Laura Kipnis: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus

Thank you for coming to our third event of Censorship Awareness Week, which is the first censorship Awareness week we've had. And we're hoping to have many more down the line because we have a sense that censorship isn't going anywhere. And I think one of the reasons we're having the week is that we think it's actually getting worse and with every passing moment. And we can only hope that that's not the case. But it's, there's, the sociological political indicators aren't real good on that. So let me just provide, provide a little bit of context for our speaker today, professor Laura Kipnis from from Northwest University. Maybe a little bit of rationale as to why this particular professor who writes about these particular topics was invited. I mean, the first one I want to say, and this is to get a little capital from one of our greatest and sacred, most sacred figures, secretary Hillary Clinton, who came last week. And I didn't go, but I heard some of her comments and was told, and one of the comments was that she said that people who disagree with each other need to listen to each other. And you know, I think that means a lot to, I think, liberal arts education, but it also means a lot to the particular program that I direct and also to me personally and intellectually. And the problem with that, of course, is that, you know, how do you decide what, what disagreeable views you allow to, to, to appear or to, to appear on your campus. And I found, again, not to be self-aggrandizing or, or self-congratulatory, I found, but it's really about the project and the community rather than myself, that Wellesley has, has done just a really spectacular job, welcoming speakers all across a different range of positions. There's been grumbling beforehand and Twittering and Facebooking and whatever, it's tweeting, I'm sorry, Snapchatting and all that. But that's normal human behavior in the digital age. But I've off, I've, I've found again, this is to congratulate the community. And I think I mentioned this last time, that when the events actually happen and people get face to face and hear the arguments, they come off a little bit better. And actually quite positive in my, my sense because people come and they, they, they're civil and they ask questions, they listen, they, they debate and they may judge even, but at least they listen and debate first rather than judge and not listen, which is seems to me to be the mark of a closed society or a closed community. So this censorship week has been somewhat characterized by when I would roughly call people on the left or liberal people, people who are self-defined as liberals who have, for various reasons, whether they publish cartoons or wrote books about, about sexual politics, that, that, that, that, or other issues related to sexual politics have been turned on or attacked for disagreeing with dominant positions or orthodoxies on their own side. This is crucial, I think, to, to, to keep in mind that, that what one of the things we're trying to foster is the idea that if you identify as say, a liberal in this case or in say Wellesley's case or, or in any case, doesn't matter what, where you are, that there may be a such a time when you as a liberal don't agree with what some of your other liberal colleagues are saying and that you might want to say to them, well, you know, I'm with you on all these things, but on this particular issue I disagree and here's why. And, and what I've noticed as a sociologist over the years is, is how quickly people who do that can be turned on and or attacked, banished, vilified or otherwise maligned, just for violating the orthodoxy. And that's a form of censorship in a way because what he's saying is that you are one of us and therefore you can't say this. And when you actually do say this, we will treat you as if you've done something very wrong and very bad and try to exert certain kinds of processes ov you. So I, I think it's just, I just wanted to stress that because that's the trend of the speakers this term. We had Professor Lila here a month ago or so, and that's a perf perfect. Another perfect example, a left wing, you know, died in the wool left wing columnist, writer, intellectual, who I actually consider to be a Leninist because he, cuz he, he said during his talk, the object of of politics is to seize power and then you decide what you're going to do. He said that 15 or 16 times, I finally said, well that's, you're basically a Leninist. Cuz that was, that was Lennon's first principle of politics. He said, thank you. But, but the idea that somehow Professor Lila, who was, you know, who is has such a, a long credentialed history of being a, a pretty radical left way was seen as an enemy by a presumably liberal community is something worth noting. It's worth noting and worth talking about further. But anyway, back to our speaker, professor Kipnis, I, I want to give some rationale as to why I, as, as a director on our board, invited her personally having read her work and seen what happened to her and she'll explain more about that. But having read her work on sexual politics in general, which I consider to be very sociologically astute and then seen accusations that she's somehow downplaying the existence of sexual assault on campus or herself committing sexual harass harassment by virtue of her writings, you know, sexual harassment by virtue of her writings, I found that to be extremely problematic cuz I couldn't see it in the work. I could only see it in the accusations. So I found that accusation completely unfounded. And my main interest was lay in the observation of how bureaucratic structures on campuses, which is what her next book is going is about and what she was gonna talk about tonight. My main interest lay in the fact that I saw increasingly on, on college campuses and I think all for good intention were increasingly regulating the sexual lives of students. It hit home strongly with me because as I may have mentioned in one of my last introductions, one of the first things that tyrants and despots and dictators attack as freedom of speech, one of the next things they attack is sexual freedom. If you look at the history of communist societies, for instance, they're very threatened by sexual freedom because sexual freedom meant two human beings were getting together in the most intimate way possible, connecting in the most intimate way possible. And the state wasn't involved in that. And the object of the state was to be involved in everything. So sexual repression was a, was a huge, a huge part of these totalitarian authoritarian structures. So that's my a little bit of context. I I will not read you the blurbs for her new book. She will tell you about her new book. I I value her and we value her. I think those of us who read her work as a, as a committed strong feminist who has critical things to say about where she thinks certain, where she thinks certain directions of feminism have gone. And I think that's what we need more of. We need people who say, I'm a feminist. I've heard your version of feminist feminism and I disagree with it and here's why. But I still remain committed to the basic ideas and precepts of what we've, we came together over. So I wanted to to say that. So I think Wellesley deserves to hear her. I think also I'm proud, again, this is a bit crow a little bit more and then I'll stop that. Our last, several of our last speakers have written controversial things or have been involved in controversies and have been giving talks. But for some reason of good fortune, several of our, our last speakers have chosen Wellesley as a place to come to bring out their arguments. First. I don't know if that's exactly the case with you, but, but we've had several speakers where who said, I haven't, I've written this, I haven't spoken yet, and I'm happy to be at Wellesley to be, this is my first time or my first time trying out this argument to a public audience. I'm not sure if that's the case with you, but you have a book coming out in about a month and you're here to talk about it. And so now I'm gonna turn the floor over to you. Thank you very much. Thanks so much Tom and to the Freedom Project for this invitation and to Wellesley. I'm really, really happy to be here. Well, let me briefly tell you how I ended up at censorship at a censorship awareness event since it's kind of an odd story, at least to me. A few years ago I was feeling kind of blocked as a writer because there are all sorts of censorship including self-censorship. And I went to see a shrink to talk about how to get unblocked. And I found myself talking about how much I envied certain writers like Philip Roth, who feel a lot of, seemed to feel a lot of freedom on the page. And I remember talking in particular about this scene at the beginning of Sabbath theater where Mickey Sabbath is masturbating on his wife's grave, which on the one hand is completely disgusting. And on the other I wished I felt the liberty to write a scene like that even though I'm not actually a novelist. I'm mostly an essayist. Anyway, in the midst of this moaning and blockage, I got an email from an editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education asking me to write an essay on campus sexual politics. And I am someone who spent most of my career writing on sexual politics. And I suppose I have a reputation as something of a contrarian feminist. But anyway, at first I said no to the offer because I didn't think I had much to say on the subject. And because I thought of the Chronicle as sort of staid. And the last thing I wanted was to be hemmed in stylistically, which would hardly help with my writer's book. But the editor persisted and they were flat. She was flattering me and cajoling me, and she said they wanted a no holds barred essay and she kept saying how great it would be. And Id previously sort of agreed with the shrink that I would write an article a month to get over the writer's block thing. So I said, okay. And because I was under the impression that no one actually read the Chronicle of Higher Education, I certainly never thought students read it. Maybe I felt a tang of the elusive freedom I was after. And so wrote in a candid and somewhat ironic way about the new campus codes banning professor student dating and about trigger warnings and the increasing professions of vulnerability by students, women, students mostly. And how from my vantage as a feminist, this was all pretty terrible for feminism. Also, policies encodes that bolster traditional femininity, which has always favored stories about female endangerment over female agency are the last thing in the world is going to reduce sexual assault, which is a goal I assume everyone shares The next thing thing. I knew students were staging a protest march against me in the essay marching to the president's office carrying mattresses and pillows and signs accusing me of supporting rape culture. I think they were demanding that I'd be officially censured, but I never found out for sure because nobody actually ever contacted me about this protest of march. I found out about it from a journalist in New York. I wasn't on campus that quarter. All this was rather strange. And even more so when the story started getting national coverage, though, as I later wrote, I quickly realized that all my writer friends were jealous that I gotten marched on and they hadn't. And I noticed myself shamelessly dropping it into conversation whenever possible. Oh, students are marching against this thing I wrote, I grimace in response to anyone's, how are you? This was in the second essay I wrote for The Chronicle after being brought up on Title IX complaints by two grad students over the first essay, they objected to me mentioning the case of a philosophy professor on our campus who'd been accused of sexual misconduct even though I'd only written a few paragraphs. One of the charges was that I created a hostile environment or maybe it was a chilling effect. I wasn't entirely sure which because I never actually got the charges in writing, which led me to become interested in questions I never thought much about, like due process and of course academic freedom and free speech. Though it turns out you don't actually have free speech at a private university, which was among the many surprising things I came to learn. Between the protest march and the Title IX complaints, I started feeling like a detective who's gotten too close to the information somebody doesn't want him to have and gets whacked on the head in a dark alley. It was like I was being warned off the subject, which obviously convinced me I was onto something and to keep writing more if only outta stubbornness and refusal to be cow toed and my own case getting hauled through the Title IX process wasn't the worst thing in the world. Mainly because I have tenure at a research university, this that is job security, at least nominally the situation would've been a lot different at a different sort of school or if I were on renew on a renewable contract, in that case, I'd likely be out of a job and wondering how to pay my mortgage a problem I suspect my student protestors haven't had to face. It's the sort of fear that shuts a lot of people up. So yes, I have privilege that current virgin Virgin of original sin, though I'm using it to say things others would probably be wiser not to say if they want to hold onto their livelihoods and dwellings. I know about these risks because going public about my case, I broke confidentiality to write about it in the Second Chronicle essay going public put me on the receiving end end of dozens of letters and documents relating to other people's Title IX cases, both professors and students. My inbox became a queering house for depressing and infuriating tales of overblown charges, secret tribunals, capricious verdicts, and frightening bureaucratic excess. A lot of what I learned was shocking, and I'm not exactly un jaded about institutional power. This story about the excesses and overreach of Title IX isn't much known because it all happens behind closed doors and because it's all shrouded in demands for confidentiality, gag orders effectively and enforced by threats about more charges. If respondents go public, I myself risk more charges by writing about my case. As you can tell, what I've learned makes me not the greatest fan of Title ix, at least in its current iteration. For those who don't know the backstory or what I'm talking about. In 2011, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, expanded Title, IXs mandate beyond gender discrimination such as funding for women's sports, which was the original intent to incorporate sexual misconduct, everything from sexual harassment to coercion to assault to campus rape, issuing vague guidelines in the form of what were called dear colleague letters, sort of faux cordiality of the overpowered civil servant everywhere. Also demanding the campus adjudications use the lowest standard of proof, which what they call preponderance of evidence or as it's sometimes described 50 50 plus a feather. How that feather of preponderance has arrived at in too many cases I've learned about is via crude gender stereotypes about men as eternal predators and women as virtuous victims and complete guesswork with Title IX officers surmising about what transpired in murky generally alcohol fueled sexual situations. I'm in no way disputing that sexual assault is reality, but I do think we need more open discussions about the vast expansion of a category currently underway and the under preparedness of campus officials to adequately deal with the spectrum of gray areas that they're being asked to pronounce on. I know just how unprepared they are because I spent a year reading various confidential Title IX reports people sent me along with court documents since more and more cases are turning into civil suits, usually by mail students who think they've been railroaded by the process, But it's tough to raise such qualms on campus. The reason I think is that the culture of sexual paranoia I'd orig I'd originally written about is a theology on campus and one not confined to the sexual sphere is fundamentally altering the intellectual climate in higher education across the board to the point where ideas that challenge conventional wisdom such as those in my first Chronicle essay, which was titled Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe, are construed as threats and consequently freedoms. Most of us used to take for granted the freedom to write a controversial essay, let's say, are being whittled away or disappearing altogether. It's worth pointing out that paranoia is a formula for intellectual rigidity and its inroads on campus are effectively dumbing down the place to the extent that the traditional ideal of the university as a setting for the free exchange of ideas is getting buried under an avalanche of fear and accusation. This is worrisome on a lot of levels, not least the future of democracy, which requires open debate. What is the connection between sex and democracy? Tom had some thoughts on that or between sexual ideology and democracy. A central component of current campus sexual ideology, I think is that sex feels dangerous for my generation coming of age. In the aftermath of the sexual revolution and related social upheavals, slogans like Pleasure in liberation were the ones that got tossed around a lot. The campus culture has shifted. The slogans now tend to be about sexual assault and other encroachments stop rape culture. No means no. Okay, I know that many people will at this point probably wanna throw a lot of statistics at me to say that one in four or one in five college students experienced sexual assault. So how can we talk about liberation? The interesting thing I've been learning in my research into these assault stats is that you can find statistics to back up pretty much whatever story about sexual danger you prefer to tell from different branches of our federal government. The very same government, you can find the one in five stat, which is cited in the Dear Colleague letter, the first one. And you can find stats that say, one in 40 students are sexually assaulted from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The reason as everyone who's examined these surveys know is that to begin with, there's no agreement on what sexual assault actually means. It can mean anything from forcible rape to someone trying to kiss you at a party. And of course they, all these surveys all have different methodologies, but let's leave that to the statisticians to sort out. The point is that we're in the realm of belief here. Not fact, we won't find out what's happening on the ground from the numbers, from the number crunchers. I'm sure we all agree that any amount of sexual assault is too high, but I hope we can also agree that one's view of the world, particularly if you're a woman, is going to be radically different if you opt to to believe the one in five stat rather than the one in 40 stat. Before we leave the realm of stats, I'll just mention that the one stat you don't hear on campus is the one about the dramatic decline of rape and sexual assault over the last 20 years off campus and on every criminologist agrees that violent crime has steeply de decline declined in the US including sex crime. And this comes from data based on the Bureau of Justice Statistics, victimization surveys, which circumvent the problem of under reporting. Since they're not based on police reports, there's no evidence that sexual assault as traditionally defined, has risen on campus. What's gone up are the kinds of things being defined as sexual assault, such as drunken sex. If someone later complains, and if drunken sex is defined as assault, it means that quite a lot of sex on campus has suddenly been criminalized because the definition of consent has been revised. Indeed, people can now change their minds about what was and wasn't consensual months or even years after the fact or so, say Title IX officers behind closed doors. How we tell the story of our sex lives is a political choice. Today's activists wish to define more forms of sex as assault than previous generations did because they believe campuses are rape cultures. These are also narrative choices. Shifting the narrative toward danger changes the way sex is experienced, where social creatures after all, and narrative is how we make sense of the world. If the prevailing narrative is that heterosexual sex is dangerous because men are predators, sex is going to feel threatening more of the time. And everything associated with sex will feel threatening as we see in the sort of charges being brought to campus. Title IX officers, which now includes such offenses as making the wrong eye contact or telling a joke someone takes offense at. If sex feels dangerous, then a dumb joke can feel like an assault and other people's sexuality becomes encroaching if not disgusting. And I should add parenthetically that I'm focusing on heterosexual sex, though actually one of the main civil cases involving Title IX is between two men at Brandeis. It's a really interesting case if anyone wants to look it up, but I've come across no cases between women or involving trans students, so I'm sure they exist. But one of the problems of doing research on this subject is that it's all you know under these confidentiality strictures. A few years ago I was having a conversation with a class about a movie. I think it was the opposite of sex. AP aptly enough, I teach film at Northwestern. A student female made a comment, assailing the female leads, poor sexual choices, which led to an unintentional pregnancy pronouncing a bit cotton matherly. I thought about the character's irresponsibility and sexual risk, taking a judgment with which most of the class concurred. My students are all making films and writing screenplays. And the consensus startled me first because I spent a lot of energy trying to get students to get that moralizing about characters isn't a great way to go about writing interesting ones. And second, because we all knew that some percentage of the class or their peer group anyway, were making similar sexual choices, not infrequently, which is why plan B, birth control is available on demand at the Student Health Service. Most of my students, I, my students are often pillaging their own lives for material and then often at the end of a quarter will say to me, oh, that was autobiographical. And so I end up in conversations with students about things you wouldn't expect to be. So this is something I tend to know about. Anyway, the con, the condemnations of this woman character struck me as a bit hypocritical. Everyone lies about sex, I suppose, but I've come to think that each generation lies about sex differently. I don't tend to preach about such things to my students, though I did say during this conversation just to offer another angle, gosh, I feel sorry for you guys. When I was in school, we thought about sex in terms of pleasure. Your generation seems to think about it all in terms of risk. And another student, male exclaimed, well, yes, sex can kill you. I've thought about that remark a lot since then. It was a great lesson in the obvious, which is that this generation of students is also the first post AIDS generation. I started wondering what horrors my students have been exposed to in their sex ed classes, necessarily, necessarily, I suppose, but still, obviously there's nothing new about a youthful education in the hazards of sex. I recall disgusting slideshows of syphilitic sex organs in my own junior high school sex ed class as each aging generation is all too pleased to educate the next one in the standard perils, pregnancy, disease, shame, spiritual corruption, and so on. The danger of sex is a recurring cultural script to be sure crucially, it shapes gender roles and colors how gender is lived. Women are after all situated differently than men when it comes to sexual danger, though, according to social science research, we typically also feel ourselves to be far more vulnerable to sexual danger than we are. And I can think of no better way to subjugate women than to convince us all that assault is around every corner. Still, for my generation of women coming of age, post pill, post sexual revolution, and after second wave, feminism had made at least a few provisional inroads into female shame. And the double standard sex wasn't exactly uncomplicated, but even when it was bad as it often was, we didn't think of sex as a harm. That wasn't our narrative, even sex with teachers. Today's cardinal danger was something a lot of us dabbled in without traumatizing effects. Just to be clear, I'm not trying to say that my generation's story about pleasure was any more true than this one's story about danger. There's no singularly true way of thinking about sex. The truth of sex has been different at every point in history. Every era believes its own sexual narrative to be the truth of sex. And at this point in time, the dominant narrative on campus anyway is all about hazard. But this shift in sexual culture isn't confined to sex alone. It's more like a land grab, gobbling up vast swaths of real estate along the way, including the very definition of what it is to be a woman. When it comes to sexual culture, each generation builds itself as an improvement. Over the last, no doubt, the slogans about pleasure and liberation were our little lies about sex. The realities were obviously a lot more complicated, especially for women. But today's hazard story also comes with its own evasions, namely a large blind spot when it comes to female agency. In a sexual culture that emphasizes female violation and endangerment i e rape culture, men's power is taken as a given instead of interrogated. Male sexuality is by definition predatory. Women are by definition prey. Men need to be policed, women need to be protected. Regulators are thus justified in weaving an ever expanding host of regulation. But this is paternalism, not feminism. Among the weirder fe features of current campus life is a generation of student activist demanding greater regulation over their lives from administrators, in contrast to the demands of previous generations of activists that campus officials get out of their lives. Like the free speech movement. When I was in school, the old people in charge of things weren't in cahoots with our sexual narrative, which at least provided something bracing to rebel against an antithesis, some contestation. Now, old people and young ones at least, the more vocal among the young all share the same priorities. One argument about the sexual endangerment story is it, it compliments the political agenda of those running the place. Neoliberalism is a term heard a lot lately, meaning the corporatization of the university and increased focus on reg regulation and criminalization as in off-campus neoliberalism in lieu of education along with an incredible bloating of the administrative ranks. Of course, title IX compliance is among the central reasons for the bloat. The staffing up in the sexual misconduct area has been enormous. I, I mean it's, there's like an industry devoted to this. The ratio of administrators to students has nearly doubled since 1975, while the ratio of faculty to students has stayed constant. So that has something to do with the allocation of resources which are being directed away from education and toward policing and regulation. One thing that's not much said in the floor of cliches about campus leftism run amok, which is of course the right's favorite charge, is that expanding the reach of campus codes into micro-behaviors like eye contact and jokes is also a neat way for administrators to consolidate their fiefdoms. If my sense of humor or gaze fall falls under the jurisdiction of some associate dean, that's a net gain for him or her, right? These administrative hires are seizing the prerogatives to set the tone of the tenor of the place. And it's a decidedly anti-intellectual, tenor. Intellectual life is being sidelined. The notion of victimized female students has been a useful pretext for an enormous transfer of power over our lives to institutions and employers speaking as a faculty member. Rights can be suspended because students are in danger. Resources can be diverted from education to the administration because students are in danger. All this comes wrapped in a vaguely feminist for near. But if this is what passes for feminism, then feminism is broken. What we're seeing is hard one rights, namely the right for women to be treated like consenting adults in erotic matters. Being relinquished without a peep traded away for the pleasures of blame and the pipe dream of safety. I realize I may not be speaking to the most receptive audience, I don't know, but since a since after I posted the poster for this conference on Facebook last week, someone sent me the Times article about the protest over the sleepwalker statue here a couple of years ago, and the petition to move the statue indoors because it was regarded as potentially triggering or otherwise offensive. I mean, I don't know from the inside what happened, but the article said over 500 students signed this petition, which you know, seems like roughly a quarter of this student body. I actually went to art school. I started out as a video artist and came of age thinking that offensive art was the most interesting art there was. This is after all the legacy of the avant garde. And I still tend to think that encountering something in offensive, and believe me, I'm as easily offended as anyone here, let me assure you. But being offended forces me into an encounter with my own boundaries in ways that more benign experiences don't. In other words, it's educational, which is why I'm someone who once wrote an essay on Larry Flint and Hustler Magazine, which evolved into a book on pornography, even though I don't particularly like pornography and find hustler, completely disgusting. But I also wanted to figure out why what's offensive often feels endangering when objectively it's not. I wasn't gonna let this magazine have that power over me, forcing myself to read it made me realize that it was a lot more complicated than I thought. A lot of it is about class resentment and deploys grossness as an attack on social elites. Part of my own disgust certainly had to do with how steeped in bourgeois proprieties my own sensibilities are in the end. Hustler had no power over me, in fact, I had power over it. And the same would be true of a sculpture of a guy, pudgy guy in his underwear. This too is a case where critical thinking has more power than a petition. And as a, as an aside, I don't tend to think that trauma theory has been particularly beneficial, has been a particularly beneficial thing for feminism, especially if it turns its adherence into would be sensors, which is something I'd like to write more about at some point in the future. But I throw it out as a a research project for anyone who wants to take it up. I wanna conclude by saying something about the perils of zealotry. I said to Tom, I would keep it short to leave time for discussion or tomatoes or whatever, but here's something about the perils of zealotry. One valuable lesson I've learned from my recent experiences of coming under fire on my campus and something I'd wish to convey to all aspiring brimstone and sensors is that zealotry can boomerang in unanticipated ways because my Title IX complainants overplayed their hand by trying to bend Title IX into an all pur purpose bludgeon. I ended up meeting the accused philosophy professor on my campus, about whom I'd previously written a couple of paragraphs. I interviewed him, I read the confidential files on his case, which he bequeathed to me after he resigned his position under fire. The more I learned about his situation, the more I saw it as a lens through which the current paranoia on campus comes into focus. So I ended up writing a book about his case and other cases like his that I learned about after I wrote about Title IX in the book will be out next month, April 4th, to be exact, which I doubt either his or my accusers are going to be particularly happy about and which is probably going to cause a bit of a storm. But what's life without risk? One of the things I also risk saying in the book is that we, feminists have been very quick to indict the pathologies of masculinity like hyper aggression, while a bit more reluctant to turn the gaze in the other direction that is on on ourselves and the pathologies of femininity, for example, I know from my own students that women tossing down shots like the guys is seen as a sign of gender progress these days. But the reality, especially as far as the campus assault issue, is far more complicated. Not least the fact that women tend to pass out first. The reality is that booze promotes stereotypical gender behavior, not just increased male aggressivity, but stereotypical female behavior too, namely female passivity and helplessness. What's, who's more helpless than a passed out woman? Let me say that I fully believe that women should be able to pass out wherever they want naked even, and be inviolable when hopes such social conditions someday arrive. The issue is that acting as if things were different from how they are isn't thus far working out. Nor is the self murderdom of saying that men have to change first and acting protectively would be capitulating to rape culture from where I sit that looks like the old female passivity in a slightly edgier wardrobe and turning our gazes only to male pathologies rather than examining our own makes us gender hypocrites. It's depressing how abate traditional gender positions turn out to be even in the midst of all the exciting new challenges to gender binaries. Yes, I realize I ventured into dangerous terrain here, but something I've been thinking about one of those middle of the night how to live sorts of questions is whether I want to be someone who allows herself to be shut up by critics or backs down for fear of ruffling feathers. I decided that I don't, which actually solved the writer's block issue. I wrote this new book in like a year, which is warp speed for me. I mean, I'll just say something else parenthetically, I started drink thinking about the student drinking issue because I started thinking that in some convoluted way, you know, like a butterfly flapping its wings in China, causing a tornado in rural Illinois that I had gotten brought up on Title IX charges in a funny way because of the student drinking, because the climate of overregulation on campuses and the vast expanding power of Title IX has something to do with the inability of the current regulations to actually address the realities of sexual assault. And particularly because of what I think is a pervasive dishonesty about the role of binge drinking. So I started doing a lot of research in interviews and thinking a lot more about alcohol. You know, I never particularly cared if my students spent their weekends binge drinking and barfing into bushes, you know, as long as they got to class on Monday. But as I started looking more into the issue, I started thinking that these things were not unrelated anyway, as you've probably gathered going through a Title IX investigation, though my case was nothing compared to what, to what others have been through, has left me a little mad and possibly a little dangerous transformed from a hi harmless ironist into an aspiring whistleblower. It's just these sorts of unintended consequences that a more psychologically shrewd band of zealots could have predicted. I mean, having been hauled up on complaints once, what do I have to lose? Confidentiality, conduct beli befitting a professor to quote myself from the closing line of the book's, preface, kiss my. In other words, thank you to my accusers and would be censors for being my unwitting muses. You can feel. Questions yourself, I'm happy to take questions, comments, internal here. Yeah, you know, to be, I, as Tom said, it's not entirely a book, a work in progress cuz it's a lot of this is coming out in a book next month. But what's a work in progress is my figuring out how to answer the kinds of objections and questions that people will have. So I'm happy to hear yours and we'll try to do my best to, you know, take, take them on. Hi, I'm Anna. I'm a student here. For the last couple of days we've talked about how the best way to fight Censorships seems to be to talk back, to have discussion about this. The problem with sexual paranoia to me on campuses is that when I do try to talk about this, if I make a joke that may be considered off color or that sort of thing, I face serious consequences for that. It could even be something as simple as people start spreading rumors and my reputation is tarnished something as severe, it's expulsion. So my question is, is how do you propose that the students try to work against this if there is this vicious cycle of the students influencing the administration, the admin administration influencing the. Students? Yeah, you know, it's a huge question and you know, for students and everyone, one of the things that happened after these charges, you know, of against me went public was I had a lot of people saying to me, even tenured professors, particularly women, I'm afraid to speak out on these issues because I'm afraid of being hauled through Twitter and accused of all sorts of stuff, like being the center of a Twitter storm. And what was kind of interesting, you know, I mentioned this student who had said that remark in class about sex, sex can kill you. And just a couple of days ago I decided to track him down. He's now working in reality TV in Hollywood and ask him, what did you mean by that remark? Because I wanted to know was it true my speculation about the sex education? And he said, you know, I'm not sure what I meant. Maybe not so much literally death, but like death by social media that for this generation, anything you do or say is all gonna be all over and spread all around. I mean, I think one of the most effective ways, you know, you mentioned getting, you know, or potentially getting criticized over a joke, but I still do think humor and irony are, to me the best tactics including like as a group, you know, the the like say women's comedy ensembles taking on some of these issues. There's this website called, it's called a the re, you know, I'll try to remember what it's called. It starts with something like an R and it's like women making fun of the sexual correctness culture on campus. Do you know what I'm talking about? No, that sounds awesome. Yeah, yeah, no, I was really surprised to see it. So I do think that there are these kinds of different approaches or experimental approaches people are taking to circumvent this and you know, but, and I applaud whatever efforts you make and I'll only just say one other thing that like in my case, it turned out to be not such a bad thing to find myself at the center of this controversy. I mean, it wasn't planned. I kind of walked into it, you know, unwittingly. But the result was like all sorts of speaking invites and you know, opportunities to write other things. So if you get over your fear and trepidation of what people are gonna say, it's also like taking, I have found in my own career, like I said, I started, you know, in an art school where I was looking at the kind of work of people like Chris Bird who was shooting himself while, you know, nailing himself to a Volkswagen and stuff like that. You know, the work that really was very out there and well see if I can say, you know, so I grew up thinking risk was the a sort of norm, but, but I've always found in my own work and career that the things that I took risks on, like, like I wrote this Hustler magazine and somebody later said to me, oh I would never have done that if I hadn't had tenure. You know, which had hadn't occurred to me at the time. But, so the places where I've taken the risks have actually turned out to be career-wise, to to be a bit, you know, crude about it. You know, pay good, they've paid off well. So that would be like a kind of encouragement to just try to follow your instincts, you know, and take the hits if they come. And you know, worst comes to worst, my own plan is to just not read Twitter for about a year after my book comes out. But it's, I appreciate that question. Hey, do I stand up? What do you like? Hi. I was thinking about the kind of line that you get between information and pollution, specifically in the current younger generation growing up. This. Might Hubble. Yeah, because I Did you say information and pollution? I missed a. Word. Yeah, information and pollution. It's just a kind of the fact that at a young age we need to be aware. I think the increasing awareness as to what constitutes sexual assault and what constitutes rape and this kind of increasing awareness of women's equal rights. It's definitely been helpful in that over the past few generations such statistics have seemed to decrease. But at the same time, it doesn't want to be made such that there's an overcorrection. That people are kind of pushing these stereotypes to the extremes of the victim and the aggressor. And they don't want to be kind of filled in this environment of fear mongering where they don't feel able to, you know, go outside on their own. Like women a lot nowadays won't want to travel on their own. I know it's been a consideration that I've had myself in whether I should explore Europe this summer, whether it would be safe. So the kind of idea is like at what point should we kind of implement a system of protection? Like how far should we take that so that people have enough awareness to respect each other, but not so much that they are constantly in a state of fear of each other. I really think that there needs to be more transparency about the cases that are being adjudicated on campuses and what's being called sexual assault. So like, here's an example that I learned about at a, at a Big 10 school, like a, that went to a Title IX case where a freshman male freshman was suspended from school for kind of pleading maybe with his girlfriend for a. And maybe cuz he asked more than once and then they broke up after this. I mean, and it went on for about 30 seconds cuz he realized she wasn't into it and then they stopped it. Well, this kid was found guilty of emotional coercion, which is not exactly like in any code, but you know, there's the, there's these codes about consent and it has to be ongoing and enthusiastic and you know, all, all of that kind of thing. So this kid, he was a freshman and his girlfriend was a sophomore, he was 18 years old, not particularly sexual experienced. And he is now more or less a lifelong sex criminal because as you all know, the common app asks if you've been, you know, suspended for any, you know, what do they call behavioral or you know, whatever things, misconduct thing. And you have to say the circumstances. So there's somebody at 18 who feels like his life is ruined because of, you know, at that time not knowing that it was, that it could be found that asking for a would get you kicked out of school. So, you know, the norms are so shifting, but they're shifting behind closed doors and the, the adjudications are happening behind closed doors and you have Title IX officers who, you know, are maybe some of them are wonderful people and some of them are vigilantes, you know, in my view, making up rules as they go along. And in, in cases like this and the only people who can fight back are rich kids because the, the civil suits they're being brought by men cost maybe like a half a million dollars to pursue at least a hundred and up to a million from what I've a thousand, you know, a hundred thousand to a million from what I've heard. So I think that, you know, the confidentiality, I think as with court cases, you can circulate details about charges with the names redacted. But I think there has to be a general public discussion of the way these norms are being shifted so radically behind closed doors with no public discussion about it. So I think that is the first step is a demand for transparency of these processes and an end to the demands for confidentiality because that's both a, a speech issue but also a due process kind of issue. So that would be my first step. I mean, I don't know what other people think about that. I mean, an argument would be oh no, than people, fewer people will actually report things because they don't want to, you know, publicity are being named and everybody will, like on a small campus, everybody would know who the person was even if the name was redacted, you know? So that would be an argument against it. But I, you know, from what I've learned and when this book comes out, I think a lot of people are gonna be very surprised because this is just not known what's going on. Nobody knows it and it's incredibly widespread from just what unsystematic information I've information I've collected unsystematically. Pass the mic to the next person. Oh wow. That right behind you. Yeah. You, you mentioned Sabbath theater and listening to you speak I was thinking of the human stain Yeah. And the ritual humiliation of Coleman Silk. And I, I wondered if that book speaks to you in any way? Yeah, I, you know, it's, I mean it's such a great title and yes, of course. I mean I guess that was a racial, you know, misunderstood racial remark. But yeah, no, the, the gotcha atmosphere, I mean, you know, gosh, that was written what, 25, 30 years ago? Yeah. 2000. Oh, is that after Clinton thousand nine? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, 2000. Okay. So it's not that long ago. But I mean the atmosphere I think has become all the more sensors since then. And, you know, the, the pleasure of the gotcha, I mean this is kind of similar to what the, the woman over there was asking the pleasure of indicting the misprint for saying the wrong thing or making the wrong joke or the, the remark that gets misinterpreted. I mean, I really have a lot of cases that I came, found out about that have to do with like dumb jokes that somebody real, I mean, makes a case about. And there can be like a six month investigation of a joke that somebody made at an off-campus bar. And, and you know, by the way, the other issue in Title IX is that now there's no such thing as off campus. So you could be at a bar and this happened like say a case with a graduate student is at an off-campus bar and makes a joke about some other TAs. And, you know, that leads to a big investigation cuz somebody reports that this joke was created a hostile environment. So the dear colleague letters of one of them, there's been about different versions maybe three years. So says that co it's up to univer colleges and universities to actually police behavior off campus, not just, you know, on. So it's, yeah, no, I mean, I, I it's, I think, sorry, I'm like, like choking out my words here, but some of this may change. The Trump administration and the Department of Education under Betsy DeVos do not seem dedicated to enforcing Title ix, including, you know, as we've all heard on the transgender, their trans, the Department of Education's transgender position pre, previously. So the enforcement from there might be less. And so a lot of the overreach on campuses is because they're trying to avoid being on this OCR watch list and the potential losing federal funding. So that threaten may lessen. The issue though is that these infrastructures are so in place on campuses and these off Title IX officers and student deans and are so overpowered and responding often to a student activist that it may not change on the ground, even if there's less demand from above, you know, from the Department of Education. And this really was, I say as somebody who, you know, had a lot of admiration for Obama, in many ways, not always the politics, but the overreach of these dear colleague letters was probably illegal. I mean, it was making law in a department, in the Department of Education that was never passed by Congress. There's something called the Administration Procedures Act or something like that where new laws have to be discussed before they're implemented. And this was making law and implementing it with no public notice and it wasn't passed by Congress. And some, some Republican congressmen started raising questions about this, but it was strangely only the right that was, was raising the questions. Can you say a little bit more about how you experienced the distinction between, between. Freedom of speech and academic freedom in what you, Northwestern is a, a private university? I mean, I, I think that the only schools that would legitimately be not under Title IX in, in that particular sense would be a Hillsdale College or a Grove City College. But any, any college or university that accepts federal funding can't be under the EEGs of Title IX and not also under the First Amendment. So what I found out, although it's, it's under, it's, it's in dispute because, you know, all this stuff is, you know, people write this stuff so all colleges that get federal funding have to adhere to Title IX in the Dear Colleague letter. So that's like every school I, I don't know, there are any schools that don't get federal funding, like maybe there are maybe a couple religious schools. The First Amendment, prote is First Amendment protects you against government interference and speech. So you could make an argument and I actually just saw a law professor within the last week make an argument that I had thought was true, but nobody had said that. And I had thought if my case, like if I were, if somebody tried to fire me over Title IX at a private university, that this argument could be made that I was being deprived of free speech by a government agency, you know, indirectly. But that wasn't what was being said. What has been said is that in a private university, you don't have, the only rights you have are the rights given to you by your employer at the university. So you all don't have, I mean because First Amendment protects against government interference, it doesn't protect against your employer saying you can't say that. So like we have a faculty handbook that says something like, you know, you have to like, you know, act in your conduct has to be befitting a professor. So these students who pressed, the grad students who pressed charges against me, charged me with violating the faculty handbook because, you know, which could be interpreted any number of ways including, because I made a couple of small mistakes in the article. Like I called a grad student who'd been involved with this professor, a former grad student because I didn't know her name and the, the language in the loss, it was past tense. So I mean, it's a bit complicated. And so she charged, that was a violation of the faculty handbook cuz I had a incorrect fact, you know, that was something I actually couldn't have known. So it's very complicated. But the argument that you're making, I just saw somebody make, you know, but I, you know, again, like all this is unfolding and it's, I think a lot of it, particularly if it had been a democratic administration, this would be being fought in the civil, this would be being played out in courts and it's the courts and judges, like this case I mentioned with the two men, the same sex relationship at Brandeis. It was a judge saying to the school, you can't say that a student kissing another student while he's asleep, when they're in a relationship is a violation of consent. Cuz the special examiner at Brandeis had said, this student who kissed a sleeping, his sleeping boyfriend was, that was, you know, the student hadn't consented and actually found him, you know, I think he was also kicked out of school for kissing somebody who was asleep, who was in a relationship with, so, sorry, that was a bit rambling. Oh no, it's pretty, it is in a really interesting case. But so, so the judge was trying to dial back on the overreach of these Title IX officers. So my, I have like two questions. I guess My first one is, so you've talked a lot about criticizing Title IX as like being the source of these bureaucratic overreaches that you call among college campuses. And because as I'm sure you know, title IX doesn't actually dictate what specific sexual misconduct policies are on each campus. Like each campus has to come up with their own sexual misconduct policy. So for example, something that is considered sexual misconduct at Wellesley might not be considered something sexual misconduct at Harvard because the college has to write their own policy. So I'm wondering how that, it seems to me that your issue is more with the specific college's policies and not Title ix, which just dictates that they have to have a policy. So I'm wondering how you're jumping from, I don't like the specific schools policy, which is a separate debate that we could have to I don't like Title IX period. Yeah. Well it's, I mean it's precisely the vagueness of what the colleges have to do that has led to this overreach because they don't know. And if you talk to Title IX offices, which I have, I mean weirdly since I became this Title IX poster girl, I was invited to speak to a convention of Title IX officers last year. They don't know what the hell to do. So the default position is to the, sorry, the default position is to overreach. So it's, you're exactly right that they don't say specifically what colleges have to do. And so they're doing too much because they are all terrified of ending up on this OCR watch list because to be on the office c r watch list, and there's like about 300 cases now proceeding that are left over from, you know, the Obama administration cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars if you're investigated by, and the OCR has been very aggressive in prosecuting schools. When somebody complains that the school hasn't done enough to prevent sexual misconduct, they send in a team of investigators to campus and the compliance costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and like can take years. So I think that has actually led to more enforcement than if the rules were spelled out. So. In that case you think that you, the OCR should have stricter, like should say what consent is or, and things like that, like that would. You. Know, wouldn't that just be more bureaucratic overreach as you say? I haven't, you know, I don't have like a position on that. I mean, not really like a policy person, I mean expose a whistleblower. So I haven't tried to figure out what would be the optimal way for the OCR to handle it. But I do know, you know what I'm saying is the ca, I mean, I don't wanna overstate what I know, but I do know the case is that the Dear Colleague letter are reg regarded by Title IX officers themselves as contradictory and incoherent. I mean, like an example is, it actually says in one of the, in one of the dear colleague letters, nothing here should be used to prevent free academic freedom or free speech on campus. Yet I was still brought up on complaints and went through a 72 day investigation. So the Title IX officers whose job is partly to protect the institutions from being on the OCR watch list are bending over backwards. You know, the same thing with a freshman being thrown out of school over a Does the title, does the Dear Colleague Letter say that's what you have to do? No, but that's somebody's interpretation. I mean, you also have, and I kind of speculate about this in the book somewhat jokingly, I mean, the people who are attracted to these positions, I hope there are no Title IX officers in the room. I mean, have a set of politics. I mean, and oftentimes it's, they wanna punish male sexuality for what they see as it's, you know, egregious side. And I, I fully agree, a lot of male sexuality is pretty egregious, but they are in the position now to punish, to be punitive to, you know, I keep going back to this freshman case, you know, to punish an 18 year old guy for asking for a. I mean, there's, there's, and there's no over, there's no oversight. So part of the issues, you have people who maybe have ideological commitments, you know, to certain positions with no oversight on them making policy behind closed doors. So those are some of the issues. But as to, should it be spelled out in the Dear C letter specifically that I, I don't know. I don't know. I haven't really thought enough about it. Can. I add one point of order just on that note? Their Title IX officers are not this homogeneous block anymore. I think there's, there's a lot of discussion among them now based on these cases. And, and I just want to say our own Title IX officer I know is actively working on, on, on, I don't know what the right word is, but, but, but, but. Bringing. It in. What's that? Not, well, not, no, I can't even put that word in, but, but rethinking the entire scope of it based on some of these things. And, and it's a very cooperative venture. It's not, it doesn't feel in any way as if capricious or sensors sensus or anything like that. There's actually a legitimate, legitimate attempt to say there is sexual assault and there is sexual harassment. Here's what it is. And there's a whole penumbra of other things that fall outside of that. And we have, we really need to focus it back in. And some of it has to do, at least this is my own sociological read of it, with the fact that they know the Trump administration is not gonna be sending any dear colleague letters that say that if anything, they're gonna be sending dear colleague letters that say something quite a bit different rolling it back. Yeah. And that might, and they don't wanna roll things back, but they also need to understand the realities of the power. Then it's actually very clear that that Dear colleague letter, this is unequivocal in my opinion, that Dear colleague letter did more to chill speech and freedom of expression than any other act of the Obama administration is, it was pure, unadulterated executive overreach and intimidation. And it's, and the effects of there are still being felt and, and, and actually the, the victim's, real victims of, of sexual assault and sexual harassment are, are, are the victims of that, of that overreach, because it was never meant to address the kinds of things you were talking about. Yeah, yeah. I think students need to know, particularly that the Obama administration did this. It's not a a, a, a liberal Republican Democrat thing. It's just what executive power does when it gets fueled by a particular ideology. It could be right on the left, it wouldn't matter. It would be still dangerous. Yeah. One of the things I found out from going to this conference with the Title IX officers is that this is his group called a txa who does the Title IX certification of the, the officers. They are very much trying to reign it in because they are warning their people that if they don't reign it in, this is gonna be settled in the courts or in Congress and Title IX will be defeated because of the overreach. So, so it was a kind of self-preservation tactic. I mean, I actually thought in my own case that I had to be found innocent because if I wasn't the, it would be a collision, even though it's a private university between the First Amendment and Title IX and Title IX would come out, look, I mean, there would be so much more scrutiny if you have a prof, a feminist professor writing an essay, getting brought up on Title IX charges Title IX itself. I think, you know, cuz it wasn't like I was gonna keep quiet about it. Title IX would've come under a lot of scrutiny. So I kind of did feel, in my case it was poli, you know, there were political reasons that I had to be let off. Okay. I have one more like separate question. Okay. I was really interested when you as a, I suppose, student activist that you, as you might describe me, I was interested when you talked about how like student activism around sexual misconduct and sexual assault has led to this idea that sex is dangerous and how you, and you seem to talk about it in as it's in contradiction to the idea of sex as liberation and like how we're moving away from liberation toward this idea that sex is dangerous. Which I found really interesting because in my experience, I've actually found that sexual liberation has actually like, been a very big part of the anti-sexual misconduct movement about how to have like sex like that and like sexual relations and relationships in general that are freer and like you have more power in them because you know what your power is. And so I'm just interested how you see that those things are opposite when in my experience, they're actually very much connected. Yeah. I don't think I would put, I don't think I would put the arrows of causality quite as starkly as you did in terms of what I was saying. So I, I would not say student activism, activism has caused a feeling of danger. What I think what I was trying to say is there's been this shift in sexual culture toward this idea that sex is dangerous and that there's this, I don't know, it, it's not so much a cause and effect, but a kind of, you know, there's this term in out of like Marxism expressive causality or something where like there are all these different forms of causation acting on this one thing. It's sort of not like a billiard ball causality like this causes that. So there's this culture in which sex scene is dangerous. There's this emphasis on like the statistics that sex is dangerous and the kind of fetish of movies like the Hunting Ground, which, you know, a lot of people really question the accuracy and the reporting in, in those stories or the selection of the cases and that kind of thing. So there's, you know, just this kind of emphasizing of danger. But I'm not saying it's caused by student activists at all. But I, you know, I completely agree with you that any additional openness about sex, which I think groups, you know, like yours are talking about what actually happens. And what I would say, you know, you asked me before about like what policy recommendations or how do I think the dear college lawyers should read, or the OCRs should, what code they should have. What I think is that what's not happening is education. What's not happening is sexual education for women and men. I mean, one of the things I say in the book is when I was in my twenties, I took a women's self-defense class, I took two, you know, where you learn how to like break boards with your foot and fight off a rapist if you have to, and tactics and techniques. And I think instead of, you know, these idiotic skits they give women when they come to school, you know, which is now mandated by the, the Clari Act, teach women's self-defense, have open discussions about what, how to say no. I mean, one of the things I learned talking to students, they don't, a lot of women don't know how to say no to sex and people are not teaching them. And that's a failure of educators. So when, you know, as with your group, these things start being talked about. Women feel themselves to be more empowered. That I think is what has to happen. So, you know, education instead of regulation, not more regulations. So I just wanted to add that it seems like this culture that you're talking about does exist outside of the university as well. And what can be troubling there is that if there's a dispute, there really is no process to deal with it as long as it's not, you know, something with the criminal justice system. So it often can come down to like whoever is loudest on social media dealing with a dispute. So I was just curious from your point of view, where do you think this sort of culture of fear or danger or paranoia came from in the first place? Which kind of context do you mean though? Because I mean, like, okay, so corporate context, there's a lot of reg, you know, regulations, HR codes and that kind of thing. But do you mean like informal shaming, like in social circles. That kind of Yeah, in, in social circles, I mean, I'm, I'm thinking specifically of an incident that happened in a social circle that I am a part of at, at an art gallery, you know, which is a place where there really is no, there is no system in place to deal with any kind of dispute like that. So it more or less comes down to on social media, who is louder or who has a bigger army to be a, you know, who can shame the other party better. Yeah. You know, it's an interesting moment. I mean, on campus, one of the things I've been thinking is that, you know, you have far more women undergrad enrollments, I mean, I understand I'm at a women's college, but in across the country, women's enrollments are now sup you know, greater at the undergrad level than than men's. And so I think that's one of the things that's changing the culture. Women are saying, Hey, we're playing by our rules now. You know, male sexual norms ruled for a lot of the time. And there were other kinds of, there were certain kinds of shaming of women's sexuality by men. And a lot of that's changed. And now the shaming is going in the other direction. You know, women are shaming men for, you know, defying the, what women want to be, the sexual norms, you know, social codes and that kind of thing. And, you know, so a lot of that's being fought out in social media, partly because it gives different people access to forums and that kind of thing. So, I mean, I'm not like hugely in, in favor of shaming one way or the other, but I'm also aware that if you look at it kind of across time as opposed to just seeing chronically, like this moment, you can see how shame has worked around sex and depending on, you know, different people are doing the shaming. So I'm not completely against it, I mean, you know, to just be honest about it. But, you know, I think it's also can be completely hypocritical. You have people called out for things that, you know, in dishonest sorts of ways. I don't know, do you have any ideas about it? I'd be curious about. I, I'm not really sure. It's just that I've encountered it and I've, I've kind of wondered where it's coming from. Yeah, sometimes I wonder if maybe just the omnipresence of like smartphones and social media. Yeah. And the way that people aren't as used to interacting with people they don't know, especially younger people these days. Like maybe as a result there's more just fear of, you know, situations like these or something. I don't know. I. Think there are a lot of contradictions in the sphere of sexual conduct or interpersonal conduct in general. Like, one of the things I think, you know, on campus is that on the one hand you've got like, you know, the hookup culture on the other hand, you've got this sort of fear and activism around, you know, sexual assault and that these things kind of merge together and it's a big, it's a big mess. And I think that's a, that's true off campus too. I mean, I think in the context of heterosexuality, I think there's this simultaneous dislike of men oftentimes and attraction to men or, you know, des desire for, I mean, I think there are a lot of conflicting sorts of relations being played out in, in, you see this on social media when some of these things erupt. You know, I have to say, like on the subject, the episode of girls a couple of weeks ago where Hannah goes to the creative writer's apartment, the writer had been called out on social media for seducing like a college student, if I remember. And because the college student had written about it, and that's, you know, happened a bunch recently that you have writers who, you know, go on tour through college towns and sleep with people, adoring fans along the way. And then the adoring fans are turning the tables and writing about these experiences in social media or, you know, on blogs or websites. And there's an, I thought it was an, I dunno if people saw it, it was an incredibly interesting episode because Hannah herself starts out in this kind of social justice warrior thing position toward him calling. She's, she's written an article calling him out, and then she finds herself also kind of seduced by his charm, not fully seduced, but they end up laying down in bed together. And then he does something gross. And I, but I thought it was one of the most honest things I've seen because it talks about the ways that women's desire to, for like recognition by a famous writer or, you know, whatever connection with somebody you admire, you know, plays out over, you know, in this, in this situation. And so I don't think there's often a lot of honesty about the conflicting kinds of emotions in these situations, if that, if that makes sense. Anyway, if you haven't said, I recommend that episode to everyone unless you hate Lena Dunham. Hi. I thought what you said about trauma theory was really interesting, and I, and I kind of like to talk more about that because I, I actually, like, I have this experience where I went to a safe space meeting with a friend where like a bunch of people were there, like talking about how to make their, you know, arts community safer. And I, my friend was asking them to define what safe space was, and she was, she wasn't, she was kind of criticizing them for not having a clear definition of what rape was and, and it's, you know, an ever-changing definition of rape. And so she told, said in front of the group that their definition of rape was sub subjective or something like that. And so, and the reaction that she got was two women jumped up and, and yelled that they were triggered and ran out of the room and the meeting ended. And I just thought that that was like a very powerful thing that I saw, and I'd like to try to figure out a way to explain exactly what was happening while like also being considerate towards people who actually do feel like, like some type of ptsd T S d because I, I don't, and I don't feel like I can truly have empathy for how that feels, but I'm not also not positive that they really did either. Yeah. So, Yeah, that's the problem. I, you know, make us sort of, I wouldn't say quip exactly, but analogy in the book about trauma is like the, an analogies like a virus, you know, it's something that you can catch from bad sex. It never goes away, you know, supposedly they're with you for life, but it's also disabling. And I mean, I guess the cynical, the cynic in me says, isn't this a learned response rather than, I mean, it's not like you're diagnosed with trauma, but it's that you learn that you have, or you're told that you have it, and then you keep experiencing the symptoms of it. So there's something that just seems profoundly disabling to me about the ethos of trauma, which is you can't ever get over it. So thus you have to change the environment. Like you can't be around people who are gonna talk about a rape or even the definition of rape. And I mean, women who are, are not going to be able to make their way in the world outside of mostly the college environment where people take this seriously if you can't, you know, be in a room where somebody's talking about a, a, a controversial subject. You know, my students are making films, a lot of them wanna go to Hollywood and, you know, be in the industry. But if you tell me you can't sit through a movie that has, you know, some tough subject matter, how are you gonna go work in the movie industry? So it's, you're, you're disabling yourself. So that's partly my objection, objection to trauma theory, that it also, the, the threshold has really become lower for the kinds of experiences. I guess it would be seen as, as traumatizing. I mean, I've had many students, not many, okay. Some students, you know, come to me and say, I've been diagnosed with ptsd, ts d over like a relationship breakup, you know? So I think it's very common as a diagnosis now. I think social workers, you know, shrinks on campus are telling students they have ptsd d and it's not in anyway helpful. And the other thing is, I mean, here I'm gonna say something else controversial, since you've all been so nice and nobody's thrown anything at me yet. I mean, this language about survivor, you know, I think is part of the issue. And I understand some people will say using this term, you know, makes me stronger or I don't like the word victim. You know, people who've had sexual assault experiences, but it also turns a bad experience into an identity in ways that, again, okay, when is that going to stop being the thing that regulates your life? So just on a self-help level, I don't think that it's necessarily helpful, but you know, there's a lot of cachet to trauma now. And claiming it as your identity gives you a platform to speak about. It's a, gives you a, a politics, it gives you a community, you know, so, you know, again, cynically, I mean there are sort of weirdly benefits to trauma status. Hi, my name is Serena Lee, I'm part of the Freedom Project, so Adam Smith fellow. So thank you Professor Ness for coming today. Oh. Call me Laura. Oh, Laura, okay. Thank you. So I have a male friend at a university in which she had had what was then like consensual, consensual sex with his girlfriend. And then a week later she did not think it was anymore and filed Title IX charges against him. And in the aftermath of that process, there's obviously the social media echo chamber. And so before it even went to the courts and before the, the national investigation even started campus court, you mean the campus court? Yeah, yeah, many, his fraternity kicked him out and there were other societies that he was a part of that issued statement saying that, you know, we do not allow people who perpetrate sexual assault to be associated with us, et cetera, et cetera. And so basically before anything could be even resolved or investigated, there was demonization going on. But on the other hand, and that demonization is not called out for by people because they fear they will be, you know, guilt by association, like enabling. Yeah. So and so, yeah, but then demonization of the victim as in like, oh, but she, you know, has she agreed to initially or whatever was gets called out as victim blaming? Yeah. Or even like some discussion about her previous sexual behavior. Dissimilar would be called like shaming. So I'm not sure, like how do we, from my perspective, this seems like a dichotomy and a double standard. Like how do we move past this? Because this is kind of a, to kill a mockingbird situation for the person who's being accused. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's, I mean, I've heard of so many cases like that and it's horrible. I mean, even the, the, the very public case about Emma Sokowitz at Columbia, you know, once the other side of the story came out when the guys, you know, gave his side of the story, it was in like, you know, one of the, like it was Huffington Post or something like that, you know, you start seeing, it was a more complicated situation. On the other hand, the people who were on her side, I think were never gonna see it that way. You know, I mentioned, you know, seeing my own students, the, the, the moralizing of my students, just even about this movie character just strikes me as a different tenor than I remember from when I was in school. There just really does seem to be a kind of pervasive moralizing at this moment, at least, you know, in my experience with, with students. So I guess there has to be within that generation, your generation to those of you who are, you know, younger people pushing back against it because the pro also more formally, the due process issues are not being addressed. So like on my campus, there just was Northwestern an issue where there were anonymous accusations of date rape drugging against a fraud against s sae. And there were no names of anyone known. I mean, there's, there was an anonymous phone complaint. There was again, a student protest march to kick the frat out of campus. The frat has been suspended officially on the basis of anonymous accusations. I mean, I'm no fan of SAE or frack culture generally, but the rush to judgment exactly in this case is that partly it's based on the idea that there's no such thing as a false accusation. You know? So, and, and that's something I talk about in the book, and you'll again have people throwing these stats around at you saying, oh, only 2% of, you know, rape accusations are false. Which is another somewhat false statistic that I talk about. So there's a lot of mythologies based on false wielding of, of statistics. But that's the ethos now, including the fact that anybody who makes an accusation gets called a survivor, which I actually wrote to the general consulate, my university, saying you can't, how can you use the term survivor to talk about an accuser? There was an official document that came out where it was about when will a survivor find out the results of a case like an adjudication? And I said, but if the results haven't been established, how do you know this person is a survivor and you know, not an accuser. So the, the campus officials themselves are participating in these in failures of due process. So I just think it has to be called out. But the culture is so much on the other side that it really is, I mean, you know, I'm kind of alone. I mean, I wrote a letter to the student paper saying, wait, shouldn't we wait to see if there's evidence before we conduct these, you know, protest marches and stuff. And, you know, I'm seen would be seen as a rape apologi for saying that because everybody knows it's happen, even if there's no evidence. So I'm not, I don't really have a good answer for you. I mean, but it's, I think it's happening all over. And I guess there's going to be at some point a turning of the tides. Do you think that college campuses are the place to prosecute or hold these rape allegations? And I'm conflicted in the sense that I don't necessarily think that they are for multiple reasons, including a conflict of interest such as reputation, reputational status. But as it, from my like understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, rape as a crime, while we want it to be prosecuted within the formal justice system, there's like, the crime of rape itself is one that has very little evidence to it that our current justice system can adjust for. So it seems like a natural evolution from a failure of a formal justice system that we came up with an informal kind of justice court to it. Yeah. So like, I'm just like picking your head about. This. Yeah, no, there's that ar I mean there's arguments on both sides. I mean, the argument for it being handled in the legal justice system, I mean, is that if it's actually rape, and by, I mean I'm an old fashioned person on this, I mean, I think that means forcible penetration or, you know, forcible sex is rape. The consent issues, I think are more the, the gray areas. I mean, if you have sex with somebody who's unconscious, that's rape. But, but you're right about the la you know, oftentimes these things happen in private, the, one of the arguments about the going the campus justice system route is that it's quicker. You know, things can linger on for years in the courts. But the other thing is that the, there are different standards of proof that are being used. There is lower threshold of proof on campus. But you know, I think that the campus, the Title IX officer is just not equipped to do investigations. And the other thing is there's, I mean, this is something I wish I'd written about in the book and I didn't, in courts where you have somebody cross-examined, you have what's called an adversarial legal system. And it's thought that an adversarial system is actually better at producing facts. Where you have in campuses what's called single investigator model, you've got one person doing the investigation, writing the report, pronouncing the judgment, usually somebody else decides the penalty, but the single investigator model is gonna be subject to all the shortfalls or prejudices or whatever of that single investigator. So that's one of the arguments I think, against the campus system, is that it can be incredibly biased and there's no oversight. And, and the procedures, you know, we talked before that there's no procedures dictated that are universal or universal, you know, national, a lot of colleges won't allow a student to present a defense like, like an accused student can't present like text messages that says, you know, I'm coming over and I wanna have sex with you, or, you know, whatever might mitigate the, the charges. So it's just, I mean, it really is a big mess. And what you've said is sort of getting at that, but part of the reason it's a mess is that more and more and more things are being called, you know, sex sexual assault. Very, like a very quick follow up to that, if that's possible, is the fact that it kind of, where does this leave us? Where does, where do we stand in this issue? Because like it seems that status quo, the informal system has like great problems with it. And the formal system also has great problems with it. So that, I had a friend who was sexually assaulted, raped on campus at a UMass Amherst and went to the first, went to her student dorms and they did nothing about it. And he was on her floor and then went to the police and they said, well, you were wearing, they basically said you were wearing something slutty. Really? Yeah. During the party. And so she ended up having to transfer back to at UNC Asheville. And so like, it seems like status quo, like where do we stand on the. Issues? Yeah, I mean, I guess I, you know, we go back to what I was saying before about education. I mean, I just think, you know, women have to be trained, taught, educated to deal with these situations as they're unfolding, you know? So rather than the, the redress the happening after the fact, you know, when there's already been this thing happening, like at this party, whatever it was that happened, you know, I would like to see students have more techniques in the moment to fight off a perpetrator, to not go to the, you know, back room with the guy or, you know, whatever it takes to not have the thing happen. And I know that there's a lot of sentiment about we can't, you know, it's capitulated a rape culture to, you know, say the woman is in charge of, you know, making sure the thing doesn't happen. But I mean, it's hard for me to see that self-protection is not in your own interest. Yes, male culture should change, but in case, just in case it doesn't, you know, learn to deal with these such, these situations more adequately. And I think we're not doing students any favors by not teaching them the types of situations that they might find themselves in. So I guess that would be my best hope for some change. I'll make it quick, but first of all, I hate Lena Dunham and I liked that episode of her a lot. Originally, my question was gonna be a lot like your question, but now I'm gonna kind of respond to your response, which is that even though I have definitely heard the point of view that you're saying of, you know, it's, it's contributing to rape culture, to focus on giving women things that they can do to prevent it, I would say that doesn't mean that people aren't giving women things. I think women are actively learning those things. I think it's a misconception that, I mean, in, in a lot of context, I would say that I would say that having a focus on that is has a lot of problems. That doesn't mean that I'm, you know, going out and trying to get completely wasted and allowing myself to be vulnerable. I think that I would say most of my friends, most of the people I know are very much aware that they have to take steps to protect themselves. And one of the problems is that they are, and that's not enough. And so I would say also to people who've raised, like, where is this fear coming from? I wouldn't say people are getting the fear from the one in five statistic. I think the statistic that scares me is the majority of my close friends have been assaulted. Like, and I'm not saying that's a representative statistic of America or anything. I'm just saying that in my experience, if I were to pull my close friends, I would say that they're assaulted, not just, you know, someone kissing them while they were asleep, I think. And none of them have taken any legal recourse. But, so I would say that there's kind of, well, I agree with a lot of what you said. I think a lot of it I, I think is, I, I don't think that's true that people are getting, that's where the information is coming from is from the statistics or from like this kind of this like culture kind of like intangible idea. I think it's coming from personal experience. So, so yeah, I would, and I, I definitely think what you're saying about statistics being the not being totally va always, yeah, statistics are complicated. I think that's really true. But I do think that that fear comes from personal experience. And I think that I just would say that the majority of people I, I know, and again, that's not representative if they have, I think a lot of the fear that you're talking about, that's where it's coming from as opposed to, yeah. Culture. What would I wanna ask you something if, if you were, you know, in charge of the educational system, I mean, if you were able to do like redos with these friends in these situations that they found themselves in, what would be a way of preventing those assaults from from happening? I would say, and this is not true of all of them, but I have a couple of friends that I'm thinking of in particular where genuinely, if you asked the other guy, he would not think of it as assault at all. He would be totally shocked. And again, you know, often that's because maybe you, someone wouldn't characterize it as salt. I'm saying, and again, I'm, this is coming from my friends, so I have their side of it, and these are just very specific examples. I would say legally it actually would, like, from a strict legals perspective, they were assaulted and yet that would never have occurred. So I do think that even though, yeah, there's this culture of shaming people who are accused not even convicted, they, you still have to, I don't know that that's the majority of the culture. That's certainly a very loud part of it, but there is also the other side of it, and that's the side that those particular offenders would. Be on. So when you say assaulted, I mean use of physical force. Physical restraint. Yeah. In order to make someone have sex with. You. Yeah. That's illegal. I mean, so that, you know, I mean, aside from physical self-defense techniques, I guess, or somehow not finding yourself in that situation in the first place, you know, it's hard to think how, I mean, yes, Ben shouldn't do that, we know that. But in trying to think about, as opposed to punishing it after the fact, preventing it from happening in the first place. I mean, that's something I think the, we all have to think about, you know, what, how could that not have happened. But how could, how would that have been prevented to being physically. Restrained? You know, again, certainly not blaming anyone because it's a horrible situation to find yourself in. But I mean, with the knowledge that this kind of situation happens, you know, often, I guess what kind of education can we give to people to not get themselves in that situation? I still don't know what you mean by that situation. These are, I, and also I didn't mention. The situation where you're vulnerable to, to being assaulted. So. Just a situation where you're having sex with someone like who happens to be bigger than you. Like these are both sober situ, maybe I should give more context, sober situations. My friends were either in a relationship or with someone that they had known for a long time. These are not like in an alleyway. These are just, they were with someone who they thought they could trust and they were physically overpowered. So like, I can, I, I don't know what you mean by situation. So one of the things I've tried to figure out as I've been writing about this issue is, is, is actually this, w what are we talking about when we say assault? So you're saying somebody's having sex with someone, but who, who then holds them down and does something they don't want to have happen? Is that right? Yes. Yeah, I mean, it's a really good question. I mean, how do you stop once? I mean, part of the problem is that sex is inherently vulnerable. You're there generally naked with somebody. And in heterosexual sex, often somebody who's a lot bigger than you, both men and women, I think are pretty inadequately, you know, educated about sexual, I don't know, reciprocity or, you know, kindness or whatever you wanna call it. So it's, you know, it's a real problem. One of the question marks is can we expect, I mean, this is just, I'm thinking out loud here and I don't know the answer. Can we expect any outside adjudication, you know, whether it's a Title IX officer or the courts to deal with cases of sex gone bad? I mean, is that something that has to be negotiated on an interpersonal level or can we expect some redress for that? Because, and if we want to say we're gonna appoint a body to oversee bad sex, you know, how how would that work? You know, what, what sort of body are you gonna take the bad sex case to? So is that assault is, you know, if you're there naked with somebody who you know, and you've made that decision to be naked with the person, I mean, I guess the thing that has to be taught is better communication, better assertion in those situations. Yeah. Like I, I still like I agree with parts of what you're saying and then I think you're, I like, I just think that that's, yeah, I, I don't know. I I just. Disagree with that. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I don't, to be honest, I don't know either. But I mean, I also know that it's incredibly common. So I mean, you know, my question mark becomes, I think that there's, it's some point realistically, maybe you have to say to yourself, that was a bad experience. I didn't like it. Maybe it wasn't a crime, but it's something I'm not gonna do again, I'm not gonna see that person again. I'm not gonna get myself in situations with X type of person again, something like that. I think I could have given you a scenario where I would understand that. Yeah, I feel like the scenario that I gave you is like, that's clearly illegal. Like if, if you're, I'm, if you're talking about in general you have a bad sex experience, if you're responding specifically to the scenario that I just offered you, I think that's, doesn't make sense from a legal perspective, from a moral per, I don't think that makes sense to me at all. Can I, can. I just, could I just say one more thing there just for, from a legal perspective, I mean, how do you, what proof do you have to go into a situation where you have somebody adjudicating a situation where you say, the guys would say, no, this was, you know, normal sex, and the women say, no, this is assault. Yeah. From a personal perspective, sex is a very subjective situation. There are people who like rougher sex and people who don't. So part of the thing is, is that to me, if I don't like rougher sex, if I don't like a situation where I may be held down, I make sure that I communicate that before I have sex. And if I do like that, then I establish the safe words, which is something that I have learned from sexual sexual education. I established a different form of communication that can come over that if that's what I'm enjoying. If I'm not enjoying that, I, I don't think that she's trying to normalize sexual abuse or being physically held down to do something you don't want to do while you're having sex. I think what she's saying is, is that further sexual education can help to prevent the situations, not completely. Yeah. I'm sorry, I didn't make mean to make this such a back and forth, but again. It's interesting you're getting to the real nitty. Of it. Again, I think that those are good points in a different scenario. Yeah, I think that was the wrong response to the scenario that I'm saying where someone said, no, they did not intend to, to do a certain action in some way. I think that that's a good point in a different scenario, that's not the scenario that I have offered and I'm, I'm, I'm trying to think of it in terms of like what I've told you and what information, but I just, I would dis I I would disagree that that's rel that's the correct response to specifically what I, what I. Have given you. And so the correct response would be prosecute the person. Yeah. If someone has sex with you, if someone penetrates you forcibly after you've said no, which is what I said yes. Because that's what rape is. And I that's what earlier you said rape was. So I think also, yeah, I had, I, I've forgotten I lost my train of thought at some point, but I Yeah, I would think that's wrong. I, sorry. I just, unless there's something on this side I'm looking over on this side. Yeah, go on. Okay. Yeah, just out of curiosity, just tacking on something else to consider is kind of the racial politics behind who we sent to jail and the fact that while there are cases, and I have had even my own personal experience where a male friend ended up in a bad sex situation that even like that was agreed to be consensual, and then later the girl retracted her consent. So I've even had those experiences, but similarly they're like, with the Stanford rate is getting six months and with a, I remember a case bar back and it blew up where the news reporter was saying like, well, these boys have a long future ahead of them and we don't want to ruin that. And so kind of like how there's certain kinds of rapists that we don't want behind prison bars and. And others that we do. So yeah, no, I mean, any focus on criminalization is gonna target minority men. I mean that's certainly what's happened. In fact, one of the interesting cases, there's one case pending against the OCR itself by an athlete named, I think it's Grant Neal, who is at US University of Colorado Pueblo, who was having a consensual relationship that he's black, I don't know the race of the woman, but there's something in Title IX where you can lodge a third party complaint. So this woman who, he was an athlete, she was, I think sort of maybe on the training staff, a friend of hers noticed she had a hickey on her neck, turned him in as an assault, you know, as an assaulter. The woman with the hickey said it was consensual, the school, whoops. Went forward with the case, kicked him off the team, which meant, you know, if you're on an athletic scholarship off out of the school, and you know, obviously a lot of the, you know, percentage of black men in college campuses are there on some kind of athletic scholarship. And well, that becomes a complicated situation. But in, in any case, you have a situation where there's, the woman herself is saying it's consensual and the school proceeded with the case, and I can't think that the race of the guy is immaterial there. So yeah, I mean there's, there really are, that's a, you know, certainly a complicating factor in increasing police policing of sex. This may be like the hardest of conversation that ever had to interrupt. This was a tough interrupted. Yeah. Okay. I mean, we usually, we usually knock off at six because we have, we have plans afterwards. So it's very difficult for me being me to, to break this up. And, and I, I think I want just thank everybody for, I'm not breaking up, I'm just letting your speaker a little bit off the hook, I suppose. Although I'm glad that some of you came and asked the questions and put her on the hook. Yeah. I'm very glad were the tough questions. I appreciate that. I think. Absolutely. It's certainly a conversation that I think is nice to have in public with a very, with a diverse kind of audience of different people that don't know often hear these things because they're done in peer groups or between administrators and faculty members certainly don't get to hear a lot of this kind of thing either. So. So I want to thank Laura for coming and I wanna thank you all for coming. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for the conversation.

Channel: WellesleyCollege

Views: 14,049

Keywords: freedom project, wellesley college, censorship

Id: 6ITJ6-9O9ew

Length: 105min 29sec (6329 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2017