Discussion for article #237096
So Kipnis is now âthe enemyâ for â gasp â daring to offer a discussion of the potential chilling effects of the ârape cultureâ movement on academic freedom? Really? Sheâs âthe enemyâ? Wow. Just wow. Oh, and for the record, despite repeated, conclusory statements, none of Kipnisâ critics, including the author of this piece, have actually identified what these supposed egregious factual errors are that Kipnis upposedly made.
And, and speaking of facts, as outsiders, we may ourselves not ever fully know exactly what happened in the Sulkowicz case, but what we do know, factually, is that outside of bare allegations, there is exactly ZERO evidence to support her allegations, while there is a TON of evidence â including many of her own messages â to undermine her allegations. But, hey, letâs not let pesky facts get in the way of a good narrative, eh? Sexual assault is a horrific crime. So are false allegations of sexual assault. One need not choose one or the other. Or does that make me âthe enemyâ now, too?
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yawn Itâs obvious that the Fainting Couch crowd has now overplayed their hand and are now being seen for who they really are. Isnât there another âlecherousâ vice president to be writing about?
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And, of course, nobody knows more about subverting and undermining the work of actual feminists than Amanda Marcotte.
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âOr take the much-debated situation at Columbia University, where multiple students accused student Paul Nungesser of various levels of assault. Emma Sulkowicz says he choked her, slapped her, held her legs against her chest and anally raped her while she begged him not to. Another student says he cornered her and forcibly kissed her, and another alleges abuse in a longterm relationship.â
Oh god, this againâŚ
What I find scary about the way Title IX is being used now is the lowering of the standard of proof to a preponderance of the evidence, coupled with an ideological assumption in the minds of many young feminists that women never lie about rape. That can lead to very severe consequences being imposed on a man based on no evidence other than a womanâs accusation. If âshe saidâ always trumps âhe said,â youâve got an inherently unfair situation.
The article brings up the case of Emma Sulkowicz. Thereâs no question that the acts she accuses him of definitely constitute rape, but thatâs not the only question. Thereâs also the matter of whether what she says happened actually happened. Should Columbia have expelled him based on her word alone? Despite the fact that there was no corroborating evidence (such as telling a friend at the time) and she didnât report it for 8 months? Because that seems to be what she was demanding.
Please note, Iâm not saying that her accusation isnât true. I have no idea, and neither does anyone else who wasnât there. Under those circumstances, I think a verdict of not proven is appropriate, and so the system worked. But sheâs become a cause celebre as supposedly the victim of a system that didnât work. Do we really want to mandate, under Title IX, a system where life-changing punishments are imposed based on an accusation unsupported by any other evidence? Thatâs the concern.
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âTitle IX is a good law.â
It may advance good interests, but it does not sound like it provides the accused nearly adequate due process rights.
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So at what point did it become cool for professors (bosses) to sleep with their students (employees)?
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3rd wave feminists have no interest in due process.
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Itâs made fairly clear in the Kipnis article that theyâre usually not in the same department.
And I donât know about being âcool,â but many workplaces do allow this so long as there is disclosure. Sometimes they require one of the employees to be reassigned, but itâs not usually an instant firing offense.
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It should be noted that in the Occidental case, the student wasnât only prosecuted, he was expelled.
It seems, then, that in this case a studentâs career was ended because of this environment. Thatâs not really something that can be brushed off. I think flatly stating that Title IX is a good law may be an oversimplification, while its intentions may be good.
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Whether or not Title IX is a good law, it most definitely needs to be rewritten in order to include due process. I mean, if you canât even find out what youâre accused of until you show up to be interrogated and canât bring a lawyer or talk publicly about whatâs happening, thatâs absurd and a complete violation of justice. Our judicial system is flawed as it is, but we still have far better procedures than what Title IX provides.
And in reality, all this is a balancing act. Too often, universities will sweep things under the rug and canât be trusted to do the right thing. But other times, theyâre over-reaching and treating every accused person like theyâre guilty and every student as if theyâre helpless babies who canât possibly know what theyâre doing. And then thereâs one of the issues Kipnis covered, which is how youâre supposed to know if youâre harassing or assaulting someone if they donât tell you. And where exactly is the line between cuddling in bed and being groped?
So much of this stuff is blurry, and it doesnât help anyone to pretend there are black and white lines on all this. Sure, if someone is physically assaulting another person in order to have sex, thatâs obviously rape. And the same goes for a situation where someone purposefully makes another person incapacitated to take advantage of them. But if someone is willingly getting drunk and going home with someone else, the lines get a little blurrier. I mean, if having sex with a drunk girl makes you a rapist, then Iâm definitely a rapist. But every girl Iâve been with clearly wanted to be with me, so I really donât see how Iâve done anything wrong.
And while the specifics of Kipnisâs post are debatable, I agree with the overall idea. Feminism isnât about treating women like precious flowers who canât protect themselves from men. Itâs about letting women make their own decisions, just like men do. And so if a girl chooses to go out with a guy, get drunk, and go back to his place; that doesnât automatically make him a rapist. Otherwise, weâre just heading back in the direction where women are assumed to be helpless victims that need to be protected from themselves, which is the situation feminism was meant to fix.
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The article makes the claim that:
âStill, Kipnis has no evidence that Title IX is being used primarily, or even largely, to broaden the definition of sexual assault and rape.â
Actually, Kipnis wasnât trying to say that Title IX was doing that. She tried to make the claim that the entire system (of which Title IX is part) is infanitlising students and not promoting individual resillience. And she claimed that part of the way that infantilising was taking place was via declaring some types of relaionships inherently abusive.
And, Kipnis provided significant evidence of that. The University she works for has now changed the rules to prevent a romantic relationship bewteen 24 year old Physics Adjunct Professor (whatever the lowest level of academic position is in the US naming system) and a 24 year old PhD student from the Film department.
Broadening the definition of unacceptable behaviour? That would appear to be proven beyond a shadow of doubt. Large numbers of relationships that were previously acceptable are no longer acceptable.
And Kipnis point was that this change of rules was done, supposedly, to protect the 24 year old student from the 24 year-old adjunct professsor.
Yes - thatâs infantilising the students.
And, by the by, itâs also making the step between the highest level of student-dom and the lowest level of academic look astonishly large and powerfulâŚ
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You make excellent points. The most worrying thing about a lot of this, as Kipnis was pointing out (and I share her glibness about the fragility of these young minds that need trigger warnings and safe spaces and wish never to be confronted by ugly ideas or truths) is that this emphasis on the âcomfortâ of students is leading to a culture where women (well, anyone, really) can say "Iâm no longer comfortable with the fact that we had sex last night - this absence of comfort means that this environment is no longer safe or conducive to my equal access to education - so Title IX. And by evoking Mattress Girl, Marcotte shows that she is not at all troubled by this line. Iâm curious to know how she feels about Emily Yoffeâs piece this week discrediting one of the rape stories in the âHuntersâ documentary about campus rape culture. Itâs not at all that Iâm not concerned or troubled by a climate in which women are sexually vulnerable, or have little or no recourse or redress when they suffer sexual assault. Itâs that the whole academic culture (see the piece on VOX about a liberal professor terrified by his liberal students that is making the rounds among many of my friends who are professors) has shifted to an idea where your feelings about the facts matter more than the facts. âEven though I got drunk and fooled around with a guy who was just as drunk, I now feel bad at that, which means that he shouldnât have let me do that.â I donât think this is an exaggeration. It doesnât mean that we shouldnât address or be concerned about the issue of rape on campus. But we should be very concerned by this slippery logical slope where regret becomes grievance.
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Sorry, Amanda, you lost me on this one, and Iâm usually a fan. Pretty much from the moment you mentioned Mattress Girl. Because your argument works if the system failed her, but thereâs a preponderance of evidence (the scary Title IX bar) that it did not, and that her accusations did not accurately describe what took place. And thereâs also a preponderance of evidence that the man she accused has been significantly wronged. So forget about the deniers and apologists and ridiculous assertions that many rape claims are false, etc. For the sake of argument, letâs assume in just this one case that Nungesser and Sulkowicz had consensual sex. What does Sulkowicz dogged campaign say for the movement then, and how does the movement account for Nungesser? Or could we dismiss her as a narcissistic borderline personality who didnât derail her cause?
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âŚwhat?
âLord, protect me from my friends, I can take care of my enemies,â Lil Wayne raps on his song âScarface.â
Amanda, couldnât you have found your way back to Jean Herauld Gourville?
Or even Voltaire?
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In case you missed it the first few times around, the 21st century is giving us a close-up view of how psychosis enters politics â and flourishes there.
Marcotte seems right that the decision to file Title IX claims was a self-inflicted wound here by the people who filed the claims. In some ways she actually seems overly charitable to Kipnis, since it might be more accurate to say they allowed her to play the martyr.
Kipnis tells an interesting story in her original piece in which she confronted the enemy (in this case a guy leading a seminar on avoiding sexual harassment). It is not clear why the story is there since it somewhat undercuts the idea that there has been some recent change on campus to find that she has been fighting the good fight for years. In the story she conquers her adversary (at least in her mind) with ease, but with a rather obvious claim which those seminars seem entirely designed to answer.
But the interesting thing here is that she prefaces the story with what seems intended to be a wink-wink cover story. The school changed its policy, because it was ridiculous she was convinced that she would fall afoul of it, so to protect herself she signed up for the class to learn how to avoid it. Except that she makes pretty clear she wasnât actually there to learn, and presumably she would have mentioned if she actually ran afoul of the policy. The whole thing is written as a how, look how clever I was to trap the dragon in his den and slay him.
The difference in this case is that, as Marcotte notes, some women foolishly did try to apply the law she was against in this case. Predictably there were no sanctions against Kipnis. Even people holding her up as a martyr, like Jon Chait, had to acknowledge in advance that she wasnât going to receive any sanction from the process. And, of course, they had to do so because it was obviously true.
There are two reasons why a university might try to keep an investigation quiet. One is that it wants to railroad the person being investigated. The other is that it wants to protect the people involved (and its own reputations). It seems pretty clear that Northwesternâs motives here were the latter. And if Kipnis really didnât know it, she was the only one. Based both on Kipnisâ account, and on the information provided by the South Carolina professor that Marshall linked to, it appears that much of the process that Kipnis details became more complex (she describes it as scary) because of her actions. Charitably she may have been making things worse because her fear led her to make poor choices. Less charitably she may have welcomed the chance to play the martyr and made things worse because she (like even her supporters like Chait) knew she wasnât really in any danger of sanction.
Of course this just makes the decision to use Title IX even more foolish. Here is a woman who brags about making herself a voluntary martyr in her original piece. More strategic opponents might have thought it was not a good idea to help her in her martyrdom.
(Separate from the more reasonable martyrdom about being investigated, she also seems to have felt victimized by protests against her which she inaccurately characterizes as claims of PTSD. Of course protests are the way that people who disagree with her make their opinions known. So there again we have her objecting to people publicly disagreeing with her by mischaracterizing them as trying to shut down her speech).
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