As evidenced in this very paper (or website, depending on how you roll), the issue of sexual misconduct and the policies surrounding it are among the most important topics on this campus, as well as on college campuses across the country. The good that this conversation has done is undeniable, and through its continuation we can only hope for and expect our sexual climate to improve. But there are elements of the conversation that worry me.
What concerns me about the sexual misconduct conversation is the grim storm cloud that has begun to loom over sex. Sexual misconduct is a serious issue: one in four women will be sexually assaulted during her time at college. But sexual misconduct is serious because sexual coercion is serious. Sexual coercion is serious because coercion is serious, not sex in itself.
Our culture has always imbued sex with enormous weight. Some of that weight can be attributed to the Bible and other classical religious attitudes toward sex, and much of it results from the association with pregnancy and disease. Biblical warnings against sex likely stem from the risk of pregnancy and disease, too. But these issues are rightly absent from the sexual misconduct dialogue. They’re not what’s at stake here. On a campus where contraception is readily available, sex does not imply pregnancy or disease, and yet the gravity that those circumstances deserve are applied to the safest of sex.
Great strides have been made in the last century to destigmatize sex, and a full realization of this goal would only improve our ability to identify and handle cases of sexual assault. As we continue to make our campus a sexually safer place, we have to be careful not to confuse the gravity of coercion with a gravity inherent to the act of sex itself. In failing to realize this distinction, we risk creating a sexual climate so stern that accusations of assault become more common than assault itself, and detract from the very serious problem of rape and misconduct.
On Tues., Nov. 11, the Washington Post ran an opinion piece in response to the widely read Yale Daily News article “Enough alcohol to call it rape?” published Fri., Nov. 7. In the column in the Post, Ruth Marcus writes, “The new insistence that women must not be shamed into silence and that consent must be evident threatens to edge too far the other way, turning young men who may have misread a sexual situation into accused rapists.” While Marcus’s point expresses an important concern, the “insistence” she describes cannot be ascribed to Yale’s actual sexual misconduct policy; in the case covered in the News, the accused man was found not responsible, and Marcus couldn’t very well argue that University officials shouldn’t take every accusation seriously. This “insistence” is a cultural symptom, not a byproduct directly linked to any specific policy. I think a sexual conversation dominated by the language of vulnerability, risk, and consequence is to blame, and we have to resist this characterization of sex.
Still, I’m not proposing that everyone have lots of casual sex. The importance and intimacy that individuals choose to ascribe to sex is personal, and you should be free to endow it with as much or as little meaning as you’d like. But on a larger scale, a more serious attitude toward sex doesn’t do any good (aside from the obvious responsibility to practice it safely).
The judgment women suffer when they choose to engage in casual sex is well publicized, but the other major implication of an overly serious sexual atmosphere relates more directly to the issue of sexual misconduct and to Marcus’s complaint against it. The language of sexual misconduct policy tells us that we shouldn’t be afraid to speak up about sexual experiences that we feel uncomfortable with—and that’s right, we shouldn’t. But the leap between speaking up and accusation is significant. A tendency toward accusation of others in cases that ultimately aren’t sexual misconduct belittles the traumatizing instances of rape and sexual assault that have occurred on this campus and others, which do warrant accusation.
I worry that an increased awareness of sexual misconduct, although it certainly cannot be faulted, can lead to a conflation of regrettable choices with sexual assault. In an atmosphere that warns us of sex’s enormous inherent value and of its potential for emotional damage, it makes sense that people might become hyper-aware of assault, even in its absence. A sexual experience that does not involve coercion and which might otherwise qualify as regrettable but ultimately unimportant becomes something so emotionally loaded that it seems as though someone must be to blame. I don’t know of any instances in which Yale has dealt with such cases unjustly by ruling in a complainant’s favor (the University put these policies in place only after repeated failure to protect victims). But it is troubling that these cases come up at all. They detract focus from cases of real misconduct and rape, and by identifying themselves as misconduct they threaten to devalue the term.
Agonizing over the desirability of a past make-out seems ridiculous. One might regret it, but it’s uncommon to confuse that regret for coercion. A coerced make-out would be an immediately flagrant example of sexual misconduct. Because making out doesn’t carry the stigmatic weight of sex, the line here seems pretty clear, and a disproportionate reaction seems unlikely. But the status we almost unquestioningly award sex apart from any other romantic act blurs this line dramatically, even though it shouldn’t.
Our ultimate goal should be a campus free of sexual misconduct, and I’m not proposing that anyone or anything is consciously working against that. But I do think that by maintaining a weighty attitude toward sex, we inhibit the achievement of a truly comfortable sexual climate.