BAD VIBRATIONS: The Lies Universities Tell Their Students about Sex
Universities today bombard students with two contradictory messages about sex, effectively encouraging them to carry a dildo in their pocket, while lugging a fainting couch behind them. On the one hand, universities have returned to a quasi-Victorian concern with the unique fragility and vulnerability of college women in matters of sex. On the other side of the campus sex ledger is the dildo raffle. At “Sex Week” festivities and other gatherings nationwide, colleges and universities actively promote sexual libertinism.
Most universities today define sexual assault differently from how it’s specified in law. Colleges now define “sexual assault” so it includes lawful conduct that couldn’t be prosecuted under the criminal law in any state—whether red, blue, or purple. It includes missteps that, in years past, would likely have been considered just messy, “live and learn” encounters between inexperienced (and often inebriated) young people. When pressed, campus administrators justify their new definitions of sexual assault by asserting the right of educational institutions to teach “new values” to the student body. While some judge this an unqualified good, the reality is more complicated.
The redefinition of sexual misconduct, and its enhanced policing by campus administrators, frequently has catastrophic consequences. Students are coming of age in a climate that seeks both to outdo the sexual experimentation of the 1970s and to impose an atmosphere of neo-Victorian surveillance. Campus investigators interrogate inexperienced students not only about whether they had consent for sex, but how they knew they had affirmative consent for each separate act of physical intimacy—each touch, each kiss, each penetration, and each position assumed while performing the latter.
Students—particularly those who are socially awkward, sexually inexperienced, or have conditions that impair their understanding of subtle social cues—are routinely punished for conduct they genuinely believed was consensual, but that transgresses new campus rules. This has led to a wave of litigation by students who allege they were wrongly accused: since 2011, more than 600 such lawsuits have been filed. At the same time, female students—although not exclusively—are advised that encounters they may initially perceive as regrettable but consensual were, in fact, non-consensual “sexual violence.”
This has important psychological ramifications, explains social psychologist Pamela Paresky: “The ability to make choices is how we know we are free, and no free person gets through life without making choices that in hindsight they would make differently. Knowing the difference between making choices and being forced to do things against our will is essential, not only to learning from our mistakes but maintaining psychological integrity and being truly free.” The campus courts occasioned by this movement have also led to systemic violations of accused students’ due process rights, undermining the integrity of the whole project. Victims can find their cases overturned either on appeal or by a court when the accused sues the university over procedural violations.
All of this sends today’s students a message that is, to put it mildly, mixed: you should enthusiastically embrace sexual freedom and experimentation—but make one misstep, even unintentionally, and you will be branded for life as either a sexual predator or trauma victim. This pathologizes the awkward, messy, unavoidably emotional landscape of youthful sexuality.
Universities are free to promote sexual experimentation. But they should be honest that pushing norms and boundaries involves making mistakes. It’s the nature of experimentation that there will inevitably be regrets with something so intimate and personal as sex. This, however, should not be quasi-criminalized.
quillette.com– Samantha Harris & Michael Thad Allen
