Sexual Citizens, page 10
LANDSCAPES OF PLEASURE AND LANDSCAPES OF ASSAULT
Among the hundreds of stories we gathered about college student sexual experiences, Austin’s story about an evening with his girlfriend was one of the sweetest. During the summer after his junior year, he was living in a great summer sublet in Long Island City, and his roommate had left to see family for the Fourth of July weekend. His girlfriend, who worked near City Hall, had stopped in Little Italy to pick up the fixings for a cheese and charcuterie plate. The night before, he’d stashed a bottle of sparkling wine in the fridge. They were planning to drink it while watching the fireworks from his roof. The sublet had many great features, but its air conditioning was not one of them. And so they stripped down to their underwear in the heat, making each other crackers with a sliver of cheese or salami, talking, and sipping prosecco. Austin described the evening as growing “progressively sillier and sexier.” They made out, and then he went down on her while she stood in the kitchen, leaning back against the counter. When she orgasmed, gripping the countertop, she didn’t have to worry about those thin dorm walls. He loved how loud she was. Then they had some of the Manchego cheese, with tiny bits of date jam. They made their way into the bedroom. He put on a condom and she got on top of him. She rode him for a bit, came, and then they turned over so he could be on top; she came again, and then he pulled out, removed the condom, and came on her stomach. They snuggled for a little while. As she dozed, he got up to wash some more grapes and slice more dried sausage, and he brought her a little plate. They spent the night there, curled up together. They were fine with having missed the fireworks.
It wasn’t just the delightful sex that made this such a powerful story in Austin’s memory. It was the whole scene. Having the apartment to themselves meant that they could slowly build to sex while they ate and drank and talked. Away from the dorms, they didn’t have to worry about being overheard by friends. The heat led easily to savoring a cheese plate while semi-naked, and summer also brought a lack of homework or anything to do other than being together. What stands out in Austin’s narrative is the care—for his girlfriend’s pleasure, but also about his girlfriend as a person, and her care for him. They’d met freshman fall, and started dating at the end of that year, so by that evening they’d passed the two-year mark. They were a little buzzed, but weren’t drunk. The prosecco was just part of a loose, joyous, steamy evening.
We see hints in Austin’s life story of what made him so sensitive to his partner’s pleasure, and so comfortable joking about sex that they had developed an elaborate series of nicknames for the variety of orgasms she experienced. Austin never felt like the type of guy that girls just walk up to and want to hook up with. His all-boys school in Pennsylvania hadn’t offered many opportunities to hone his verbal “game”—skill at talking with women in ways that seductively conveyed sexual interest. By his own assessment, girls at parties were more likely to be put off by his scrawny build than they were to be attracted to his warm smile. The only women with whom he’d spent any appreciable amount of time before college were his mom, his three older sisters, and his many women cousins. Austin credited having strong women in his life as a counterbalance to his male-dominated school culture, and the basis of his respect for women.
Like a lot of his peers, Austin had turned to porn to learn about sex in high school—but his search for answers also led him to erotic fiction, where he learned to think about sex as something more than just “getting my nut and falling asleep.”31 Austin laughed when recalling everything he didn’t learn from his high school’s “sexual diseases class.” The class didn’t succeed in scaring him away from having sex before marriage, nor did the photos of pustulant genitalia answer his questions about sex: what people actually do, what it feels like, how to be good at it. He hated that he was a virgin when he started college, and yet the fall of freshman year he had passed up a chance to have sex for the first time—even though a girl had clearly indicated that she was ready to take things to the next level. He recalled his internal struggle, “I’m an idiot, I’m missing a chance to get my dick sucked.” But he experienced the woman as a really negative person and he knew that he was going to break up with her; it felt wrong to have sex opportunistically. He recalled thinking, “Everybody’s gonna be angry at me, there’s always consequences.” Even after he lost his virginity, his few random hookups left him feeling bad about himself. On spring break in Cabo San Lucas, he got drunk and had sex with a girl he met at a club. “Did I need to do that? Having sex with someone you care about is a lot better.”
It had taken Austin several years to grow into who he was when we interviewed him. The Austin who was so attentive to his girlfriend on the Fourth of July hardly seemed like the Austin in this story from freshman orientation.
My roommate was hooking up with this girl, sex and everything. So they made me sleep in her roommate’s place. The first night, she was really drunk, and they were just like, “Oh go over there.” And I didn’t know what to do so I just lay down next to her and she was like “Oh I just threw up, like, I don’t want to do anything,” but I kind of just laid next to her for a bit and kind of rubbed her body for a bit. I definitely grabbed her boob, but then I felt weird about it, because I was also drunk, and then I slept in the other bed. And then the next time I saw her because they continued hooking up I went back and we talked for, like, two or three hours about bullshit. We actually got along pretty well, and like, it was never bad, it never felt like it was wholly a bad thing, but I definitely felt bad about it. I shouldn’t have done that. But I was definitely happy that I had slept in the other bed. Glad I did that. I stopped and was like “Uh, this isn’t it.” She didn’t seem like she was hating it, but she didn’t seem like she was loving it. Okay, she probably didn’t give affirmative or negative consent. This is a gray area. And I was just like “Okay, this is weird, this is a bad idea.” I don’t know, it wasn’t one of my best moments.
When we asked him how he would categorize the event, he said, “Not something I would do again.” When we asked him if it was a “hookup,” he was definitive. “No, because we didn’t make out. I don’t know what to categorize it as. Just kind of shitty.” As the interview continued, we asked Austin to share more about his definition of sexual assault and, in light of that, to reflect on what had happened. “I know the definition of sexual assault, like any kind of nonconsensual sexual action, so yes . . . that would probably be considered sexual assault.”
By now, Austin was near tears. He distinguished between rape and assault. “Well, rape in terms of vaginal rape. And sexual assault being, like, a lot of, like, bad touching. Which is I guess what I did. But umm. But also, like. Yeah damn. Well, fuck me, right? Yeah.”
He looked crushed, as if he’d just realized something terrible about himself.
The assault that Austin told us he committed during orientation week was typical of many campus sexual assault incidents: he and the woman were both drunk, it was not reported, they maintained a social relationship afterwards but never discussed what happened, and in fact the interview seemed to have been the first moment that Austin considered that it was assault. Austin was desperate to accrue sexual experience, anxious about being behind his peers. Intoxication clouded his judgment. People know that being drunk is associated with an increased risk of being assaulted, but less remarked upon are the ways in which heavy drinking raises the risk of assaulting someone. An opportunity presented itself, set in motion by the community norm that part of being a good friend is going along with being shuffled into a virtual stranger’s bedroom, or having a virtual stranger shuffled into yours. We don’t know how the woman in Austin’s story experienced what happened. But we do know how Austin felt, after he began thinking about what he’d done. It’s hard to think about Austin as a sociopath or a predator. Did he commit assault? In our view, yes. Is he a terrible person? In our view, no.
Austin knew about affirmative consent; this didn’t stop him from doing what he did. What eventually stopped him? His sex education had instructed him to fear sex, but provided no guidance about how to have sex in ways that were healthy and respectful. Maybe it was what he’d gotten from reading erotic fiction—thinking about sex as something other than just “getting his nut”—or maybe it was his broader feeling that the way you treat people matters, that “there’s always consequences.” Or maybe it was just the fact that he wasn’t that tiny bit drunker, so he paid attention when his conscience called out to him: “this is weird, this is a bad idea.”
There’s a lot that can be said about this. But the role of alcohol in clouding both his judgment and the woman’s own capacity to express herself is inescapable. Just over half of those who reported being assaulted in the SHIFT survey identified the “method of perpetration” as “incapacitation.”32 That pretty much means that the person who was assaulted was drunk. This doesn’t make the assault their fault, but it does reflect an important reality. We need to grapple with the role of alcohol in the college landscape, particularly because, in our view, it doesn’t just put people at risk of being assaulted: it also puts people, like Austin, at risk of committing assault.
3
THE TOXIC CAMPUS BREW
“I DON’T HAVE A DRINKING PROBLEM. I’M JUST A FUCKING COLLEGE STUDENT.”
It’s the fall of 2015, the first full day of orientation. After years of meticulously planned afternoons, late nights, and bleary-eyed mornings doing assignments for every AP class they could cram into their schedules, or long hours at McDonald’s to help their family make rent, or summers of internships and weekends at band practice, tutoring, or varsity sports, and then months of essay writing, test taking, and hand-wringing, these new freshmen were in—at college, away from their parents, in the big city. For many, the focus of anticipation was on what they had deferred—or not been allowed to do—while they were working so hard to get in: “getting drunk and getting laid.” Lots of students party really hard during orientation. Many move on fairly quickly, finding friends or other social activities, but for some, it’s the beginning of four years of frequent binge drinking. Columbia is not the only campus where students joke that there’s no such thing as an alcoholic until after graduation.
Nick, a senior from Ohio, reflected on that week. “One of the guys bought some beer and I walked across College Walk with like a twelve-pack of Bud Lite. . . . ‘This is so cool, this is sick. [I’m not even] 21, you know?’” Nick was written up for drinking by his RA several times over the course of the freshman fall. “I had to, like, go to speak to advisors and stuff like, ‘Do you have a problem?’ Like, ‘Do you have a drinking problem you wanna talk about?’ I’m like, no, I’m just a fucking college student.”
Freshman fall is both exciting and socially painful. Students are homesick, or feeling bad about how relieved they are to be away from home, or both. They are scared that everyone is smarter than they are. They’re nervous that everyone is more experienced. Drinking together can break the ice—providing the courage necessary to walk into a party of strangers, jump out onto the dance floor, or flirt with a possible hookup. Not everyone drinks; some students cope by going for a run, visiting a museum, or engaging in religious observance.1 But a lot of students drink a lot, and their binge drinking intersects with the campus landscape; some Americans even celebrate this kind of drinking as a part of the normal college experience. The stress young people experience factors in, but stress is a justification as much as a cause.
Students arriving on campus have to manufacture an entire social world. Making friends and finding your people are central to the college project. For students new to campus and unsure where their college paths will take them, a big, loud party with some red Solo cups holds a distinct lure in those early anxiety-filled evenings. The contents of that cup promise to dull students’ worries about meeting new people and offer a shortcut to building friendships with them.2 Drunkenness and college are also tightly coupled in the American social imaginary. Before Jennifer’s older son left for college, the family settled in for a long-weekend movie binge of college-themed films, culled from lists of “best college movies” and Facebook friends’ suggestions. But after following Animal House with Old School, Back to School, and Revenge of the Nerds, Jennifer shut down the film festival. It was not fun; it was a master class in binge drinking.
As much as some students don’t really want to drink, we were surprised to find that unless activities and groups explicitly reject alcohol, even student activity groups that might not stand out as being structured around drinking frequently cement group bonds by incorporating alcohol into their social events. During the fall semester, drinking provides a common set of challenges and experiences that students can share. As on a scavenger hunt, students work collaboratively to solve a series of problems regarding money or fake IDs or party locations or bars where the bouncers card loosely if at all.3
On the opening days of the school year we sat outside bars and watched as bouncers let in large groups of freshmen, some of whom looked like they were high school sophomores or juniors.4 Students were thrilled to have “gotten in” to the local Irish bar for a classic orientation week scene: drunkenly making out with relative strangers, enveloped by the smells of bodies sweaty from the late August heat, feet sliding on a floor slick with spilled drinks and poorly cleaned-up vomit. If that sounds disgusting, it was. But the first-year students we talked to described it as fun—escaping home, breaking the rules, awkwardly discovering the body of another person, creating stories they could revel in hours, days, or even years later. Students form deep friendships, and sometimes even find true love, while caring for their drunk friends—getting them to drink water, or go for a walk, holding their hair while they vomit, or watching to make sure they don’t aspirate vomit while passed out. Assuming that no permanent damage is sustained, the frequently absurd, occasionally life-threatening, hazily remembered and very intense experiences of drunk young people become shared jokes: mistakenly peeing in the closet when too drunk to notice it’s not the bathroom, or standing in rumpled formal clothes outside a bar as the rain begins to fall, arguing about whether a friend—stumbling but still conscious—needs an ambulance, or just a taxi home followed by water and ibuprofen.
An ambulance is always parked on College Walk, the main pedestrian path through campus, where Nick so proudly walked with his twelve-pack of Bud Lite. Mostly the ambulances serve students who are exceptionally drunk or on some drug, or who are injured while intoxicated. Were this a housing project rather than an Ivy League campus, we can imagine the outrage at the necessity for such a thing, or the criticism of how that ambulance was facilitating degeneracy by lessening the consequences for bad behavior. But there is no outrage here. This is privilege: students don’t have to go far or wait very long for help, and if the Columbia ambulance takes them to an emergency room, the ride is free (although the ER visit, notably, is not). There are lots of reasons why young people who attend college drink more than their out-of-college peers, engaging in a riskier behavior and breaking the law at considerably higher rates.5 Their privilege gives them some license to break the rules.6 And for the most part, the law gives them a pass.
No one wants to get “cava’d”—taken away by the university ambulance corps (formerly, Columbia Area Volunteer Ambulance), but this service is an important option and is provided at no cost. Good Samaritan policies encourage students who may themselves have been drinking while underage or using illegal drugs to intervene to help a friend who seems in danger. While the ambulance ride may be free, the ER bill that follows can be well over $1,000.7 And if the Columbia ambulance is busy, students pay for the ride as well. As much as young people are legally adults, their parents typically find out at this point. An out-of-network ambulance ride and IV drip is a rounding error for some family budgets and a month’s rent for others. Because a well-meaning intervention can result in disciplinary action at school, or financial troubles at home, the students who are most likely to drink are the ones who can afford it—not just the alcohol itself, but the risks that go with it.8
SOCIAL RISKS
Both of us remember our own college drinking. Shamus’s junior year was particularly alcohol-filled. He had to take a bit of a break from drinking after he’d danced in a fountain, passed out in some bushes, and woke up with a horrific hangover and an even worse cold. Jennifer dutifully slurped down the contents of a cup of beer with a goldfish in it as she stood in a basement during orientation week. Thankfully, she doesn’t remember the feeling of the goldfish sliding down her throat. She thought swallowing a goldfish was what you did at college. After all, her dad had done it as well.
