Esme began college with a clearly defined sexual project: “I wanted to make out with a ton of boys, I wanted to lose my virginity, and I wanted a boyfriend, in that order.” That plan didn’t include getting raped in the spring of her sophomore year. The night started like many others. With a dozen other friends, she did some shots in a senior’s room. Around midnight most of them set out for an off-campus party downtown sponsored by a student group. Some women stayed behind; they were already too “tapped out, too drunk.” No one in the group was sober enough to notice that Esme was too.
Esme jumped into the first cab; when they arrived, as some of her group poured into the club, she stayed outside to wait for the others. A man approached her. He seemed “nice,” and “kind of cute.” He suggested they go back to his place. Esme told him no, she was waiting for her friends. He didn’t listen. Grabbing her arm, he pulled her down the street toward his apartment. Esme didn’t put up much resistance. She described herself as “kind of laughing . . . with him, ’cause he’s like, kind of being charming and I don’t really know what’s going on.”
But this wasn’t just a crazy college escapade. Once in his apartment, the man got her to unlock her phone. Pretending to be Esme, he sent a message to her friends saying she was with Monica. But Monica was passed out in her own bed, back at their dorm. “He pushed me on the bed, took my clothes off, and started having sex with me. And I was like, ‘hey, stop,’ and he was like ‘no,’ and that continued for a while. . . . I passed out, and woke up again in the middle of the night and threw up a bunch, he gave me a wastebasket,’ and then . . . passed out again. And then when I woke up, he was having sex with me, and I was sober and I was like ‘stop, this is really bad.’”
After she was raped, Esme had trouble concentrating, and her grades started to slide. She was angry at her friends. They had failed to notice how drunk she was, had left her alone outside the club, and had not even questioned that message about being with Monica, who had passed out earlier in the evening. By the time we interviewed her she’d found a new “crew.” Her rape coalesced what she’d been feeling for a while: she needed a more supportive group of friends.
Yet when Esme told us her story, she emphasized her relative privilege. “I’m sure lucky that . . . I mean, this is a fucked up thing to say, but I’m really lucky that I have parents that I can go home to and, like, that day I had the resources to get $60.00 out of the bank and pay for Plan B, and I could go to Health Services and all of that stuff. I feel like my situation is so much less bad than so many other people . . . like if it had to happen to one of the girls that I’m friends with, that I’m close with now—thank God it’s me, because it would fuck them up really really bad, but I can take it.”
She also expressed gratitude about when it happened: right before spring break. Days later she was back home, being cared for by her family. She could talk with her mom about the assault; they’d had conversations about sex and drinking before. It wasn’t easy, but Esme knew her mother would be supportive. “I haven’t cried about it, except for when I told my mom, and I went to a counselor for a while and even then, I was like, ‘This is so ridiculous, I’m probably wasting your time, there are people outside that have actual problems.’”
Stories like Esme’s are what students conjure up when you ask them to describe a “typical” sexual assault. In focus group discussions, interviews, and casual conversations around campus, a common archetype emerged: a creepy guy lurking in or near a bar, and then a young woman awakening after the rape, groggy and shaken, in an unfamiliar space. But even in narratives that fit that archetype, important pieces are left out. Esme’s emphasis is on her friends. In her mind, her loyalty to them set the whole event in motion: the man who raped her approached her while she was waiting alone outside for others. She wondered why no one who shared that first cab with her decided to keep her company as she waited. In her recounting of the aftermath, her resilience, her relative privilege, and her decision to seek out new friends, we see how her social group anchors her story. Sometimes it’s the opposite: social isolation, too, can produce vulnerability.
In this chapter, we use the concepts of sexual projects, sexual citizenship, and sexual geographies to walk through a wide range of sexual assaults. The point is not to make an argument, but instead to outline the range of different experiences that make up the category “sexual assault,” to demonstrate just how varied those experiences are (which is why sexual assault is so hard to address), and to show the utility of our framework. In subsequent chapters, we move more systematically through both an argument and an explanation.
Lupe, who uses the pronoun “they,” was a first-generation college student. Their transition to college had not been an easy one. What they experienced at a “White institution” was so different from their Latino community at home, and they felt that so much of social life revolved around drinking in contexts where Lupe did not feel welcome. During their interview, Lupe told us a story about going alone to a club off campus one Thursday night at the end of freshman year, desperate to get away from the drama of the campus’s relatively small queer community and the predictable “shitty white music” at student events. Lupe left a campus that never felt quite like home to reconnect with what was important to them, and to recharge.
Lupe does not have sex with cis-gender men (men whose gender identity corresponds to the sex they were assigned at birth), and describes themself as not conventionally attractive. So they were a little taken aback when a man sidled up and offered to buy them a drink. Lupe demurred. The man bought the drink anyway, and Lupe “was like, whatever, a free drink.” A single drink in New York might account for ten percent of Lupe’s monthly spending money. Maybe they wouldn’t have accepted the drink if bar drinks weren’t so pricey, if money weren’t so scarce, or if there were more people on campus who liked bachata. But no one seemed to know the Dominican style of music that Lupe loved—that helped them connect with their past and identity, complicated though that could be. And so Lupe ended up at this club, hoping to sit, listen, and escape. Soon after having that drink, they began to feel sleepy and dizzy—so much that upon leaving the club, they were not sure that they could make it home on the subway. The stranger offered to get a cab. After this, Lupe remembers only fragments. Being almost carried out of the cab into a building. The use of force. Waking the next morning, “freaking out, you know, ’cause I like I have no idea where I am, of how I even got there . . . and also like this guy . . . I’m just not into that at all.” They scrambled to find their cellphone and clothes, afraid that “if I don’t get out of here like he might hurt me more . . . ’cause in my mind, men don’t just like assault you, they probably kill you as well, you know?”
Lupe and Esme’s stories share a context—an off-campus bar—and what sexual assault researchers call a “method of perpetration”—intoxication combined with being physically overpowered.1 In other “stranger in a bar” stories, the turning point is not being hauled staggering into a taxi, but changing one’s mind and being ignored.
Jiyoung was in many circumstances a confident sexual agent. She proudly recounted the time she had asked a guy, as they sat eating pizza, if he’d like to go back to his room and have sex. And two summers ago in Paris, naked and making out with a man in bed, she had sat up, told him she was tired, threw on her clothes, and left to go home. “He was a slobbery kisser.” She decided she’d rather catch up on her sleep. But Jiyoung’s decisiveness and clarity about her sexual project of accumulating fun sexual experiences did not protect her in an encounter that fell on what she described as the other side of the “really thin line between rape and sex.” One night when she was very drunk, she approached a man in a bar. After not very much chatting she suggested that they go back to his place. The intercourse didn’t feel good, and she wanted him to stop. She tried to convey that, but “he wasn’t responsive.” When she reflected back on this night, Jiyoung did what many who are assaulted do: blamed herself. “It was a mistake to go up to a person just because you wanted sex.” Once they started down the path to having sex, she reasoned, it was nearly impossible to stop, so she just “ended it quickly and left quickly.”
Esme’s and Lupe’s assaults involved physical force, resistance, and being so drunk they passed in and out of consciousness. Jiyoung, by her own account, “tried” to convey that she wanted to stop and that the sex didn’t feel good. Her partner didn’t use force, but he “wasn’t responsive.” The differences in these stories matter. Prevention that respects women and queer people as active sexual agents rather than helpless creatures in need of protection requires building a world in which everyone understands that even if someone goes home from a bar with you—even after you put your penis inside them—they can still change their mind. And Lupe’s story gestures toward the much broader vision of prevention we will lay out in the pages to come. Of course, Lupe should have been safe sitting at a bar, listening to the bachata, but if there were a space where Lupe felt at home on campus, where they felt they could be and enjoy themself, then they’d never have wandered away, in despair at their isolation. Addressing sexual assault requires talking about more than how people are having sex. Lupe’s story, and Tim’s which follows later in this chapter, draw attention to how loneliness, sadness, and other aspects of mental health produce risk for all kinds of things, including sexual assault.2
Imagine a fraternity: floor sticky with beer, lights low, music too loud to talk. Two people have consumed an astonishing amount of alcohol, and the assault happens in that same building, after the guy has pulled, carried, or cajoled the girl upstairs, in plain sight of many who might have intervened as bystanders. Luci’s story fits a prototype—the toxic brew of alcohol, Greek life, women students new to campus, and older, socially powerful men.3 After years at an elite but very sheltered boarding school in Thailand, she started Columbia eager to lose her virginity, party, and be popular. That first Saturday after classes began, she went out to one of the local bars with another first-year student, Nancy. Their fake IDs weren’t particularly good, but the bouncer didn’t care. The local bars knew that men were their biggest spending customers, and the best way to get men in the door and get them buying drinks was to make sure that there were plenty of women there too.
At the bar they met two seniors. Nancy danced with one, and the other, Scott, bought Luci a drink. After a while, Scott invited Luci back to his fraternity house. She was excited to go with him. This was what college was all about. They stumbled up the busy avenue in the warm early-fall night, turning left on a street toward fraternity row. They stopped for a bit outside of the fraternity’s townhouse on the south side of the street. Scott couldn’t find his keys. They made out on the sidewalk, waiting for one of Scott’s brothers to let them in. Luci’s phone rang and rang. She finally answered it. Nancy was coming to find her. Luci convinced Scott to wait, and once Nancy got there the three climbed the steps and walked through the carved entryway, covered with decades of peeling paint. Scott steered Luci up a flight of stairs. Nancy followed. Luci paused on the stairs to chat with someone she knew, excited to see a familiar face after just a few days on campus. It felt as if her college plan was really coming together. Scott seemed annoyed by all of these diversions, but Luci didn’t really care. As they sat in a shared space on the second floor, Scott made drinks for both girls. Nancy passed out on the couch, before even touching the drink. Scott asked Luci if she wanted to see his room. She did. She knew what that meant—to her. They went up one more floor. He closed the door, and they started making out again. He pushed her down on the bed and started to unbutton her pants. “No, don’t,” she said. He responded, “It’s okay.” As they continued making out, he took off her pants and underwear and penetrated her. Luci remembers saying no again. He continued. She’d never been in this kind of situation before. She was drunk. She’d tried to stop him. But Scott wouldn’t stop. Luci gave up and let him finish.
They dozed off. It was later but not yet morning—there were still plenty of people in the fraternity house—when they awoke to loud knocking on the door. Nancy had woken up, remembered Luci, and had gone to find her. Still drunk, Luci hurriedly threw on her clothes. When she stood up, Scott noticed the blood on the sheets. Looking concerned, he asked Luci if it had been her first time. It was, but Luci denied it. As Luci walked out into the hall with Nancy, she saw Scott pull aside a popular member of a prestigious sorority. Luci couldn’t hear what he whispered to her, but the girl, whose name she didn’t recall, offered to walk her back to her dorm. When we interviewed Luci as a senior, she had never told anyone this story. Or at least, never the full story; right after it happened, she described it to her friends as just a wild night, as consensual. Now, several years later, she said that she would feel weird about changing her story publicly. She blamed herself, at least partially—she shouldn’t have gotten that drunk, she said, or she should have told him up front that she was a virgin. Maybe then he wouldn’t have been so cavalier about how it was “ok”? And yet she insisted what happened to her wasn’t right. To us, she described what Scott did as preying on her. She’d since heard that he’d done the same with others.
“Stranger rape” like the kind we described with Esme, Lupe, or Jiyoung looms large in the national imagination; so too does the kind of frathouse rape that Luci experienced, where she’d just met Scott that night, and never really saw him again. But sexual assault is also something that “normal” people do. The SHIFT survey replicated what decades of campus sexual assault research has shown: a substantial proportion of sexual assaults are committed by an acquaintance, friend, or intimate partner.4 It isn’t just that the two people knew each other; often they’d previously had some sexual contact. This is part of what makes it even more complicated.
As the #MeToo movement has gained attention, some have worried that it advances a view of women as in need of the protection both by and from men. That stands in stark contrast to the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which understood women as fully capable of protecting themselves, provided they lived in a context that enabled them to do so.5 Our vision is a society in which everyone—not just women, but also men and genderqueer people—is more protected; that includes protecting people who might commit assaults from actually doing so. We believe it’s important to understand assaulters as people; as we’ll show in Chapter 6, many of those who commit assault think that what they are doing is having sex and who would be horrified to learn that what they did was experienced as assault by the other person.
Jiyoung’s and Luci’s stories suggest that in some cases the problem is that young women’s partners confuse sexual agency with consent. The women wanted some kind of sexual contact, just not the kind they ended up having. And their sexual partners were either blind, ambivalent, or hostile to this. We heard stories of women initiating sexual encounters that went beyond what they wanted. Of women struggling, often with a great deal of self-blame, to reconcile their own role in setting an encounter in motion with their experience of unwanted and nonconsensual sex. And of students of all genders refusing to label an encounter an assault because they felt that doing so might invalidate their self-perception and identity as an assertive, together, sexually modern person.
Karen’s ex-boyfriend was crushed by news of his sister’s cancer recurrence. He texted to see if she had time to talk. They met up in Riverside Park, walking over to the boulders just south of 116th Street and climbing up to watch the boats go by on the Hudson River. Karen was weirded out when he pulled her close and started to kiss her. She’d come to meet him thinking she was supporting a friend in crisis. Sex was the last thing on her mind. She still found him very attractive, but she wasn’t interested in anything sexual. He didn’t notice, or care. He pushed her up against the rock and raped her. He used physical force. She said “no.” She was very clear. She laughed nervously as she told us this story, matter-of-factly adding that later that day, when showering, she found dirt in her vagina. It got there when he dragged her to the ground. And yet she was reluctant to label it “rape,” much less “assault.” She still cared for him. She even noted, confused, that parts of the rape were physically pleasurable. Karen made excuses for him: he knew her to be sexually adventurous, and so perhaps he misunderstood her words and physical resistance. Maybe he thought her “no” was an objection to the discomfort of being pushed against the rock, not to the sex itself. That must have been why, she reasoned, he dragged her onto the ground.
Early in our research our ethnographic team assembled around a conference table at the Columbia School of Social Work to receive the training that the university offers with the goal of developing young people’s skills to stop assaults before they happen; these ‘bystander’ interventions are one of the small number of programs that have shown any effectiveness in reducing campus sexual assault.6 We wanted to understand what students were learning about assault, and what they were told they could do about it. The educator talked about how perpetrators groom their victims, and together we practiced bystander strategies—how to distract a perpetrator, or disrupt an assault in process. But the role playing, focused on what we might do to interrupt an incident on the subway, presented a much simpler scene—a predatory stranger bothering a person just sitting there minding their own business—than that which young people most often confront. The reality that people know one another, have often been intimate before, that the contact could be read as flirting as much as it could be assault, makes it so much harder. It’s confusing, as a bystander, to know if you are keeping someone safe or blocking them from getting lucky. Worse still, sometimes it’s the bystander who is the problem.7
On a balmy Saturday night in April, Jessica and Kathleen went from an end-of-year dance performance to a neighborhood bar. They were acquaintances but not close friends: in the same performing arts group, and living in the same dorm. Dalton, a senior, had been texting Jessica, saying that he hoped to see her there. Jessica and Kathleen flashed their fake IDs to get in and edged their way to a table Dalton had managed to snag at the back of the bar. Dalton paid for round after round for both of them. Kathleen was falling-over drunk. Dalton offered to help Jessica get Kathleen back to the dorm, and so they staggered up Broadway, practically carrying Kathleen. It was a combination of frustrating and funny, a bonding moment that might well have been something they would chat about in the days to come, perhaps even ribbing Kathleen a bit for getting so drunk. While Jessica signed Dalton in, Kathleen laughed and ran off. Up the stairs and down the hall, they chased after her, taking seriously their responsibility to get her safely to bed. She hid in a stairwell. Eventually, they found her and got her settled. Then Dalton asked Jessica if she wanted to chill in her room. The details after that are hazy; looking back, she was surprised that she didn’t throw up, given how drunk she must have been. She wonders, as students often do when they recall feeling drunker than they’d expected, if maybe he put something in her drink. She remembered lying on the bed together, chatting. Suddenly, they were having sex.
At the time, Jessica didn’t label what had happened assault. He was cute, and the sex actually felt pretty good. But she wasn’t happy about it. She didn’t normally have random hookups. She didn’t want a boyfriend, but her sexual project typically involved an ongoing connection with someone she liked and knew. In the weeks that followed, Dalton kept texting Jessica. He was eager to see her again. But she ignored his texts, “ghosting him” (not responding to any of his messages) because she just felt so “weird” about what had happened. By the time she shared her story with us, Dalton had graduated. We heard her story as assault: Jessica was very drunk, didn’t say she wanted sex, and was clear—to herself at least—that she didn’t want it. It’s not clear that she said no; but neither did she say yes. We only have Jessica’s accounting; it seems likely to us that Dalton had no idea that she experienced their encounter the way she did. His later attempts to connect with Jessica, as she told it, conveyed not that he was worried she was going to report him for assault, but that he was hoping to hang out with her again. He may even have thought that they shared something special—the “taking care of a drunk friend” scenario is sometimes enough to spark romance. When we talked to men and women in our focus groups, there was a notable difference in how they understood assaults. The men imagined that rapes were contexts where women were screaming “no” and fighting for their lives. Perhaps Dalton couldn’t imagine their encounter as assault because it didn’t look like what men often imagined it looked like.
Jessica is not to blame for lacking the sexual vocabulary to effectively stop what was happening, or after, to think through what had happened to her. In a broader sense, both of them were failed by the communities that raised them. Both had mastered so many lessons on their way to the Ivy League, but some fundamental ones escaped them. Dalton had been drinking in ways that likely clouded his judgment and consideration. It was only much later, after hearing several campus conversations about sexual assault, intoxication, and consent, that Jessica realized that she had been too drunk to consent, and came to think about what had happened as assault. We don’t know how Dalton would have described his actions that night. But if he’d acknowledged how drunk she was as well as his own drunkenness, and considered more than the goal of sex that he likely wanted to achieve, and asked Jessica what she wanted, she might have responded to those future texts, and she wouldn’t have been thinking back on her experience with him in the way that she did.
When we interviewed Kara in the winter of her senior year, she gave a first impression of wealth and composure: dark jeans, high-heeled brown riding boots, and a cashmere turtleneck complementing her perfectly straight long dark hair, and carefully done light makeup. But she twisted nervously at her class ring from the private school where she’d been a scholarship student, and over the course of the interview, hives crept up her neck and her cheeks reddened; when we probed for details, she repeatedly answered, “I just don’t remember.” She struggled awkwardly for words to describe her sexual life. Yet she’d reached out to us, one of those who contacted the team to be interviewed because they “had a story to tell.” The story she came to share was about a friend’s experience. Her own assault—a word she never used—was something she just skimmed over.
She and her freshman-year roommate had shared a double: 150 square feet with two beds, two dressers, and two desks. That February, she crawled into bed, exhausted and “crossed”—having smoked weed and having drunk a little. Her roommate’s boyfriend, visiting from Germany, had invited a friend of his from Boston down to New York. Kara wasn’t happy about this—she and her roommate had been fighting so much that Kara had asked the resident advisor for help, and she had begun seeing a counselor because the conflict was making her anxious. No one asked Kara if this friend of her roommate’s boyfriend could stay in the room; the four of them just crammed in together. She cracked a joke before going to sleep, hoping to break the ongoing tension. “Hey guys, don’t do anything, I’m over here.” Her roommate snapped back, “What’s your problem? We would never do that.”
The friend from Boston—Kara never knew his name—woke her up in the night. He told her he was cold and wanted to get in bed with her. Still a little high, drunk, and tired, and thinking that maybe he really was just cold, she let him climb under the covers. Soon he started to kiss her. She described herself as too “spacey” to do anything but go along with it “and, like, maybe kissing, fine, but I didn’t—then I ended up giving him a blow job, and I didn’t want to.” He didn’t use much physical force. She stopped kissing him and rested her head on his chest, hoping to fall back asleep. He pushed her head down “a little bit.” She doesn’t remember the details, just that “it was not—it wasn’t like, pleasant. . . . And the worst part was, then he just went back to his bed on the floor, and I was like, ‘I thought the whole point was, you were cold!’ I definitely felt taken advantage of at that point.” Kara’s room didn’t feel like her own; she was so scared of her roommate that she barely felt justified in claiming ownership over her bed, much less her body.
College students tend to refer to a lot of their sexual encounters as “hookups.”8 The term is ambiguous, denoting quite a range of interactions and relationships. The two people may know each other well—or not. They may have met at a bar, a campus event, or through an app. They may have kissed before, or been sleeping together for months—or maybe not. Hookups involve all kinds of sexual contact, from making out to intercourse, that happen outside a committed relationship. Given that so much sex occurs in the context of hookups, it’s not particularly surprising that many unwanted and nonconsensual sexual experiences do, too.9 A SHIFT paper led by Louisa Gilbert found that assaults that victims identified as happening because they were “incapacitated” were disproportionately likely to be committed by acquaintances (in this case, also known as “hookups”), where the two people had met beforehand at a party.10 Non-incapacitated assaults—where force or verbal coercion was used—were more likely to happen in the contexts of committed relationships. But to focus on the relationship context alone is to miss how other elements of the context—like sexual geography—shape vulnerability.11
Charisma, a Black Latina senior from Albuquerque who was a varsity athlete, was quick to answer the question about what she’d choose for her one college “do-over” if given the chance. She’d love to have back one Saturday night toward the end of her freshman year. She’d met Raymond, who lived out in Brooklyn, through her roommate. After texting back and forth for weeks, he invited her out to his place. There were so many signs that it was not going to be a good night: the subway she was planning to take was closed for the weekend, making her trip almost twice as long; on the walk from the train the skies opened up, a torrential downpour soaking her to the bone, and her cell phone died so she couldn’t call him for directions when she got lost. Miraculously, she had his number written on an actual piece of paper, and some change in her pocket; she was lucky enough to find a bodega with a working pay phone, and called him to get her. Sodden and demoralized, she was happy to peel off her shoes and socks and dry out. They watched tv, did a couple of shots, smoked a joint, and then started to make out. She was fine with all that, but clearly had not been expecting more to happen. She was firm in providing us with “evidence”: she was wearing “granny panties” and had not brought her oral contraceptives or even a toothbrush. But more did happen. She “didn’t really want it to” and she tried to convey that with her body language. When he reached in between in her legs:
I wasn’t expecting that to happen. So I was like “Okay, let me move his hand.” And then his hand didn’t move so I was like oh, okay, this is happening. So then it’s like he started taking his clothes off, I started taking mine off, just like let it happen. ’Cause it’s like I didn’t know how to say no. ’Cause it’s like my way of saying no was through body language, trying to move his hand, ’cause that’s what had worked in the past to slow things down if I didn’t want to be touched in a certain area. But in this moment that didn’t work. So it was like my plan, I never had a plan B. . . . It’s like plan A was always just body language, just move their hand. Like, they get it. But this time plan A didn’t work, and I didn’t, like, plan B would be saying no. But I just, I didn’t know how to, I didn’t know what to do. . . . Verbal wasn’t really my form of communication. . . .
Charisma conveyed in nonverbal ways that she wasn’t enjoying their sex. She told him that it hurt, and at one point when it was hurting she did, in fact, say “no.” He may have heard but he didn’t listen; instead of stopping, she told us, he just tried a different position. Refusing sex can be awkward, but it’s a teachable skill—unfortunately, not one that Charisma had been given an opportunity to learn.12 Nor, to be sure, had Raymond understood, or maybe even been exposed to, the practice of affirmative consent.
There’s a distinction between how much someone wants sex (their internal desire) and their verbalization of that desire.13 Raymond may have had no idea how much she did not want to be having sex. However, his ignoring the way she moved his hands away as he tried to touch her sexually shows a lack of respect for Charisma’s citizenship. Being attentive to the other person’s right to sexual self-determination—thinking about sex as something to share rather than something to get or to have—may have gone a long way to prevent this kind of encounter. Geography matters too. Charisma was stuck in Brooklyn late at night in a downpour. The train would take almost two hours. Some students wouldn’t think twice about a $60 cab ride home, but she wasn’t one of those students. Charisma told us they had “sex,” as she called it, twice that night and then once in the morning. Perhaps anticipating our curiosity about the second and third times, she told us, unprompted,
I didn’t stop it the other times ’cause I was like, well, we already did it once. What’s another time? I just, like, literally had no energy to open my mouth or say anything, I just laid there. . . . It was just sad. I was probably thinking about my other friends who have casual sex . . . and like it was never a big deal for them when they do it, and maybe it’s like really not a big deal. Or I was feeling hoish, or easy, or whatever. . . . I was like, my friends do this and it’s fine for them, so it’s not actually a big deal.
Charisma’s only other sexual experience had been with her high school boyfriend; they’d gone out for the last two years of high school, and could read each other’s body language. But she barely knew Raymond, and never saw him again. She took the experience as her own introduction to what she described as “hit it and quit it”: “Before I could never understand, okay, a guy hooks up with a girl, has sex with her, then he’s like done with her. Why can’t you just continue to have sex with her? Why do you want to quit it? But then after that experience I was like ‘Oh, ’cause you don’t feel like it. You’re not interested anymore.’”14 She described the night as “something I would take back for sure,” but then added that she “had to try to find a positive out of that. Which was like confirming for me that I want sex to be something meaningful for me, I want to care about the person, like I know I’m not the type to just have casual sex.” While it may seem to some that Charisma was avoiding the “truth” of her assault, she made that night in Brooklyn into a lesson about her sexual project. But like a lot of learning, it took some struggle and repetition to master it.
Later, in her sophomore year, she dated a guy she’d met on Tinder for a couple of months. She wasn’t crazy about him; even while they were still texting, she thought to herself that she should google “how to break up with someone.” He was “a little rude”—telling her, for example, that her arms were fat—and was “disrespectful” to her friends. She recounted, “I hated being with him in public. He would be, just, extra . . . thinking that people are trying to annoy him on purpose or walk in his way and I’m ‘This is New York City. It’s crowded.’” She said, looking back, that “I should have taken note of those little signs, to end it or whatever. But I wanted to practice being with someone.” Charisma thought of this as a time when she “failed”—by tolerating his bad behavior, by failing to express herself fully, and by giving in when he was ready for sex, and she was not. “Even with him I had sex earlier than I wanted to.” He kept pushing her to “move to the next level.” She was still getting over her experience with Raymond, and also didn’t really like him that much. But she didn’t know how to keep saying “let’s just wait” without it becoming “a thing” in their relationship. “I didn’t want to be in another uncomfortable situation. So I just told him to get the condom and let it happen. I was trying to hold off for like a couple of weeks. But I don’t know, I just didn’t want to be in another awkward situation.”
“Tinder guy,” as she described him, was verbally abusive over the course of their relationship. For Charisma, having unwanted sex felt easier than having a difficult conversation. She didn’t have the vocabulary to talk about her sexual project, or a strong sense of her own right to sexual self-determination. His focus was on moving things to the next level, not on creating a context where she felt comfortable expressing herself. After they first had sex, she decided something was wrong with how she was navigating her sexual project. She wanted someone who recognized her sexual citizenship. The realization was definitive: “Just because I’m dating someone doesn’t mean I have to have sex with them. I want sex to be more intimate. I don’t want to regret it.” By the time we sat down with Charisma, it had been two years since she had dated “Tinder guy,” during which time she’d talked with a couple of guys but not had intercourse with anyone. She was happy about this. “I want it to be something serious for me, ’cause then I’m more into it, I have more fun with him. We are comfortable, I’m more willing to try new things.” The emerging clarity around her sexual project is evident in her description of a more recent liaison: “I was talking to someone this semester for a couple of months. And I could have had sex with him easily. But I didn’t want to. I held on. It was like—it was not a problem for me to say ‘No.’ Pretty sure he thought I would give in at some point. But I have grown a lot. And I was like, nuh-uh. . . . I’m really glad that I didn’t have sex with him, I was able to stick to what I want sex to be for me.” Charisma hadn’t necessarily found a different kind of guy, she had found a different sense of herself: one with clarity and purpose about her right to have only the kind of sex she wanted.
Charisma’s story of being worn down into finally consenting to sex she did not want was echoed by other students we spoke with. It wasn’t that they were drunk and didn’t have the words—it was that a partner heard their words but didn’t listen.
Mattie came to label what happened to her “rape”—but the relationship started out in an exciting way. She had struggled to find people who wanted the same kinds of experiences that she did, but eventually after some searching online she met her girlfriend at a New York kink sex party. Mattie was assigned the gender identity of “male” at birth, but during college began to transition to being a woman. Over the course of her two-month relationship with her girlfriend, Mattie had begun taking hormones and her transition became more and more visible. She was happy, finally feeling like herself. But as Mattie transitioned, her girlfriend kept wanting to have sex that involved Mattie’s penis. For Mattie, using her penis during sex made her feel less like a woman. Her girlfriend’s determined pursuit of penile penetration felt like a violation—not only of her boundaries, but of her whole self.
She was very resentful of my transition. She didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t use my penis anymore and she really wanted that. Every time we would have sex, she would like ask me. . . . When I would remind her, she would like frown. At some point I kind of gave up and I like stopped saying “no.” I just stood there and took it and that was really horrible and I would totally classify that as the fact that I was raped because I was emotionally pressured into it. I was coerced to consenting and I didn’t want to consent and had she not been all upset every time I said no, I would have said, “No,” and—you know—I would’ve kept saying, “No.” But at some point, it just took too much emotional toll on me, so I started saying “yes.” It was a war of attrition and her wants overtook my—my consent boundaries, my needs. So she ended up raping me.
In this “war of attrition,” Mattie’s partner extracted verbal consent, as had Charisma’s. But for Mattie, as she made clear, it was still rape.15
Sometimes assaulters ignore a clearly articulated “no.” Sometimes it is the body language, telling them to stop, that they disregard. And sometimes they turn a persistent “no” into an unwanted “yes.” A lot of times the failure is one of empathy and imagination—failure to understand that someone might go along with something because it feels awkward to stop, failure to see that one’s social power, or the group’s, might render another unable to say no, failure to think about how the desire to avoid an awkward moment could literally overpower the desire not to have sex—or failure to consider that, given how much the other person has had to drink, it’s absurd to imagine that they can consent. Assaults are contexts where one person is inattentive to the other person’s right to sexual self-determination: their sexual citizenship. And often those who are assaulted have not been supported to develop a sense of themselves as full sexual citizens.
In hearing these stories, we rarely saw what looked like predation, but it also never looked like benign neglect. Instead, the neglect of the other person seemed far more active—sometimes intentional, sometimes just astonishingly self-absorbed. Almost as if the other person wasn’t a person, but instead an object used to satisfy personal desires. This is the wisdom of emphasizing affirmative consent—teaching people that they should check in with each other, and be clear about what the other person is up for. But to focus on only the lack of affirmative consent is to overlook the many other layers of the problem. What kind of society produces people whose feeling about their own right to sexual self-determination is so impoverished that they’d spare someone else an awkward interaction, even if it means having a strange and unwelcome penis inside of them?16 What kind of society produces people whose sexual projects ignore the basic sexual citizenship of others?17 And what kind of society produces spaces that don’t discourage this kind of behavior, but that instead, seem to facilitate it?18
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Her “what was I kidding myself?” refers to two things. First, despite her mental map of moving through the bases with him, she hadn’t accounted for how she might feel—and what she was feeling was zero. She recounted her internal dialogue: “This is awful. I hate this. I am not even pity doing anything with this guy.” To translate, “pity doing something” might be giving him a blow job, just to end the evening. The second part of “what was I kidding myself” was her realization that “the slow production” might be her ideal, but not his. Her internal dialogue continued: “I’m not even touching his penis, this is not happening.” They were in her dorm room, in her bed, and he started taking off her clothes. He unbuckled her jeans, and reached for a condom. She thought to herself, “We were just supposed to make out.” She tried to pacify him by suggesting that they cuddle: it would be kind of cozy to fall asleep in each other’s arms. She woke up in the middle of the night.”This guy is humping me in my sleep—just, like, gyrating. I’m like, ‘What is this?’ He was, like, humping, like, my butt and my leg. I was like, ‘This is weird.’”
The next day, she talked to a friend. Gwen described it as “weird.” Her friend quickly corrected her. “Oh my god that’s sexual assault, ’cause as far as he knows you were sleeping!” Then she told her mom. When her mom agreed with her friend, Gwen pushed back against all that the label would mean. She justified his actions, “The lines are kind of blurred. I did let him sleep over, you know.” She decided, “I’m not gonna think twice about it.” This, combined with the next assault, was the crucible in which her sexual citizenship was forged.
The second assault—also an incident of unwanted touching—illustrates just how scary it can be to fight off a guy who feels entitled to sex. She described it as “my scariest situation where I kind of learned that, like, I have no obligation to men and their sexual needs.” Think for a moment, before the story continues, that this woman—from a wealthy background, and close enough to her mom that she reached out unhesitatingly after her first assault—had, until this time, thought she had an obligation to men and their sexual needs. And ask yourself if you think many men in the stories we’ve told so far feel the same way about women’s needs (including the need to be left alone).24
The man in this story was not a fellow student; he was a model from Los Angeles, and “gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous” but also “scummy.” They had been sending flirtatious texts, but she was busy with exams. The last night before she left for the summer, with her roommate already gone, she’d spent the day packing up her belongings. He said he was going to come uptown to smoke with her.
I told him, “I’m not having sex with you, by the way.” He’s like, “Ha, ha, do you give good head?” I was like, “I guess, but don’t expect anything.”
“LA model club promoter guy,” as she referred to him, took the subway uptown. In the sultry press of mid-May, they went to smoke a joint in Morningside Park.
And he’s like, “I need to go back to your room.” And I was like, “No, let’s not.” And then he’s like, “Yeah, I left my food in there.” I was like, “Fine.” So, I was very high from not a lot of weed and so we go back to the room. . . .
She was clear—with him, with herself—that she did not want to fool around:
I was only gonna hook up with a guy if it was worth it. Not just for the sake of it. So he kind of starts making out with me and he was a good kisser. I was like, “All right, fine.” He takes off my shirt, and I’m like, “All right, fine.” Then he’s like, “Take off your pants.” And I was like—I used my intuition. I just knew—your gut’s right one hundred percent of the time. This wasn’t right. I was like, “Nothing’s happening.”
He turned off the lights. She asked him to turn them back on.
And then he said, “Well, we’re gonna have sex.” I’m like, “No we’re not.” I was like, “Well, see, look, look at my bed, there’s no sheets on bed, it’s all in boxes. . . .”
He’s like, “Whatever. We’ll do it here on the floor, we’ll do it standing, I don’t care.
And, like, blah, blah, blah. I was like, “No, no, no.” Then he’s like, “Well, suck me off.” and I was like, “No.” “Oh yeah?” “No.” “Are you fucking kidding me? I came all the way uptown to smoke you out and not even gonna have an orgasm.”
She couldn’t believe it.
And then he starts verbally assaulting me. Telling me, “Oh, you’re a bitch. You’re” [she paused] the c word. “Fuck you, you think this school actually means something?” You know what I mean? Just, like, trying to put me down. And, like, everything just seems, like, exaggerated, because, like, I’m high.
It continued. He threatened to tell the security guard she’d been smoking marijuana, and she responded that she’d tell the security guard that he tried to rape her.
“You need to get out or I’m gonna call the cops.” And he’s like, “And then the cops’ll know you’re high.” And I was like, “I have a really better argument than you do.” And so he finally leaves and then he says, “I’ll catch you later.” And I was like, “Fuck you.” And I was traumatized, ’cause I was, like, just verbally harassed.
And then I just start crying and I called my mom and I told her about the story and as I’m kind of saying it back it’s a lot better than I thought it was in the moment. In the moment it felt like the worst thing in the world, but at the end of the day it was an idiot who was just saying mean things to me; nothing escalated, my pants never came off. I know you’re not supposed to blame yourself. But I went against my better judgment. I knew what this guy was all about and I chose to ignore it. Um, yeah, so I—I definitely learned from the situation.
That was a turning point:
I was like, wow, I wasn’t even gonna give him head, you know, was not gonna feel bad about it. Because I had no reason to, you know. He doesn’t—what makes him deserve it, right? Definitely a learning experience. I actually ran into him at a club and I was like, to my friend, I was like, “That’s my rapist. Or, like, rapist guy.”
Later in the interview we asked her about consent. How it works, and how it’s worked for her. The juxtaposition, and her description based on her experiences, was astonishing. “You know, guys will pressure you until you do consent. I’ve never been raped or anything.”
No, she’d never been raped. But she’d had her body touched, and had been subject to verbal abuse, by a man who assumed that consent to enter her room equaled consent to enter her vagina.
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Reading these stories may feel like jumping into a river of pain; there are so many instances of young people failing to see the humanity in each other, to treat each other with kindness and consideration. And there are some moments that seem like real, intentional evil, like telling a vulnerable freshman that “it’s okay” when she clearly says “no.” But as we wade through into these waters, despite the variety in these stories, there is a constant set of factors operating in the background that produce vulnerability both to being assaulted, and to committing assault. These factors are not just identifiable—they are modifiable. We can build safer campuses, although in part it will require work off campus, and before students ever arrive on campus. To see how to move forward, we have to learn more about campus geography today.