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!
So what is going on?
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.
Samantha Harris is a Senior Fellow at FIRE and an attorney who represents students and faculty. The views expressed in this article are the views of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of FIRE. Follow her on Twitter at @samk_harris.
Michael Thad Allen represents students and faculty in employment disputes and campus misconduct proceedings as the principal of Allen Law LLC. He is the author of The Business of Genocide.
Feature image: London Slutwalk, Piccadilly, 2011.
Why not? It’s probably a better alternative than the current state of higher education. I wouldn’t be surprised if such policies resulted in better educational outcomes.
The mess starts, because many women expect men to be mind readers and probably they don’t even realize it what a double standard this creates. I believe this is the reason why in their minds the dildo and fainting couch can coexist. The double standard I talk about is the aspect of perception. If a women has a crush on some guy and that guy asks the girl out that is OK, however if a guy who is not attractive enough does the same, it is assault.
Furthermore if the sex is satisfying then it is OK, however if it wasn’t orgasmic then it is assault.
I think Plato said it best in one of his dialogues. When asked how he feels now that his sexual years are behind him, having become advanced in years, the character responds:
I feel as though I’ve been liberated from life-long bondage to a mad man.
A lot of people underestimate the crude emotional intimacy of sexual encounters. They buy the idea of it all being just a fun, casual, and cool thing, but don’t understand they are playing with fire. Sex has incredible potential, and can be very powerful and beneficial under the proper conditions. But it can also go very, very wrong, especially when you are young and don’t really understand what’s going on. First impressions and experiences can mark you for life, in good ways but also bad ways. Your whole experience about it can be skewed, perhaps without repair. This is why we protect children from it, and from pornography. It’s also supposed to be the whole point of marriage: not to repress this sexual energy, but to channel it into building something productive and more safe.
A lot of this whole issue, when seen from above, rings to be akin to some sort of sexual trauma epidemic. Trauma that is not precisely properly understood. They crave a solution but exert their efforts in contradicting ways.
Funny that for all this new and modern “education and openness” towards sexuality, where there’s plenty teaching of contraception, sexual preferences and kinks, biology, etc.; we don’t really see much education about the emotional aspect of it. There is no soul, relationships are social constructs, and love and romance are patriarchal tools for oppression after all.
I think you could make both a spiritual and secular argument about sexuality’s teleology being the strengthening of the bond between future parents. You can trick your brain into releasing the reward without delivering the actual job, sort of like playing videogames or taking this or that drug, but that doesn’t remove the intimacy and dangers in the activity. And your brain and psyche will still get warped. You gain sensual and expedient pleasure, but still risk damaging the plumbing of your loving devices, sort of speak. A lot of the couch fainting may be coming from this chronic damages.
Sex feels great, but so does cocaine. I don’t think we should go back to a victorian era, but perhaps in the future this crisis helps some understanding that perhaps marriage and fidelity was not such a bad thing after all.
There’s an interesting conundrum here. Women are far more hierarchical than men are when it comes to dating. Women tend to preference an educated mate, a working mate, a taller mate, a richer mate, a higher status mate, etc than men do.
We already have an imbalanced ratio at universities with more women than men. The men at universities are more likely to be open to dating women that are at lower level schools or not getting a higher education at all. Meanwhile, the current standard is far more likely to punish men dating fellow students more than women, so it would seem to further enhance the value of seeking women outside of the university environment.
It seems as if the A status men will end up with the B status women (though they may be A’s with respect to attractiveness, niceness, etc; just B with respect to jobs & education). The B men will therefore end up with the C women. Naturally this will result in a surplus of unattached A women and C men.
At the end of the day, the dating pool for heterosexual women at modern universities is likely to become very shallow and probably result in a substantial amount of those women failing to find suitable partners. I foresee a glut of never married, childless, highly educated women in the workforce in a few decades. And these women will naturally be more successful at climbing the ranks because they don’t have much of a family life to distract from work. Or phrased another way, they’ll become workaholics. Which will act as a negative feedback loop, keeping them from dating much and marrying as they get older.
At the end of the day, will our institutions and businesses employ a middle rank of female “nuns”? With the lowest males collecting a UBI and playing video games. And will this be better for society or worse for society?
I saved a copy of something I wrote on another forum like 7 years ago. Copy-pasted without edits:
Claiming that creepy men is a bigger problem than creepy women is asinine - men are the initiators in the dating game. It’s like complaining that surgeons are more likely to make surgical errors than accountants are.
Here are four simple dating truths:
Men are expected to do all of the initiating. Feminist attempts to have women initiate get no traction.
More aggressive approaches are more successful. Women deny this to no end, but every man learns it with experience. More aggressive approaches also have more consequences for failure, but only men who are genetically gifted (handsome) have success without being aggressive. Women subconsciously perceive aggressiveness as masculinity.
Women’s ENTIRE dating game is poker. They hide their feelings and force men to discover them. Men cannot know how an approach will be received until they try it.
“Creepiness” is ANY attempt at pursuit from men who women do not find attractive. Women deny this definition when confronted with it, yet confirm it with their behavior.
Taken together, these truths leave men with these options:
No aggressive approaches from men. All men who are not genetically gifted resign themselves to virginity and either humans reproduce at sub-replacement level or the “hot guys” impregnate 100 girls apiece to keep up the numbers.
Men who are not attractive based on looks alone make aggressive approaches towards women they like. Sometimes, they successfully arouse the women and relationships begin. Most of the time, they are dismissed as “creepy”.
There are no other options, unless women change aspects of their nature to make some of the four truths untrue. Since women have no conscious control over this, it will not happen.
overall a good article: nuanced, balanced, well-researched and really pointed at some of the underlying problems. but a few years ago Emily Yoffee “dropped the mic” on this issue once and for all: upwards of 95% of these campus “assaults” involve excessive alcohol consumption at social events on weekends.
I’ve been following this stuff since an alleged victim made the cover of Time Magazine circa 1991 (for the youngsters out there, making the cover of Time Magazine was once a very big deal).
I’ve never once heard a campus sexual assault story that started “one fine Tuesday afternoon as we were leaving the Chemistry building, my new lab partner Jake . . .”
Victorian virtues, in loco parentis, affirmative consent, - it’s all white noise. The bottom line is:
young people inexperienced in navigating casual sexual encounters
excessive alcohol consumption
severely impaired memories
= a campus sexual assault “epidemic” marked by kangaroo court proceedings
Dear Abby, he put his tongue in my mouth when we were kissing. Am I wrong, or have I been raped?
I’m old enough to remember the 1970s as a teenager and wondering where radical feminism and the sexual revolution were headed. Even in high school, it struck me: here comes a high-speed, head-on collision.
Universities need to be removed from the entire pseudo-judicial fakery industry on campuses. It’s part of the larger explosion of university administration that has grossly inflated the cost structure of college. It’s a win-win: students would be treated like adults and subject to laws that all adults are subject to, ending one aspect of how the younger Millennials have been crippled and kept from becoming adults, and a big part of what’s inflating their tuition would be gone.
The recent DoE changes to bring more sense to Title IX are only a stopgap. University administrators need to be out of this business entirely.
And of course, universities need to get out of the dildo business as well. It’s ridiculous and makes clear that American schools aren’t serious places.
(He says as he browses dildos for his significant other …
)
In a sense, university sex education isn’t contradictory but rather biased. It is female centric. The freedom is for females, the boundaries are for men. Female sexuality is seen as empowering, male sexuality as toxic. That’s the first problem. The second problem is the sex education is focused on sex, not relationships. Sexual compatibility is an important part of a relationship, but hardly the only. There seems little inclination in modern society for creating stable, lasting relationships.
Men, no. How could they? But boys?
Shannon Bell is an author and performance artist who’s book Fast Feminism is assigned in gender study courses. I’ve tried a quick search to no avail, so you’ll just have to trust me on this, but she’s one of these obscene shock type performers and she says things like “I am the whore who will corrupt your young sons,” and stuff. I really wish I could find what I saw before, but she explicitly wanted the listener to know she was talking about underage teens.
I have witnessed myself cringy poetry readings where gross women excitedly describe their genetalia in gruesome detail. My ears definitely felt forced upon.
Maybe Germaine Greer has been excommunicated now, but she’s been on these university reading lists as well. She has a book called The Beautiful Boy which is basically photographic softcore porn imagery of teenage boys.
How do you think any men who did such things on campus, with the genders reversed, would fare?
You don’t need to physically force yourself on someone (although it wouldnt surprize me if Ms Bell has) to have more sexual freedom. There’s no doubt females have more freedom of sexual expression on campus than do men. We all know how a male version of Shannon Bell making performance art about lusting after underage girls would be recieved.
I certainly was not asking for it. Even if I was, I am now retroactively deciding that I wasn’t.
The point of my post was to say that girls have a greater freedom of sexual expression on campus, not that it turns them into predators or anything. Their sexual expression is celebrated. Although that’s probably only true to a certain extent, if they are “subversive” about it. I doubt anyone’s going to applaud a female student expressing her desires to have monogamous sex for reproduction with a man who will marry her and take care of her financially.
Anyways I’m tired and going to bed now. Goodnight all
Late reply because I had lots of work. Anyway, you obviously adhere to the binary that men are predators and women are prey. Consider this, then: the major campus rape stories (Duke lacrosse, the Rolling Stone UVA article, mattress girl etc) were all exposed as fake. If campus rape was the pandemic it’s made out to be, why is it so hard to get an actual case? Also, since accusation seems more rife than rape, why are there still the kangaroo courts. In the case of the UVA case, the accuser made up the story to win over a guy who had rejected her. Mattress girl Emma Sulkowicz made up the allegation because the accused didn’t want to hook up with her. So, hey, I guess women can force themselves on men.
Interesting article. I have college kids and I WOULD NEVER send my kid to a college that is not 50/50. You can look up all this information in the Common Data Set of every college in the US. My college kids say there are so many mixed messages that just ignore them. There is definitely a culture of “hookups” as @K_Dershem mentioned. Just the outbreaks of STD’s on college campus tell the real story. I find it interesting that it seems all these silly ideas that they promote on campuses are trying to have women approach sex like men. Hey Johnny is seeing Rosy Palm everyday, so hey ladies so should you. Didn’t these girls have a mother to tell them the Birds and the Bees. My mother told us - we were many girls - Men look at you and they get a hard on. Let’s start by talking about the visceral changes that young men get just by “looking” at a pretty girl. I think these women don’t have a clue. For some reason, this always gets left of the conversation. I do agree, there are so many more women going to college. I had a friend’s daughter who went American U and she did not have one date- no exaggeration - I looked up in the Common Data Set and it’s 2800 men to 4100 women! The competition for dates must be fierce. This is bizarre and bad. There have been studies on how it effects how men treat women. If a campus has slightly more men the women tend to treat women better as they compete for them. College is an important place to spread your wings and discover the opposite sex without the complications of parents butting in. I do believe many of these things happen on the more progressive campuses. I know when I went off to college, again, my mother told me that if I get too drunk, bad things can happen. She told me never to get myself into a situation I can’t get out off - including someones bed! This is life. Do you all avoid “the bad parts of town” late at night. I know I’d be thrown under the bus today - women can do all the same things as men. Where is the personal responsibility. Let’s face it folks, sex is different for men and women pretending otherwise is being dishonest. That’s my story and I’m stickin to it!
Good article with an interesting history about US campus culture in a era that pre-dates my own. Following this, I don’t know why any parents would allow for their children, but in particular their sons to attend college in the United States.
It makes no sense to push sexual freedom and exploration (and it would that the target audiences are women. I know I’ve had to do a lot of detective work to reach the following conclusion, but few men use vibrators as far as I know), while at the same time telling women in particular that any act which - in hindsight either had an ambiguous explicit consent attached to it, or felt awkward - may constitute an act of sexual violence. First off, this is really confusing for young women and infantilising them, but I suspect that the author is really downplaying the devastating consequences for the young men. What a minefield to operate in. And last I checked, men are traditionally more likely to be the ones who instigate expressions of romantic interest and pursue women (probably a human universal?). So you have just gone ahead and set up an entire generation of young men for failure. Perhaps this is just another “blank slate” inspired slight of hand to attempt to change fundamental human nature and to weaponise it against young men in this twisted logic of critical feminism? I can’t begin to imagine the stress that a young man faces when being accused of sexual violence or rape when they know that the behaviour in question was fully consensual. This is really a life sentence. Picture the parents: 18 years of unconditional love and parenting only for a young man to fall victim to bogus and unfounded accusations of sexual misconduct and to top it off, to be tried in a university kangaroo court? Title IX appears to give women a call option (on the accusation of rape) which has no expiry date and which can be exercised at any time. You are literally selling the men short.
For avoidance of doubt, I don’t how well documented are the claims of universities previously turned a blind eye to guys to were dangerous or engaging in true sexual misconduct. Nobody I have ever come across would be interested in defending a guy who truly, in the classical sense - forces himself onto women or takes advantage of them. And where does the belief that only women can regret a sexual encounter come from?
In any event, not only can’t kids drink beer in the US until the age of 21 (which in large part defeats the purpose of an undergraduate experience), but it would appear that title IX guarantees that they can never be certain of whether they are on solid ground after any sexual encounter. As far as I can gather, title IX serves as the nail on the coffin in respect of my (imaginary) son or daughter’s request to be schooled in the US. And why would you let your friends or anyone you know, send their kids to be educated in the US. I’d rather educate kids to understand individual responsibility, consent and consequences, and to live and learn under the old system.