The Campus Rape Myth:... Number Three..

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 answers both nonsexual health queries and such burning questions as: “Sex with four friends—Mutual?” and “Will it ever be good for me?” (from a virgin). 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 hip-to-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”). 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. The University of Virginia Women’s Center intones that “rape or sexual assault is not an act of sex or lust—it’s about aggression, power, and humiliation, using sex as the weapon. The rapist’s goal is domination.”

This characterization may or may not describe the psychopathic violence of stranger rape. But it is an absurd description of the barnyard rutting 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. Each would be perfectly content if his partner for the evening becomes president of the United States one day, so long as she lets him take off her panties tonight.

One group on campus isn’t buying the politics of the campus “rape” movement, however: students. To the despair of rape industrialists everywhere, students have held on to the view that women usually have considerable power to determine whether a campus social event ends with intercourse.

Rutgers University Sexual Assault Services surveyed student athletes about violence against women in the 2001–02 academic year. The female teams were more “direct,” the survey reported, in “expressing the idea that women who are raped sometimes put themselves in those situations.” A female athlete told interviewers: “When we go out to parties, and I see girls and the way they dress and the way they act . . . and just the way they are, under the influence and um, then they like accuse them of like, oh yeah, my boyfriend did this to me or whatever, I honestly always think it’s their fault.” Another brainwashed victim of the rape culture.

Equally maddening must be the reaction that sometimes greets performers in Sex Signals, an improvisational show on date rape whose venues include Harvard, Yale, and schools throughout the Midwest. “Sometimes we get women who are advocates for men,” the show’s founders told a Chicago public radio station this October, barely concealing their disbelief. “They blame the victim and try to find out what the victim did so they won’t do it.” Such worrisome self-help efforts could shut down the campus rape industry.

“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 Catherine Mac-Kinnonite “all-sex-is-rape” strand. But it’s an idea that won’t go away among the student Lumpenproletariat. Students refer to “sororistutes”—those wild and crazy Greek women so often featured in Girls Gone Wild videos. And they persist in seeing a connection between promiscuity and the alleged campus rape epidemic. A Rutgers University freshman says 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.”

Rape consultant David Lisak faced a similar problem this November: 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 buying it. “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.”

In a column this November in the University of Virginia’s student newspaper, third-year student Katelyn Kiley gave the real scoop on frat parties: They’re filled with boys hoping to have sex. She did not call these boys “rapists.” She did not demonize their sex drive. She merely offered some practical wisdom to the “scantily clad” freshman girls trooping off to Virginia’s fraternity row: “That frat boy really is just trying to get into your pants.” Most disturbingly, she advised the girls to exercise sexual control: “So dance with that good-looking guy. If he offers, you can even go up to his room to get a mixed drink. . . . Flirt. But it’s probably a good idea to keep your clothes on, and at the end of the night, to go home to your own bed. Interestingly enough, that’s how you get them to keep asking you back.”

You can read thousands of pages of rape crisis center hysteria without coming across such bracing common sense. Amazingly, Kiley hasn’t received any of the millions of dollars that feminists in the federal government have showered on campuses to prevent what they call rape.

Some student rebels are going one step further: organizing in favor of sexual restraint. Such newly created 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.

Maybe these young iconoclasts can take up another discredited idea: college is for learning. The adults in charge have gone deaf to the siren call of beauty that for centuries lured people to the classics. But fighting male dominance or catering to the libidinal impulses released in the 1960s are sorry substitutes for the pursuit of knowledge. The campus rape and sex industries are signs of how hollow the university has become.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her most recent book, coauthored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga, is The Immigration Solution.

Campus Rape Myth Link..