. These policies start from the presumption that sex is
non-consensual and must be proven otherwise. They also seem to assume
that women have little to no sexual agency, or worse, that women are
passive victims. A Title IX training slide from Boston University, for
example, cites “poor communication” as something that can render sex
non-consensual, and thus turn it into sexual violence. An avalanche of
lawsuits has brought to light the conduct that the neo-Victorians now
condemn.
One former Northwestern University student sued
after he was expelled over a sexual encounter in which he supposedly
used “‘emotional and verbal coercion,’ apparently because [he] requested
sex more than once that evening.” Repeating the request was considered
sufficient evidence of coercion, not because the man, turned down, then
forced his girlfriend to submit (the school found no evidence of force),
but because his request itself was unwanted. Behind the expulsion lies
an assumption that the young woman, like her Victorian ancestor on the
fainting couch, was too fragile to withstand the verbal overture and
bereft of the ability to assert her will and say “No.”
In another case discussed by Hanna Stotland in The New York Times,
a male student was expelled because—though it was undisputed the young
woman consented to sexual intercourse—the man didn’t desist quickly
enough when she began to cry. Her alleged emotional trauma alone was
enough to condemn him.
Nor is it always women recast as weaker vessels. At Brandeis University,
for example, a student, J.C., charged his ex-boyfriend with sexual
misconduct for, among other things, “occasionally wak[ing] him up by
kissing him” and “look[ing] at his private areas when they were
showering together.” Brandeis’s special examiner determined that “J.C. …
was not strong-willed or forceful enough” to stand up to these supposed
onslaughts and condemned the ex-boyfriend for “serious sexual
transgressions.”
If the groundswell of support for these new
campus norms came from below, the apparatus that now enforces them did
not. In large part owing to federal regulations and guidance, every
university has established a “sex bureaucracy,” justified by the federal law of Title IX, dedicated to policing students’ sex lives.
Passed in 1972, Title IX prohibits sex discrimination at federally
funded educational institutions. In the 1990s, courts extended Title IX
to include an institution’s deliberate indifference to
student-on-student sexual assault and harassment. Thereafter, Title IX
enforcement was rapidly institutionalized throughout higher education.
Between 2013 and 2016, for example, Title IX spending
at UC Berkeley rose by at least $2 million. Similarly, Harvard
University in 2016 employed 50 full- and part-time Title IX coordinators
across its 13 schools.
All of this sends today’s students a
message that is, to put it mildly, mixed: you should enthusiastically
embrace sexual freedom and experimentation—but make one misstep, even
unintentionally, and you will be branded for life as either a sexual
predator or trauma victim. This pathologizes the awkward, messy,
unavoidably emotional landscape of youthful sexuality.
Obviously, no one wants to return to the days when simply
fraternizing with the opposite sex could get you expelled, nor to a time
when colleges looked the other way at sexual assault. But the rules of
the Victorian university offered one thing that’s now sorely lacking.
And that is clarity.
The world of the dildo and fainting couch offers no clarity whatsoever. If administrators genuinely believe that 25% of the female student body will be sexually assaulted,
it would be a lot easier to go back to single-sex dorms and strict
parietal rules. Yet it seems illogical simultaneously to encourage
unbridled sexual experimentation, but only under the strictest
guidelines. Staffing universities with the equivalent of hall monitors,
who peer into the most granular details of students’ sex lives, seems a
failed social experiment.
We think three things would lead to a
more practical approach. They all begin with a simple plea—that
universities be honest with students.
First, we agree that universities should be free to set rules to
safeguard the educational environment. Potentially, this can embrace new
values—like the spectacularly successful co-education movement of the
1960s. Maybe it should include a new dialogue about consent today. But
universities should stop telling students that rules about affirmative
consent define actual crimes of “sexual violence.” At most, universities
administer limited civil infractions. They are not prosecuting crimes.
Campus definitions of affirmative consent have been uniformly rejected
as criminal law standards. While every sexual assault that could be
prosecuted as a crime would meet the definition of sexual assault under
campus conduct codes, the reverse is not even remotely true.
If cases really involve sexual violence, they should be addressed by law
enforcement. No one wants a world where genuine sexual violence is
swept under the rug. But this is what universities do, holding
themselves out to students as protectors simply by expelling actual
violent offenders—who then return, free and at large, to society. Real
criminals of course should go to jail. Yet the sex bureaucrats tell
students they are saving them from “sexual violence” and “rape,”
implying real crimes, when what they are really doing is punishing
students who have violated, not the law, but rather a new set of campus
sex norms. Schools also project the message that the Title IX office is a
more welcoming place to report “sexual violence” than the criminal
justice system. But this sympathetic environment exists—if it
does—mostly because the Title IX offices prosecute conduct which isn’t
strictly criminal. Universities should be honest about this, too.
Second, they should stop promoting fainting-couch culture. Alleged
victims, we’re told, are too traumatized to submit to cross-examination.
Really? Women outside the ivory tower didn’t get this memo, nor do
witnesses to murder, kidnap victims, or victims of other traumatic
crimes. These and similar myths propagate the message that college women
are too frail to participate as full adults in civil society, another
parallel to the Victorians. Universities should treat college women as
strong enough to assert their rights in a free society as equals.
Universities are free to promote sexual experimentation. But they should
be honest that pushing norms and boundaries involves making mistakes.
It’s the nature of experimentation that there will inevitably be regrets
with something so intimate and personal as sex. This, however, should
not be quasi-criminalized.
Finally, although universities should have the authority to enforce
their own rules, including sexual misconduct, they should be honest
about the fact that the values they seek to instil are neither intuitive
nor even widely accepted. Instead, universities act as if they have
discovered the importance of “consent” for the first time, a concept
long established in criminal and civil law. It’s simply understood very
differently beyond the ivory tower.
Schools should develop a
nomenclature that reflects this fact. If students violate campus rules,
schools may punish them. That doesn’t mean students should be expelled
as sex offenders. Of course, if the conduct is a real crime, that’s a
different story.
If schools want to radically re-define sexual
agency, sexual mores, and consent, that’s their prerogative (within
legal limits). Maybe they’ll succeed; maybe they won’t. But they
shouldn’t create a generation of neo-sex offenders and neo-trauma
victims to give birth to this brave new world.
