Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the professors quoted in the article suggests otherwise: > The system promulgated a definition of sexual misconduct so expansive that it “plausibly covers almost all sex students are having today,” as Gersen wrote in an article in the California Law Review.
The standard at my college was any alcoholic consumption meant you could no longer consent. If I had a beer and had sex with my girlfriend it was considered sexual misconduct under the definition of consent the school provided.
America’s New Sex Bureaucracy
111–120 of 387 posts
Re: America’s New Sex Bureaucracy
#112Re: America’s New Sex Bureaucracy
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't want to wade into the specifics of campus tribunals, but the broad mechanism here is very commonplace and uncontroversial, no? Eg if I work for an NSF grant recipient and I spit on my boss, and I get fired with no court ruling, would you find it confusing/objectionable?
Yes, that would be objectionable, and probably not even legal, unless your boss was a member of a protected class and it could be shown that what you were doing was a hate action against the class and not the individual.
Re: America’s New Sex Bureaucracy
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
A university tribunal is not government fiat, and a civil court has more power than simply issuing fines.
A university tribunal that operates as a result of federal requirements is government fiat, and a civil court is primarily concerned with awarding damages rather than imposing penalties. That they sometimes do other things is evidence more that the legal system is messy and flawed than that the exceptions should be the rule.
Re: America’s New Sex Bureaucracy
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not hearing from many opponents that sexual assault should be tolerated. It wasn't that long ago that a literal parade of college students were chanting "No means yes! Yes means anal!" Fortunately, that behavior isn't common. But it also isn't fair to insinuate that the other side doesn't exist.
> It wasn't that long ago that a literal parade of college students were chanting "No means yes! Yes means anal!" Nor too long ago that a parade of college students were chanting "Die Cis Scum." Bizarrely (to me), detailed reporting showed that neither groups actually believed the words they were chanting - most people shouting "No means yes! Yes means anal" didn't believe rape was ok and most people shouting "Die Ci…
Re: America’s New Sex Bureaucracy
#116All I want is a world where more people are choosing to have more sex with more people, and as much as I support feminism and liberalism, it makes me sad to see sex become so... formalized and regimented. It's as if people are forgetting that sex feels great and that pleasure is good. I resent the fact that this great country (the US) has one of the lowest rates of sexual encounters per year per person.
Re: America’s New Sex Bureaucracy
#117Meh. This is the second sexual revolution. The first go around resulted in rules and around causal sex in college that favor men and encode male expectations. Women are making clear that those rules don’t work for them and are demanding a change. If you don’t push the line on consent you have nothing to worry about.
I get what you're saying. But the "second sexual revolution" actually happened in the 80s-90s. I remember it distinctly. You always paused, and clearly asked, at each stage. But this is different. Now there is no such thing as "consent". Or rather, consent can be withdrawn retroactively . I've never been accused of rape, as far as I know. But many years ago, one girlfriend told me that she had thought I was wealthy.…
Re: America’s New Sex Bureaucracy
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't want to wade into the specifics of campus tribunals, but the broad mechanism here is very commonplace and uncontroversial, no? Eg if I work for an NSF grant recipient and I spit on my boss, and I get fired with no court ruling, would you find it confusing/objectionable?
If firing you was a requirement to maintain the NSF grant? Yes, that would be objectionable, because then it isn't your boss (a private person/organization) but rather the government imposing the penalty without due process.
Re: America’s New Sex Bureaucracy
#119For the life of me I don’t understand why government funded institutions run their own tribunals. Send it through the proper court system, if the accused is guilty you can expel them cleanly.
If I run a startup, and one of my employees is making other employees uncomfortable, and he keeps getting accused of harassing other employees, and is generally just making some of my best engineers unhappy, hurting productivity, and ruining our carefully constructed culture... ...I can fire him. I mean, obviously I need to go through the proper HR procedures, follow local employment law, respect the terms of his con…
This is a massive false equivalence. For one thing, most of the "employees" in your metaphor are eighteen to twenty-two years old. Not to mention the fact that students are regularly put through the ringer and expelled on the first accusation. It's hardly akin to the "repeat offense" scenario you outlined in your first example. And comparing being expelled for an alleged sexual assault to being asked to leave a resort for rude behavior? Come on.
This is a different situation than anything you described. Universities have much more of a guardian and stewardship role than an employer, and rape is a fucking crime. It should be handled by the mechanism we've created to handle crimes, i.e. criminal courts of law.
Re: America’s New Sex Bureaucracy
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
One way to prevent these things from going too far is to make the standards gender neutral. If men start accusing women of rape by trickery too, I imagine feminists will very quickly back down. The main problem is when it's all in one direction: when people think that defining more things as rape makes them more feminist, more supportive of women, and more deserving of social brownie points, then they have incentive…
I don't have any direct (or indirect) experience. So what happens now if a man accuses a woman of "raping" him? I'm guessing that he'd be ignored. And I don't think the standards will become gender-neutral any faster than they'll become just. I do wonder, though, whether young men are becoming more cautious about who they have sex with. And if there's any way to protect oneself against future rape accusations. Perhap…
I do think there is currently a double standard, and I think that misogyny and the view of women as "passive" participants in sex contributes to that. The CDC estimates that 1 in 71 men will be raped in their lifetime, and an analysis by Scientific American found that 79 percent of male victims of rape reported it to police, but unfortunately I cannot find information on how many of those reports led to a trial and potentially a conviction.
I think that while some men are likely ignored, and we definitely have a problem with the way we imagine sexual assault as a society, the relatively high reporting rate suggests that many cases are also taken seriously.
I'm also not really sure what "strategy" you're referring to; a strategy to protect yourself from Title IX complaints? I really think that what rayiner said is all you need to do: "Don't take advantage of marginal situations; don't toe the line. Don't do anything you can't defend later."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sexual-victimizat...