Sexual Citizens, page 6
“THIS IS GOING TO BE LIKE A WHOLE NEW CAN OF WORMS.”
Social organization doesn’t just make assault possible. It also renders some assaults more visible than others, in ways that are highly gendered. Men we interviewed who’d been assaulted, like many students, struggled to make sense of their experience. When we first met him, Boutros seemed like a member of the global elite. An aspiring Olympic-level squash player, he speaks English, French, German, and Arabic, and worked for the year before college at a bank in Switzerland. But as his story unfolded we realized the error in our assumptions: his family had fled Lebanon for France, and he had been a scholarship student at a Swiss boarding school. His good looks, language skills, and boarding school contacts helped him find a job as a bank receptionist in Geneva during his pre-college gap year. In response to the question about whether he’d ever had sex where he or the other person did not fully grant consent, he said, “Not sex, no, but this was weird.” He warned us that “this is going to be like a whole new can of worms.” Boutros described a pub crawl during a long weekend in Edinburgh with his best friend and two women who were several years older. Late at night, the cab dropped his friend off at the hostel. Boutros planned to walk across town to his cousin’s house. But one of the women insisted, “‘No, no, no, like you’re too drunk. Just come back with me.’ And, um, I went back to her house, and it was weird. Like she was trying to get with me and stuff, and I just wanted to go to sleep. And, um, I think that’s like the closest to like . . . I guess that’s kind of like sexual assault.”
We asked Boutros about this woman “trying to get with” him. She undressed, grabbed him, and wouldn’t let go. He repeatedly asked her to leave him alone. In our conversation, Boutros kept doubling back on his story, his otherwise coherent discussion becoming more and more muddled.
I don’t think it’s sexual assault. Come on, a girl can’t really sexually assault a guy. I don’t know, maybe . . . I was thinking, “What the hell are you doing? You’ve got a boyfriend, I like your best friend, just leave me alone.” I guess it is, but it just sounds like—sexual assault makes it sound pretty bad. I guess it is, pretty. Okay, fine. It was sexual assault. I just think it was weird. And she’s a weirdo. . . . As I said, I really overthink things. I don’t think I just got sexually assaulted. “I’m going to sue her and I’m going to like. . . .” No. Unless I get grievous bodily harm or come to serious financial detriment.
Boutros eventually pried himself free. She had taken advantage of the fact that he was in her apartment, in a city he didn’t know, and that he was drunk. When we tell people that nearly one in six men in the SHIFT survey experienced some form of sexual assault by the time they graduated, they almost invariably follow up by asking: “Who is assaulting them?” In two-thirds of the cases, it’s women.19 This answer is hard for many to make sense of. It’s similarly hard for many heterosexual men to see themselves as victims of sexual assault—how could it be assault if they were not afraid or were never physically overpowered?20
“I WAS DRINKING ’CAUSE I WAS UPSET.”
Tim is tall, athletic, and handsome, and was part of a prestigious group of men on campus; his very active sex life mostly involved getting drunk and hooking up with women (“girls,” as he called them). He didn’t feel harmed by his assault, but he was indignant about the invisibility of his experience. The evening he wanted to talk with us about happened during his sophomore year. He described himself as having been “really sad.” He went out to one of the bars near campus and drank heavily, alone: “My last memory is feeling myself losing control, looking and seeing if any of my friends are there. There was only one guy, eating face with some girl—he’s not gonna help me right now. My last memory is face planting on the table. I wake up again maybe like 5:45-ish.” He was in an unknown bed. His face was sticky. He checked to see if maybe he’d thrown up—but it wasn’t vomit. He realized it was vaginal secretions. He had no memory of what happened.
We asked him how he felt about waking up naked and confused in a stranger’s bed. “Well, I don’t really care. Like, shit just happens, right? Whatever. I walk back to my room. I sleep it off, wash my face. This bitch probably rubbed my face while I was asleep.” The next day, he asked a friend, “What the fuck happened last night?” His friends had seen her drag him, barely able to walk, back to her room. This was not Tim’s first interaction with her. Early in the fall of his freshman year, he was, somewhat typically, blackout drunk at a party. “There was an hour I didn’t remember . . . I was just like dancing, barely standing up.” She approached him, took his phone out of his pocket, and snapped some pictures of them together. He didn’t remember any of this. Weeks later she walked up to him in the dining hall and asked him to send the pictures to her. “I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ She’s like, ‘You were really fucked up so I took your phone out of your pocket and took pictures.’” Tim shook his head and told her, “‘You don’t know me, you’re not my friend.’” He figured she wanted him to text her the photos so she could get his number. Thinking back on this, and his later story, he told us, “She’s a psycho, she’s a fucking psycho.”
Tim was angry—not at the woman or at his friends who just let him get dragged away, but at the feeling that the kind of experience he had goes unrecognized, and if he brought it up, it could go catastrophically wrong.
Like, shit, I really didn’t care to be honest . . . but what was upsetting is obviously if that happened to a girl there’d be a huge fucking deal. . . . I don’t really care what happens to me—passing out in public, that’s dangerous for me, if anything, it’s better that she took me home, but here’s what got me really angry about it. I didn’t give a shit. I’ve hooked up with a lot of girls when I’m drunk. What was upsetting to me is that say I go to Columbia, right? I’ll say “Hey, I blacked out and passed out. Woke up in this girl’s bed,” right? . . . They talk to her. All she has to say is, “He was drunk, he doesn’t remember, he raped me,” right? And who are they gonna believe? Best case scenario, it’s a stalemate. More than likely, she could say, “He was drunk, I remember he was”—and what the fuck do I do? So I feel if any girl says that, they’re fine. But a dude doesn’t have recourse, it’s fucked up. Again, like personally I don’t think it’s that bad, but I definitely understand how that’s like textbook definition of rape, right?
Tim is right: he was assaulted. It may never have occurred to the woman who first stalked and then assaulted Tim that there is sex that men do not want to have, in part because of sexual scripts that suggest that men always want sex.21 Like many more men than women, Tim did not feel particularly harmed by what happened to him. He was, however, angry about the ways in which, in our terms, prevailing gendered assumptions invalidated his experiences and made them unintelligible—not to him, since he very explicitly noted that “that’s like textbook definition of rape”—but, he felt, to the institution and the world around him.
“I WAS LOST ALREADY.”
Boutros and Tim found it hard to make sense of their experiences because of gendered ideas about sex and assault, including the notion that men always want sex, and that assault necessarily requires being physically overpowered. Fran’s experience also reflected gendered sexual ideals—in her case, the moralistic division of women into saints and sinners. The silencing of Fran’s sexual citizenship began at a birthday party when she was five. Her parents, new to Mountain Brook and unfamiliar with the conservative Southern Baptist community’s standards of modesty for young girls, had dropped her off at a birthday pool party. She felt like a million bucks in her new bikini from Target, with a matching cover-up. The shaming was immediate, and intense. She didn’t even know what a slut or a sinner was, only that the other girls told her she was one. And not just that day; they picked on her all through elementary and middle school, with a social hierarchy that placed her at the bottom because of her perceived moral defects.
A middle school party was a turning point. She was rarely invited anywhere, and she and another ostracized kid—also in a panic about one of their first boy-girl parties—decided it might be easier if they swiped some tequila and did a couple of shots before the party. It was a revelation to have even a brief interlude where she could tune out the worries about what others might think or say. She felt powerful, getting away with and even embracing the transgressions that she had for so long been accused of. The adult chaperones did not seem to notice her intoxication, or perhaps it just confirmed what they already felt about her. And her friend’s parents who picked them up may have just thought that she was being silly on the way home.
This was the start of what Fran subsequently described as her descent into being “a bad girl”—sneaking out of the house, frequently stoned and drunk, after her parents went to bed (“which they did at, like, 8 p.m.”). Her parents didn’t notice; all they cared about, seemingly, was her field hockey and her grades. Fran was raped at 14, in the back of a car, by her boyfriend. They’d only been going out for two weeks, and hadn’t done anything other than touch each other’s bodies with their clothes on. She doesn’t entirely remember what happened, other than that one moment they were clothed and making out, then suddenly, they were naked and his penis was inside of her. This was her first of many rapes. He was a senior, and had turned eighteen months before the incident. She was too young to legally consent. She didn’t think about this; all she knew is that she didn’t want to be having sex, and had not consented. But then, as she recounted, she decided it was fine. It started to feel good. And anyway, “I was lost already.” She had been since she was five.
HOW COULD I NOT KNOW THAT AN INVITATION TO SOMEONE’S ROOM MEANT HOOKING UP?
If sexual shame produces vulnerability, so does silence. And it’s not young people’s silence we’re talking about here, it’s our own: failure to talk to them about sex, to articulate a vision for what their projects might be, to lay the groundwork for them to own their sexual citizenship. The refusal to acknowledge young people as legitimate sexual beings causes harm: not feeling as if they have the right to say “yes” causes confusion about when it’s legitimate to say “no.”22 We were astonished by the extent to which these otherwise highly educated young people lacked meaningful knowledge about sex, with consequences that were direct and disturbing. This was most acutely at play during those early weeks of school when perhaps the prime directive is: Don’t look stupid.
Kimberly’s mother, who’d been a waitress in a bar, was murdered by her father when Kimberly was in middle school. Kimberly and her younger sisters, taken in by an aunt in rural Maine, basically raised themselves. Kimberly felt bad leaving her siblings behind in that small, drafty house, but Columbia was her big break, and no one was going to stop her from becoming an engineer. Her second night on campus, a guy from across the hall knocked on the door of her room, inviting her to a party. “Sure!” she told him. She was not going to drink, she said to herself, but she’d go. But everyone else was drinking, and it felt weird to keep refusing. She doesn’t remember very much of what happened—mostly that her roommate, who came to find her later in the guy’s room, brought her back to the party. She recalls feeling embarrassed when he announced to everyone that she gave great blow jobs, that he was going to ask her for another one sometime soon.
Only the next day, at the orientation session on consent, did she gain the language to label what had happened: that they hardly even said a word to one another, that he never checked in with her about what was okay, and that she was too drunk to even make sense of what was happening. She said she bore no animosity toward him because he was also a freshman and didn’t know any better. What does it mean to be so unsure of one’s sexual boundaries, so without a language for physical and sexual autonomy, that you need a workshop on consent to understand that you’ve been violated?
“BUT YOU’RE HAVING FUN.”
Gaslighting—psychological manipulation that sows doubt, making someone question their own memory or sanity—takes advantage of inexperience; and those starting out in college are particularly vulnerable, because they are inexperienced not just with sex but with college life itself. Jamie was the rare kid who’d gotten through boarding school without drinking at all. Short, with straight shoulder-length hair and dark eyes, she was the daughter of poultry workers from Maryland’s Eastern Shore. In high school Jamie worried that as a scholarship kid, she might not be given a second chance if she got in trouble. Better to keep her head down and excel. She was not just going to be the first in her family to make it to college—she was going for the Ivy League. Her plan had always been not to do anything illegal—no drugs and no drinking until she was 21. Her life project felt too precarious to take any big risks, and she was particularly cautious about sex.
But it seemed like everyone in her dorm was drunk those first couple of nights. Jamie worried she was missing out on some essential part of the experience. On the third night she gave in and did a couple of shots. Late that night, one of her new friends texted her. Did she want to come see his saxophone? She walked into his room, and looked around. Where should she sit? Sure, it’s awkward to sit down on a bed, but where else could she sit? Jamie didn’t want to seem uptight or uncool by choosing the desk chair or the floor. They chatted on his bed and then he reached over, dimmed the lights, and started to touch her. He caressed her chest, shoulders, and neck. She told him she didn’t want to do anything, and reminded him about her boyfriend from high school, then a freshman at Harvard. Saxophone guy responded, “No, but you’re having fun,” and kept touching her. She didn’t want him to feel like he’d done something wrong, so she just told him she was too tired to fool around, grabbed her shoes, and walked back down the hall to her room.
Jamie felt like an idiot—how could she not know that in college, an invitation to someone’s room meant hooking up? She felt awful, that she’d unintentionally cheated on her boyfriend. She was worried about burning bridges—she hadn’t made many friends yet, and didn’t want to lose one already. She was even more worried about her reputation. People might learn about what happened, and think of her as an inexperienced virgin who didn’t have a clue about how to have fun, how to navigate the “real college experience.” She didn’t call what happened an assault—she called it a “learning experience.” She’d never told anyone until she shared it in the interview—she thought people would blame her, say she should’ve known better. This was the first of three times that Jamie was assaulted. The interview was so difficult that we reached out to her afterwards, to check in and see how she was doing. Jamie insisted that she was fine—that she’d been eager to participate in the research, and was glad she did. Jamie was proud of the months of sobriety she’d logged, and hoped that her story could somehow help make campuses safer. Still, for all her “learning experience,” it was sad to hear how much of that learning was done alone, without much help from the communities and institutions whose job it was to raise her.
“I CAME ALL THE WAY UPTOWN AND I’M NOT EVEN GONNA HAVE AN ORGASM?”
Gwen prepared for the interview, bringing a list of all the guys she’d hooked up with—she’d even checked it with her friends—and referred to it from time to time as we chatted. As a tall, beautiful white woman, she’d slid easily into the New York club scene, and spent several nights a week out, downtown. She described herself as “boy crazy,” but—other than one threesome she bragged about—she had not actually had intercourse with that many people. The words spilled out, as she shared stories that she thought were “good for the study.” She hadn’t wanted to have intercourse with the B-list actors, not-that-famous professional athletes, and other guys she met in clubs who invited her back to their hotel rooms—and so she didn’t. But her strategy to “not have sex” was to give them a blow job. For her this seemed like a reasonable compromise, a way to get out of a room she no longer wanted to be in, when a guy was pushing for something more. She repeatedly said that she wanted to “restore the intimacy of the make-out.” The line seemed fairly well practiced. But it reflected a sentiment that seemed to us sincere: yearning to enact a sexual project in which physical intimacy expresses emotional connection, rather than her perceived feminine obligation to satisfy someone else’s physical desire.23
Gwen was reluctant to label what happened freshman year an assault. But when asked if she had any regrets, she immediately answered: “Yeah, scary sex regrets.” The guy was a senior she’d met at a party; he wanted to go home that night, but she wasn’t that interested and decided to just give him her number. The next morning, over Sunday brunch at their favorite local diner, her roommates encouraged her to give him a chance. And she admitted to herself that if she was going to be with someone on campus, it might as well include a freshman’s bragging rights of dating a senior. They went on two dates. She had a plan in mind:
All right, we’re going to kiss and it’s gonna be great and then that’s it and then he’s gonna finger me the next time and this is gonna be the slow production. . . . But what was I kidding myself? Like, he’s a senior in college, that was not what was gonna happen. The moment we start kissing I honestly, at that situation, was just trying to force something that wasn’t there.
