On Violence and On Violence Against Women Read online

  Look back over the objections to the ‘Dear Colleague’ letter and you can see that in each instance the letter was trying to facilitate the path for women plaintiffs notoriously let down by the system whenever they bring legal charges or try to press a case. What, for example, would count as ‘clear and convincing evidence’: that the woman wrote it in her diary? That she told her best friend? Or perhaps that she went straight to the police or to the hospital for a medical test? One of the main difficulties is that the letter obliges universities to adjudicate disputes and impose penalties but gives them no legal power to summon witnesses – who in any case are not to be found, since the only witnesses in such cases tend to be the plaintiff and the accused. This is just one reason why women who report harassment and assault have historically been so vulnerable: ‘Your word against his,’ as one British college adviser put it to a young undergraduate friend of mine who had been raped by another student, to discourage her from going to the police: ‘I am dealing with two traumatised, vulnerable people,’ the adviser said. (The student turned out to be a serial rapist who was eventually convicted and barred from the legal training which, unbelievably – or perhaps not – he had been pursuing since completing his undergraduate degree.) To say the absence of witnesses can be exploited is an understatement. In December 2018, four women in the US revived sexual allegations against Donald Trump first made during the 2016 presidential campaign, when Trump had immediately tweeted that they were part of a Democratic conspiracy. Pressed to produce evidence, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said: ‘The president has first-hand knowledge of what he did and didn’t do’ (as if the women did not).19 As Grigoriadis puts it, sexual assault is at once ‘the problem from hell’ and ‘the perfect crime’.20

  One perhaps unanticipated consequence of Title IX has been that the university itself has started to feel under threat: ‘Anxiety about legal exposure’, writes Doyle, ‘registers on every campus as a background hum.’ As a result, administration and bureaucracy in American universities have swelled (as have the salaries of investigators), while Title IX cases take on ‘a mind-numbing fractal complexity’.21 At exactly the same time, across the US, university management has been increasingly aligning itself with campus security – hence ‘campus sex, campus security’, the title of Doyle’s book, although she is careful to insist that there is no seamless line that runs between the two. At Arizona State University, a campus police officer was recorded violently arresting a black woman faculty member, Professor Ersula Ore, who had refused to show her ID on the street (she was shoved up against a car, thrown to the ground and handcuffed). In November 2011, at the time of the Occupy movement, police pepper-sprayed students as they protested silently against higher tuition fees at UC Davis. A subsequent investigation, forced on the authorities because a student’s photo of the scene had gone viral, established that the police had been sent in by the university’s chancellor, Linda Katehi. In a subsequent statement, Katehi explained she had acted out of concern that the campus was under threat of outside infiltration – an age-old ploy to discredit and quash political protest. These vocabularies have chilling resonance across the globe. Note, for example, how effortlessly harassment – ‘groping’ – can slip into far-right discourse about the threat posed by migrants: ‘Our authorities submit to imported, marauding, groping, beating, knife-stabbing, migrant mobs,’ Alice Weidel, joint leader of the German AfD in the Bundestag, tweeted in January 2018 (a tweet eventually blocked by Twitter).22 Katehi feared the consequences for the university if ‘anything happens to any student while we’re in violation of policy’.23

  Who, we might ask, is violating whom? Who or what exactly is in danger? A student’s ‘experience of vulnerability’, Doyle writes, ‘has translated into a sense of the university’s impending doom, to which it responds with a militarization of all of its processes’.24 This was just one of several worrying moments I encountered while researching the topic of harassment, because it demonstrated the speed with which a progressive cause can be complicit with, or co-opted by, nasty political agendas (I realise that should hardly have been a surprise to me in the age of Brexit and Trump). Likewise Katehi’s suggestion of ‘outside infiltration’. Since ‘outsider’ usually means ‘foreigner’, danger to women, not for the first time, is being sidelined by a felt racial threat, another example of the short time span in which women’s issues are ever allowed to be the main event. There is an irony in this resurgence of racist tropes given that Obama saw the issue of campus assault as belonging to the agenda of civil rights. ‘There’s a reason the story of the civil rights movement was written in our schools,’ he stated at the 2009 NAACP Convention. ‘It’s because there is no stronger weapon against inequality.’25 ‘Education has long been recognized’, the Department’s letter states in its opening line, ‘as the great equalizer in America.’ Sexual harassment harms students. But I also wonder if it would be the focus of such official concern were it not seen to be chipping away at national pride, tarnishing what – for most US citizens and certainly for students burdened with crushing debt – has always been, and is even more today, the ever-retreating vision of the American dream (the debt part applying equally to students in the UK).26

  * * *

  From the very beginning there has been one particular feminist subtext to this story. Catharine MacKinnon was one of the earliest campaigners for the inclusion of sexual harassment in universities under Title IX.27 In her first book, Sexual Harassment of Working Women, published in 1979, she argued that harassment was a form of discrimination arising from inequality. Inequality is crucial, as distinct from difference. Case after collapsing case in the courts had shown that if you take as your starting point the idea of a pre-existing, God-given difference between the sexes, then it becomes much more difficult to prove discrimination, even in cases of harassment. Because men are different, you will be told, they are just behaving as normal (they cannot help helping themselves). Instead she insisted, in what is for me one of her strongest arguments to date, that only if such behaviour is seen to stem from unequal power relations, rather than expressing the natural order of things, can it be classified as illegal under discrimination law. Forms of behaviour ‘that would not be seen as criminal because they are anything but unusual may, in this context, be seen as discriminating for precisely the same reason’.28 The ‘usual’ – what passes as the norm for men – being precisely what anti-harassment activists consider themselves to be fighting against.

  As the pay gap in the UK widens, notably for young women entering the workforce for the first time, we should take note.29 In a special Channel 4 News report on harassment in December 2017, Maryann Brandon, one of Hollywood’s most successful film editors and producers – her list includes Star Wars – stated that as long as there is unequal pay, harassment will continue. I am less sanguine than Brandon that equal pay in and of itself would bring sexual harassment to an end (in April 2019, ten women filed a lawsuit against Disney for gender pay discrimination).30 When the NCCL published its pamphlet on sexual harassment, with specific reference to US civil rights legislation, it too defined harassment as unlawful discrimination and placed it firmly in the world of work, as a trade union matter. But, although it made reference to US legal recommendations, it was far more wary of the likely success of women having recourse to the law. MacKinnon, on the other hand, has spent much of her life trying to bring sexuality within the law’s remit. If sexuality were separated from gender inequality, she writes in the final pages of the book, then the risk is that sexuality ‘would become a law unto itself’.31

  Although I am sure MacKinnon did not intend it in this way, ‘a law unto itself’ might, however, be a perfect description of exactly what sexuality is. For psychoanalysis, sexuality is lawless or it is nothing, not least because of the way it plunges its roots into our unconscious lives, where all sexual certainties come to grief. In the unconscious we are not men or women but always, and in endlessly shifting combinations, neither or
both. This is where I have from the beginning parted ways with MacKinnon and more generally with radical feminism which, brooking no ambiguity on such matters, sees masculinity as perfectly and violently in control of itself, whereas for me it is masculinity out of control – masculinity in a panic – that is most likely to turn ugly. ‘Toxic masculinity’, comments writer and hip-hop artist Jordan Stephens, ‘is being championed by men who are so terrified of confronting any trauma experienced as children that they choose to project that torture onto others.’32 Student-on-student harassment can be a way for anxious young men to launch themselves into a form of power which, they realise, just might be beyond them. For more than a decade now, male students in the US have consistently been getting lower grades than women.33 Across the US as a whole, the proportion of men earning BAs is declining, at thirty per cent of men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, compared with thirty-eight per cent of women. Women also gain more doctoral degrees than men and are now more likely to enter medical and law school. In high schools boys are also consistently underperforming girls, as indeed they are in the UK.34

  This of course exempts harassers from nothing – even if some of those busily collating these statistics are using them to excuse male violence, at the same time as they target women’s advancement, not to say feminism, as the cause. But it does allow to (some) men a glimpse of their own imperfection. It opens up a gap between men who brook no challenge to their authority and those for whom such authority is nothing to be proud of, not least because they understand that one person’s power is always exercised at somebody else’s expense. If this were not the case – and all men were by definition exactly who they are – then feminism is on a hiding to nothing. The mind, with no mercy, shuts down on itself with no get-out clause, no room for psychic manoeuvre for either sex (a feeling I always have when I read MacKinnon and her followers on these matters). None of which is to underestimate how unremitting masculinity can be, even when a man is convinced he is reformed or, to use the current term, ‘woke’. This is how a student at the University of Austin, Texas, described to Grigoriadis, without a trace of irony, his new ethos – ‘good words to live by’ – now he had come to understand that ‘pushing’ girls into sex was wrong: ‘Shave with the grain the first time, always buy tools you don’t have to replace, don’t aim a gun at someone unless you intend to shoot them. Don’t have sex with anyone who doesn’t want to have sex with you.’35

  We need, then, to acknowledge the strange vagaries of human sexuality, which has always felt emancipatory to me; recognise its stubbornness once it has been locked into place (what feminist psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell has described as the heavy undertow or drag of sexual difference); insist that harassment is unacceptable and must cease. Holding these apparently contradictory ideas in mind at the same time, moving on more than one front: for me this presents the greatest challenge raised by the present crisis. The tension between these components of the issue perhaps helps us to understand why legal attempts to curtail harassment, as they have incrementally spread across campuses in the US, might also seem to be ineffective, to go awry, even to defeat themselves. At the end of her book, Grigoriadis cites statistics which suggest that efforts at legal redress, and other measures, over the past decade appear not to have reduced the incidence of harassment on campus. She is, incidentally, scrupulous in her use of statistics: the New York Times had to issue a public apology for a review which wrongly suggested she had overlooked US Department of Justice figures indicating that women students were less likely than other women of the same age to be the target of sexual assault (as if this somehow made campus rape less of a big deal). But even if Title IX has not produced the sought-for result – the elimination of campus harassment or even a change in attitudes – Grigoriadis concludes that on balance it has been a good thing.36 The fact that she has to spell this out indicates how far her own journey has taken her from certainty on the matter.

  Her book, however grim, is a carnival of characters. There is no one she declines to talk to, no place she will not go. Talking to college guys late at night is not something she enjoys. More than once I found myself asking how on earth she could bear to carry on some of these conversations (a question she also asks of herself). Not altogether willingly – appropriately, we could say, for her topic – she immerses herself in the college fraternity scene where male students, notably in their first term, set out to prove they have arrived by grabbing as much sex as they can, their unbridled misogyny seeming to be the source of most assaults. (‘Last night I should have gone to jail’ is a popular response when she asks them about consent.37) Her description of frats, which makes Hollywood sound comparatively progressive, matches that documented from 2008 to 2018 by photographer Andrew Moisey, whose pictures of fraternity life uncovered ritual humiliation, homoerotic bonding and animal cruelty from men ‘destined to be America’s future leaders’. These rituals can start even earlier. In November 2018, a ‘hazing’ video emerged capturing a young student in Toronto being pinned down by schoolmates in a locker room and sexually assaulted with a broom handle; up to then, the all-boys Catholic school had long been known as a ‘beacon of tradition, Catholic faith and elite hockey’.38 In the course of one year, 2017, four freshman students died as a direct result of hazing rituals during initiation ceremonies (around a hundred thousand young men choose to undergo these rituals every year).39 Drawing on historian Nicholas Syrett’s 2009 study of fraternities, The Company He Keeps, Grigoriadis tracks this behaviour to the 1950s when GI Bill undergrads came back from foreign wars ‘with notches on their belts to face Eisenhower’s moral strictures at home’.40 None of this changes the reality that all-male fraternities are surrounded with an aura of the sacred (indeed the ugliness of the rituals may be the reason why). In 2016, the North American Interfraternity Conference joined with the National Panhellenic Conference and agreed to spend $300,000 on lobbying, amongst other things, against fraternities going coeducational, as those at Harvard and Wesleyan had done. They were also calling for congressional nullification of the ‘Dear Colleague’ letter (on this they would get their way).41

  Grigoriadis listens to young women who, while entering freely into the campus hook-up culture of casual sex, also describe themselves falling into alcoholic stupor and waking up to find they have had sex they knew nothing about and were certainly not in any position to enjoy. Alcohol on campus plays a key role, but that is most often turned against women, as if the problem was their being out of it, rather than the fact that someone took advantage of their state. A woman having been intoxicated is, of course, precisely what the accused, the police and the counsel for the defence in rape cases use to discredit her evidence and get a case dismissed. In a recent survey, seven per cent of women students answered yes to questions about whether they had been penetrated while asleep, unconscious or incapacitated by alcohol or drugs.42 When serial ‘black cab rapist’ John Worboys was released on parole in the UK after serving nine years and nine months in prison, one of his many accusers described how she had been laughed at by the police: ‘[The police officers] said I must have been drunk and fallen over. I was not believed.’ (She woke up bruised after Worboys had persuaded her to have a drink and forced a pill into her mouth.)43

  Grigoriadis also talks to a group of young women whose casual attitude to sex extends to assault, which, like many of the women who voted for Trump in 2016, they dismiss, while rolling their eyes at male boorishness. Yet they too describe the ‘weird’ things that happened to them at the start of their freshman year, and find themselves wondering whether encounters meant to be sex might in fact have been rape. She talks to the mothers of boys who feel they have been wrongly accused, some of whom have been sent down from college, their educational ambitions and future prospects in shreds: ‘to hell with the university’s bullshit due process,’ one of the mothers says. She talks to one boy who genuinely seems to believe that he ‘accidentally’ had anal sex with his girlfriend. She talks to abusers and
rapists who are proud of what they have done, and then lists their truly sickening comments about women, which I have chosen not to reproduce here. She listens as one student first denounces Trump as most likely ‘terrible’ for his country, then triumphantly proclaims ‘the bitch is dead’: ‘We’re back, we won, and we’re mad.’ She describes cases where it felt to her, as she got deeper and deeper into their complexity, that the facts had begun to ‘blow away’.44

  Hesitantly, Grigoriadis admits to not believing every student plaintiff, although she has no doubt that the call to believe women has brought about a welcome sea-change.45 She allows for mixed motives and confused memories – blurred lines – in which both plaintiff and the accused might genuinely feel they are telling the truth, where what one student genuinely experiences as unwelcome may not have ‘knowingly’ stemmed from an intent to harm. ‘Unknowingly’ on the other hand brings us slap-bang up against the unconscious where all hues darken and blur. (Freud used the blurred outlines and colours of modern painting as an analogy for the unconscious.46) The Blurred Lines of her title is an allusion to the title of a popular song by Robin Thicke, which includes the line ‘Must wanna get nasty’ and repeats ‘I know you want it’ at least six times. The song is also the basis of an essay by Roxane Gay in her bestselling Bad Feminist, one of the reasons she is a ‘bad’ feminist being that she finds herself wanting to sing along.47

  Blurred Lines starts and ends with the case of Emma Sulkowicz, who, having unsuccessfully brought a rape charge against a fellow undergraduate at Columbia University, politicised a whole generation of students on sexual harassment with her Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight), a work of endurance art and political protest whose self-imposed ‘rules of engagement’ required her to carry a dormitory mattress everywhere she went on campus for nine months. ‘That image’, Hillary Clinton said in her speech to the Democratic National Committee’s Women’s Leadership Forum in 2015, ‘should haunt all of us.’48 By the end of her book, Grigoriadis believes Sulkowicz’s account of what happened, despite its having been challenged down to every last detail by Paul Nungesser, the student she accused. Nungesser went on to file his own complaint against the university for violating his Title IX rights by allowing Sulkowicz to continue with her protest piece, for which she received academic credit (Columbia settled with him out of court). Nungesser’s case is not helped when his mother alludes to women Nazi perpetrators in his defence. Grigoriadis continues to believe Sulkowicz after hearing released messages in which she appears to be appealing for the anal sex which is at the basis of the charge of rape. And when, in a gesture Grigoriadis sees as verging on a ‘retraction’, Sulkowicz writes in a note accompanying a later piece based on her experience: ‘I do not mean to be prescriptive, some people find pleasure in feeling upset.’49 The sentiment comes dangerously close to suggesting that women enjoy experiences they later complain about.