Those who commit sexual assault are commonly depicted as immoral, calculating men. While men commit the vast majority of assaults, we found that perpetration took many forms. For example, Diana, who we met in Chapter 4 as part of a fancy “brunch crowd,” is an unlikely image of someone who commits sexual assault. But her story offers an apt starting point for our examination of the experiences and thoughts of those who either by their own admission, or in our evaluation, committed an assault. She had been a “nerdy, smart kid” in middle school and much of high school. She told us she hadn’t been popular or particularly happy with herself back then. As for many students we spoke with, college wasn’t just a chance to move out from under her parents’ watchful eye. It was a chance to reinvent herself, leaving behind her “shitty behavior” to her high school boyfriend, and deliberately transforming her body, her look, and her personality.
But Diana’s adjustment wasn’t a smooth one. She spent most of orientation week drunk, and had sex with several men she barely remembered. She didn’t exactly regret this, but it was hardly the new beginning she anticipated. One guy told her he was twenty-one and the cousin of a fellow Columbia student. As they spent more time together, Diana realized that he was twenty-six and had no relationship to campus. He wasn’t a “bad guy,” Diana told us, but he was clearly comfortable lying to her to get what he wanted.
During these early months at school, Diana’s sexual project was about self: who she was, and how she fit into a peer group. She seemed clear about one part of her own sexual citizenship—her right to explore, to seek out sexual experiences that made her feel the way she wanted to feel. But less present in her mind was the fact that the people she was having sex with were also people. As described in Chapter 4, she and her friends treated sex as a sport—or, like so many things at Columbia, a competition. That achievement-oriented sexual project, combined with a lack of attention to other people’s sexual citizenship, rendered her vulnerable—both to being assaulted, and to committing assault.
Midway through freshman year, deciding that the brunch crowd were not really her people, she found a new community of friends, reveling in her status as the most sexually experienced in the group. On one occasion, her role in the group as expert led to giving two of them, a man and a woman, kissing tips. It felt necessary to demonstrate. “Oh, I’ll teach you how to kiss, too,” she said to the woman. “Like, I’m just such a good kisser.” Diana chalked up her confidence to, in part, being very drunk and stoned. She remembers stumbling and slurring her speech.
The man she had “taught” to kiss was sober. Shortly after giving him instruction, the alcohol hit her hard. She felt ill and laid down. He proceeded to get a banana, and “started dangling it in my mouth and, you know, saying, ‘It’s just, you’re, like, sucking a dick. Like, wow, this is so fun to watch.’ I was kind of just, like, too drunk to understand it at all.” The woman she had kissed stopped it, afraid that Diana would choke.
I, like, woke up the next day feeling like, “That was, like, really gross,” and definitely, like, again like I didn’t really think of it as, like, he did something wrong. Looking back on it, it basically fits the definition of crossing someone’s sexual boundaries without their consent . . . putting something in my mouth in this very sexual way. Um, and we’ve never discussed it. . . .
This incident was an unwanted nonconsensual sexual interaction, but Diana didn’t consider what happened to her an assault. Thinking back, she recognizes it as “technically” an assault, but it’s not how she experienced it.
As freshman year progressed, Diana became increasingly close with a man who identified as gay. As in many of her earlier relationships, sexuality was a terrain of play and performance. They shocked themselves—and, they hoped, others—by making out in public while drunk or stoned at parties. It was all just fun—until they were alone, without an audience. In his room one night after another evening of partying, they found themselves making out. They almost had intercourse, Diana thinks, but she stopped the encounter. She had her period, and while she would not have been that worried about something like this with a man who had had sex with a woman before, she was concerned how her friend might experience it as his first time having intercourse with a woman. They slept in bed together, but did not have sex.
The next morning Diana was thrilled by the idea that maybe his sexual identity wasn’t an impediment to her desires. Over breakfast he said to her, “I think I’m moving down the Kinsey Scale for you.” It was the sexiest line she’d ever heard.
That week Diana couldn’t concentrate on her work. She barely slept. She was obsessed. She wanted to be the girl he turned straight for.
“It was kind of this, like, conquest-like, thing, which I think is unhealthy and, like, bad.” Diana told us. “And, spoiler alert: I’m the one that crosses boundaries in this situation.” At this moment, three things collide: the clarity of her sexual project, which is to feel desired—so desired that she could “turn someone straight”; her assurance about her own sexual citizenship, the notion that yes, she should have the right to realize her sexual projects; and the lack of consideration for other people’s sexual citizenship. Diana’s achievement-oriented sexual project also made her vulnerable to committing assault. All those times that she treated other people like objects—they were doing the same with her. But not this time.
Diana reflected, when we interviewed her, on how her single-minded focus on the thrill of her capacity to “turn him straight” made her inattentive to what her friend might have wanted—her sexual project made his desires invisible.1 But she was accustomed to being the object of someone else’s desire, not to acting as the agent in a sexual encounter, and was unsure how to proceed.2 So she went to an expert: she called a man.
Diana’s ex-boyfriend recommended what she described as the “frog-in-hot-water” approach—slowly advancing the heat of the encounter, to the point where someone ends up doing something to which they would never initially have agreed.3 The analogy is as apt as it is disturbing. With a clear goal in mind, Diana developed a plan to “push the ladder to sex.”
Her execution was clumsy; after all, she wasn’t used to playing this role. She invited her gay friend over to hang out. They were sober. As soon as he settled in she told him, “We’re going to have sex.”
“I’m actually gay.”
She changed the conversation, and after a long period of getting comfortable again, suggested that they just hang out in their underwear. He agreed, and she again raised the issue of sex.
“I still don’t know,” he replied.
She wished she had said, “Okay. Let’s put our clothes back on and go take a walk and get some ice cream or something.”
But she didn’t. She was blindly focused on getting what she wanted.
He kissed her first. Diana knew something wasn’t quite right; it felt really awkward. She started taking off his underwear.
“I don’t want to,” he said.
Diana cut him off. “Oh, you don’t have to.” She thought he meant he didn’t want to go down on her. “To this day I don’t know if he was about to say, ‘I don’t want to have sex with you.’”
Diana performed oral sex on him. As she guided him to penetrative sex she said, “Are you ready for this moment in your life?”
“Yeah. . . .”
Diana asked him a couple times, “Are you okay with this?”
“Mm-hmmm . . . yeah.” Her successful extraction of a verbal agreement to sex underlines the limits of a focus on affirmative consent.4
When they were done, Diana asked him to sleep over. He left to sleep in his own bed. She felt something was wrong. But when she woke the next morning, she bragged to her friends, “I have the power to turn gay guys straight!”
When she next saw him, he told her, “That was good sex, but I don’t really want to have an ongoing sexual relationship with you because I actually am gay.”
About a month later, Diana was frustrated that they weren’t spending as much time together as they used to. To express her anger, she brought up the issue of his leading her on, saying that he’d had sex with her and then abandoned her.
“I didn’t want to have sex,” he replied.
It didn’t sink in at first. But a day later Diana was distraught. “Am I, like, a rapist?” she thought.
She texted him immediately. “You gotta come over here. We gotta talk. Did I assault you? Like, did I rape you?”
Diana said, “He had to, like, calm me down, ’cause I was so upset. And we had a lot of other conversations about it. He basically said, ‘You didn’t assault me. But I didn’t want to have sex.’”
Diana suddenly experienced their encounter in an entirely new light. She didn’t have the power to turn gay men straight. He didn’t move down the Kinsey Scale—she’d dragged him down it.5 She knew she’d “gotten a ‘yeah’” from him. And she was emphatic: “I think of myself as very concerned about consent, I did at that time as well. And the fact that I could still, basically, violate someone, even thinking about consent the whole time, was also really shocking. . . . It makes me think, like, what I had been taught about consent was just very basically, ‘you need to get a yes.’ And I got a yes.” But now, looking back, she understood that the “yeah” was meaningless if there was something coercive about it.6 He insisted he was fine, emotionally. But Diana’s life changed.
In the following months, Diana again reinvented herself. As she told us her stories, she admitted, “I guess weed really features in a lot of my stories of my life, but I do not smoke weed anymore.” She cut her hair. She hasn’t had sex since, and is not pursuing it. At the time of our interview she identified as “currently asexual, previously heterosexual.” She partly blamed her previous engagement with femininity.
I was really upset with the traditional trappings of femininity. I was basically just getting tired of being that sort of person, and femininity sort of seemed to me like this powerless position all of a sudden. And I was also still really upset about what had happened, you know, because I just was really, really angry at myself and worried about what the whole thing meant. Femininity just seemed very dangerous. So then I was basically like, “I want to work on my gender identity,” ’cause I felt pretty strongly masculine. . . . A lot of times that’s a classic sign of realizing you’re trans, just struggling with your gender identity. But it sort of never got to that point for me. I just had this phase, and then I sort of settled into . . . not really presenting as hyper-feminine anymore.
The realization that she might have harmed someone she cared about left her feeling that the only path to recovering a moral self was to reject both femininity and sexuality. What had felt modern, brave, and cool, enabling her to win at the brunch competition, she suddenly experienced as self-absorbed and unkind. There is a gendered dimension to her transformation—she only confronted the limits of treating other people like objects when she moved out of the sexual gatekeeper role. Her high school entanglements and that “gross” freshman year experience with the hot senior, who dismissed her after sex by handing her her clothes, were both grounded in an achievement-oriented sexual project and a disregard for men’s self-determination. But none of those interactions, framed as they were within the heterosexual logic of men being the ones who advance a sexual interaction, had spurred her to think she might need to care about her partner’s sexual citizenship.
In therapy what I really wanted to talk about was my unhealthy tendency to get obsessed with people. Partly because I felt like that’s what had led me to really ignore the warning signs of consent—[I’m] looking back on all my relationships and thinking, “Was I like that? Like, have I done this before? You know, is my behavior intrinsically sort of angled to put pressure on people?”
In therapy Diana found connections between overlooking “the warning signs of consent” and her more general patterns of human interaction. This wasn’t just cognitive work, learning the rules of the road; it was a project of self-reconstruction that involved reimagining her approach to human relations. Not all students who assaulted others were so self-aware.
The moral opprobrium in the language and ideas used to talk about sexual assault make it impossible to imagine that those who commit it could be our sons and daughters, or our friends and peers. We picture some evil stranger, a distinct kind of person: a perpetrator. The term calls attention to what’s wrong with them—a deep flaw in personality, or attitudes, or some other individual trait—rather than what might be awry with “us”—our communities, our relationships, our actions. It suggests that the task is to protect ourselves from a predator, the same way we would against, say, a lion. Which is to say against something that isn’t human. This is a convenient way to think about sexual assault. But it’s also dangerously incomplete.
We suggest thinking of perpetration—an act that people sometimes commit—rather than perpetrator—a stable identity that someone might inhabit.7 A lot is known about the characteristics of those who sexually assault others.8 A paper led by Kate Walsh, using the SHIFT survey, echoes and advances that work by showing that on this campus, having been the victim of assault in the last year, believing in and relying on nonverbal consent strategies, binge drinking, having depression symptoms, and having committed assaults before college, were all predictive of committing assault.9
There’s considerable unrealized potential in prevention work that goes beyond the “good guy/predator” dichotomy. We heard many assault stories in which students thought they were just telling us about an interesting or weird sexual experience they had. Not only were they not trying to commit an assault, they did not recognize how what they were doing could be seen that way. We’re not arguing that those who harm others should be held blameless or that sexual assault is never intentional. But focusing only on character flaws and individual responsibility distracts from opportunities to prevent assaults that reflect a lack of consideration of the other person’s sexual citizenship, rather than a deliberate erasure of it. And, to be fair, we are social scientists; our purpose in this book is to look at how institutions and social structures, rather than individual psyches, contribute to sexual assault.
From the students who were assaulted, we heard plenty of stories that sounded like predation—someone deliberately creating circumstances in which to sexually assault someone, either by force or intoxication or both (think about Esme’s or Lupe’s experiences). We also heard stories in which one person clearly articulated not wanting sex and was ignored (think Luci and Steve: she said no, and he said, “It’s okay”). A student who sees campus as a hunting ground in which to find other students to rape would have been unlikely to sit down with us to talk about their strategies, motives, and desires. None of the twelve stories of assault told from the perspective of the assaulter are like that. Rather, they depict behavior that is harmful, but hard to read as evil. This chapter represents the perspectives of a very particular subset of people who commit sexual assault. These are voices that are rarely heard but well worth listening to.
Eddie was from a well-to-do family in Chicago. A tennis player, he was handsome and had always been popular. He had never really talked much with his parents about sex or drugs or drinking. As long as he did well in school and at sports, and didn’t create a scandal, they basically had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. One Saturday night back in high school, he was drinking with friends at someone’s house. Their parents were away for the weekend. He knew that one of the girls there liked him, but he wasn’t particularly attracted to her. Both drunk, eventually they started making out. They wandered down into the finished basement, away from everyone else, and began to fumble beneath each other’s clothes. As Eddie tells it, she started to give him a hand job. But he wasn’t into it, and so eventually he just got up and went back upstairs to the party. About an hour later a group of women came up to him, yelling.
“What the fuck, Eddie! You left her passed out, naked, on the couch down there!”
Eddie said they “basically accused me of rape.” He didn’t know what to say. But he figured a safe bet was to just keep hanging out with her. As her friends saw her cuddled up with Eddie on the couch, they figured nothing bad could have happened. So they dropped it.
Once at Columbia, Eddie cut back a little on the drinking because it got in the way of athletics and academics, and sometimes got him into situations he regretted later on, but otherwise didn’t change much. By junior year he had been “seeing” Wendy for a bit: this basically meant they’d met at a few parties, hung out, and had sex a couple times. A member of a popular sorority, she invited him to her sorority formal, a clear sign that she liked him. Eddie was proud to be picked by a woman from a prestigious sorority; it was a positive sign of his social position on campus. He felt that accepting the invite came with an obligation, one that had little to do with how he felt.
“I put on a tie. So I knew I was going to have sex.”
Eddie recounted that he had intentionally not gone “all out” at the formal, because of a looming early-morning practice the next day as well as his decision to drink less in general. His date was a different story. She threw back shots at the Mexican restaurant that was the group’s first stop. Then they headed to a club for the actual formal. Eddie told us he purposefully didn’t show his fake ID to get wristbanded; he didn’t want to be able to drink. His date continued to drink heavily. At 1 a.m., with a practice the next morning starting at 6, he told her he was going home. She said she’d go back with him. He really wanted to go home alone so he could sleep. He felt it would be rude to have the cab pull up to her sorority and ask her to jump out, but if he walked her inside the cab would leave and then he’d have to walk home in the pouring rain. He told the driver to go to his dorm. As they got out of the car she wrapped her arms around him—in part to flirt, but also because she couldn’t really stand on her own. As Eddie described it, “She comes up to my room with me.” He didn’t really want her to. Sharing a twin bed with her meant he would get even less sleep. But he didn’t tell her how he felt. “I didn’t make an effort to prevent this.”
He found the sex unpleasant. The condom broke. And she was in and out of consciousness. She told him she wasn’t on birth control. They had sex a second time, that time without a condom. He was upset, because she was there all night and he couldn’t really sleep. And he was really concerned about practice the next day: he hadn’t been playing well and was worried that his coach might demote him to a lower-ranked position on the team. He made it through, though, and after practice, went to the pharmacy to get Plan B—a morning-after birth control. He went by the sorority and gave it to her. Their interactions weren’t the greatest afterwards. Eddie’s read was that Wendy was upset that he didn’t keep seeing her. A part of the same small social circle, within a year they had “patched things up.” They never had a conversation, but she didn’t seem angry anymore. We interviewed Wendy as well, but she never mentioned this night. She did share a story of being assaulted before college (which was fairly common; one in five students in the SHIFT survey had experienced some form of pre-college assault), which seems to suggest she was willing to talk about experiences she thought of as assault.
As Eddie described it, she had been drifting in and out of consciousness—blackout drunk—as he had sex with her. He seemed sincere in his belief that there was a social debt: that taking a woman out for a formal “required” that they have sex. She’d asked him out, and had been interested in him for some time. He felt obliged to deliver. The fact that Eddie even sat down with us to talk about his experiences, describing this encounter as “weird,” but certainly not as an assault, underlines our point about the continuum of assaulters stretching from intentional predators to people too wrapped up in their own desires, insecurities, goals, or social obligations to hear what the other person is saying or notice what state they are in. Eddie was typical of many people we spoke to who genuinely did not understand that they might be committing assault. Having sex (or sexual contact) with women who were blackout drunk but (perhaps in his imagination) really into him was a pattern he seemed not to recognize. It was just part of his sex life.
During data collection, we had a clinician on call in case a team member needed help figuring out whether to triage a distraught participant to care. The concern was that a student who had been assaulted might become intensely distressed during an interview. This happened, but the more typical response among those recounting assault experiences was, “It was good to finally talk about it.” Even Fran, who recounted supporting her high school cocaine habit by giving blow jobs to married men, thanked us, saying that she hoped her story would press parents to look beyond their children’s grades and field hockey scores as measures of whether they were doing okay. She gathered up her coat, threw her backpack over one shoulder, and strolled out. Jennifer, who had interviewed Fran, walked slowly up Amsterdam Avenue in tears. She had to make a call for support. For herself.
But there was a third group for whom very powerful feelings surfaced during the interviews: those who realized they’d committed assault. Diana was deeply shaken when she considered how her actions may have been experienced by her friend. Think about Austin’s recounting of that moment freshman year, when he got in bed with a girl and touched her breasts. “Well, fuck me,” he said to us, tears welling up in his eyes. There were times when we heard experiences unquestionably as assaults, but the person who told these stories—like Eddie—never gave any indication that they viewed it this way. But others, either in the moment of the interview or some time before it, did. And they were crushed. For some of the men, we suspect the response is bound to fear—imagining that their life could forever be “ruined” because of what they did. But there is more to it. Most people want to be seen as desirable—to imagine that others are genuinely attracted to them and that they are good at sex. They don’t want to think of themselves as people whose sexual exploits are produced by coercion rather than desire. They have been taught the importance of consent. Many students belong to groups that have explicitly set community standards regarding consent—from athletic teams to fraternities to the band and the debate team. And the university is striving to develop these cultural norms as well. Students have mostly gotten the twin messages that assault is bad and that an accusation of assault will, as students put it, “ruin your life.”
Our point is not to make those who commit assault look like victims, or suggest that they have no responsibility. Rather, we argue that while the vilification of “perpetrators” may have helped achieve important political ends, creating widespread social support for the recognition and prevention of sexual assault, it has also narrowed understanding. It’s been decades since the finding first emerged that many campus sexual assaults are committed by a friend or intimate partner, and yet those assaulters have largely remained shadowy caricatures.10 They haven’t fully been integrated into the broader understanding of why assaults happen or what we should do about them. Thus we provide some details from the family and educational backstory of those who sexually assault others. These details are part of the story of what leads to campus sexual assault.
Elliot was a smart but awkward teen who grew up in a financially comfortable, stable household. His mother stopped working when he was born, and his father worked long hours but made it a point to come home every evening for family dinner. Their wealthy, conservative Michigan neighborhood had good schools. Few of his high school classmates drank, and fewer still did drugs. Being sexually active didn’t make you a “cool kid.” Elliot’s peers didn’t focus much on accruing sexual experience; they were more driven by their families to launch their careers.
The major lesson about sexuality that Elliot learned from his parents was not to talk about it: “Sexuality wasn’t necessarily stigmatized in my family, but it wasn’t open.” From school, he took away two lessons, both focused on the bad things that happen after sex: “If you have sex you might get pregnant” and “This is what happens if you have STIs.” Elliot struggled with anxiety, and his early sexual experiences featured little pleasure, joy, or intimate connection; he recounted them mostly as experiences to power through. As his high school years passed he became fixated on his virginity—the desire to lose it, coupled with the fear that maybe preserving it might be a better choice.11 When he was a junior dating a senior, she prodded him to talk about what he wanted sexually, what she wanted, and what they might do together. Her openness made him think that maybe he was making too big of a deal about sex. Finally, one day his girlfriend said to him, “Hey, you want to get this over with, like, have your first time and, like, move on?” He answered, “Yeah, like, fine. Why not?”
She took charge of the situation, bringing him back to her family’s house one weekend when her parents were out of town. As he remembered:
She was pretty much, like, large and in charge. . . . I was too nervous to help her take her shirt off and stuff like that. So she just did it all and was telling me what to do, like, “Get undressed.” I was nervous, but excited obviously. I was very comfortable with what was going on, so I didn’t really mind. I just kind of let it happen.
Otherwise articulate, Elliot struggled to describe his sexual experiences, stumbling as he spoke, and falling back frequently on the words “awkward” and “uncomfortable.”
In senior year Elliot recreated his own virginity loss experience, except that this time he was the one who “did it all.” His new girlfriend had never had intercourse, and wanted to. Like Elliot, she suffered from extreme anxiety. He figured if they talked about it, she’d become overwhelmed by her own anxiety. So one day, while getting undressed on the couch, Elliot leaned back and said to her, “I’m going to get a condom.” He continued: “That was the point that I expected her to be, like, either, ‘No,’ or just, like, continue on.” She was dead silent. Elliot could tell she was nervous. As they began to have intercourse, she gave no sign it was a pleasurable experience. But she also didn’t indicate that it was bad. Elliot expected that she’d feel able to ask him to stop if she wanted to. “She was very independent, self-aware, and easily the most successful, driven person that I knew in my life.” Then she did say something. Elliot recounted that she “kind of asked him to stop because it was painful for her.” So he pulled out.
She showered and Elliot accompanied her home. It was an awkward, silent ride. Growing up in a community where people didn’t talk about sex, neither of them knew what to say. As they continued to date, the sex got better. Years later, home on break, they ran into each other at a party. Both drunk, they laughed, reminiscing at how terrible her first time was. When we talked to him, after Elliot had been through so much more, we asked him if he regretted anything about these early sexual experiences.
In retrospect, I don’t really regret any of it. I wish I had been in an environment where talking about sex was easier, because even largely to this day, I’m not even that comfortable talking to the rest of my family about it. I kind of have it in my mind that they knew what was going on with my sex life, but nobody was going to address it. Even with friends, though, it was not super open. Nobody ever talked about the actual act of sex or anything like that. It was more gossiping about who was having sex with whom.
Elliot had accrued more sexual experience by the time got to Columbia, but little in the way of sexual vocabulary. He continued to feel anxious, and started to experience depression. Eventually he saw a doctor and began medication; it helped, but the day-to-day was still hard.12 He found a student group where he felt like he belonged, and was excited to be in a new, more open sexual environment. Like many of his peers, his sex life involved a lot of alcohol, and not that much emotional intimacy. One night, for example, after drunk sex with a woman he barely knew, he asked her if she wanted to stay over. “People do that?!?” she laughed.
Layered on top of the silence and fear were sexual interactions that taught him to separate intimacy from sex. In his freshman year there was a woman he really liked, but she wasn’t interested in any kind of relationship. Still, their physical connection developed, and they hooked up for several months before drifting apart. It was a lonely year for Elliot; the Model UN, which had been so important to him in high school, wasn’t nearly as meaningful in college. He felt surrounded by others who were sure of their paths after college, already on the hunt for internships.13 He got mono, missed a major conference, and faced his teammates’ ire. That, on top of his mediocre grades and his feeling that everyone else was doing college better than he was, made him feel that summer couldn’t come soon enough.
The following December, Katie walked into the dorm’s common room, where Elliot sat studying for finals. Elliot later learned that she’d taken some Clonazepam, a tranquilizer prescribed to treat seizures and panic attacks, and had been drinking. Katie found the Clonazepam helped make her “chill,” something hard to achieve during finals week. Katie complained to Elliot that since breaking up with her ex—someone Elliot knew well from Model UN—she hadn’t had sex. And she talked about loneliness in a way that resonated with Elliot. He asked her if she wanted to have sex with him. She said no.
They continued to talk. Elliot was sober, and suggested they go for a walk together in the unseasonably warm night. They’d lived on the same hall now for a semester but had never really spoken. In the early hours of the morning they strolled around campus and through the Morningside Heights neighborhood, talking about the things that were so frustrating about college, and their lives. Feeling they were now connecting, Elliot again asked Katie if she wanted to have sex. She said no.
It was just an hour or two before dawn when they finally returned to the dorm common room, where they continued to chat. One last time, Elliot asked if she wanted to have sex. She agreed. At nearly 5 a.m., with their roommates fast asleep, they couldn’t use either of their rooms. Katie went to her room, got some lubricant, and met Elliot back in the common room. They closed the blinds, had sex, and then each went to back to their own rooms, across the hall from one another, to sleep.
A few days later a mutual friend came to see Elliot. Katie was concerned about what happened. She didn’t want people to know she’d had sex with Elliot, given how close Elliot was to her ex. The friend told Elliot that Katie was concerned about the “social consequences.” Elliot was focused on finals, and it hadn’t occurred to him to tell others about what had happened with Katie. He blew it off, didn’t reach out to Katie, and went home, ready for a break.
Early in the spring semester Elliot received an ominous email, summoning him to the Office of Gender-Based Misconduct. Katie had reported their incident as an assault. Months later, after the investigation was completed, Elliot was called in to meet with his dean. He’d been found guilty. She had repeatedly said “no.” She had been drinking, and was on a drug that further impaired her. He had worn her down, extracting a yes that she did not want to give, that she was not capable of giving.
As Elliot tells it, the experience was catastrophic for his identity—he had never imagined himself to be the kind of person who would assault someone. His depression worsened. He considered suicide. When he returned to campus after his suspension, he felt—and was treated—like a pariah. His old friends wouldn’t speak to him. “Nobody even acknowledged me.” Katie’s friends saw him heading to a bar one evening, and screamed at him: “Rapist!!!” The experience forced him to grow as a person. As he recounted, “I was admittedly kind of terrible to other people sometimes, just mean or not accepting. So, looking back, I have turned it into a positive experience for myself. I am now just, like, a kind, gentle person I think as a result.”
The first time he had sex after being found responsible for committing assault, Elliot had a severe panic attack. Before sex, he’d told the woman what had happened with Katie and about the school’s decision. She reassured him that the sex they were about to have was consensual. But still, as soon as the sex was over he locked himself in the shower to have a private place to cry. Today he has rules for himself. One of them is telling his partners what happened. “I can’t have a physical relationship with somebody without explaining that to them. It’s almost unfair to that person. It explains to them a lot of the anxieties on my end.” Women have been open to him, mostly, even after he’s told them what happened. He requires a lot of reassurance before they have sex, that they are not “going to in any way use sex against me. Because I mean obviously at this point, all it takes is one person to turn around and say, ‘Elliot also raped me,’ for me to just go to prison, at least in my mind.”
He says he’d never have a one-night stand again. “That would cause me too much anxiety.” It’s not the emotional connection Elliot needs; it’s trust. And yet Elliot continues to have drunk sex. With his current girlfriend he would “drink and party with her friends and stuff. I would stay with her in her dorm room and we would have sex, and, like, me being drunk and having sex, and her being drunk and having sex, that freaked me out because then it becomes, like, ‘Is this actually consensual?’ and so that question is always in my head.” In fact, he told us that while drunk, he’s had sex with his girlfriend that he didn’t want.
She probably had no idea of, like, the state that I was in. I woke up and I was like, “Let’s not do that next time. That was not a good choice on either of our parts. I mean I was so drunk that it wasn’t enjoyable.” She felt way worse than I intended to make her feel about it, because like I said, I felt in no way abused or taken advantage of. I just know that it was probably not worth it.
Still, he couldn’t think of this, in any way, as rape—even though his girlfriend had sex with him that he didn’t want, while he was too drunk to consent. Elliot didn’t feel harmed. He also felt, and clearly expressed, that he didn’t want it to happen again. Elliot turned the experience of being found responsible for committing assault into something “positive” in part by developing a broader sexual vocabulary, and reflecting more deeply about his own sexual experiences.
I think there should be another term. Not so much that I think that, like, date rape or something like that isn’t rape, but I think there’s culturally such a connotation with rape and physical violence, that it conjures up the wrong image of what consent is meant to be. I think in coining another term—and I’m sure a feminist will point out how this is entirely wrong of me were I to bring it up, but that’s okay—in coining another term, you could kind of take the wrong connotation away from it [physical violence] and start to break down what consent actually is in the context of alcohol, drugs, and all of these altered states of mind and stuff. I woke up and I didn’t feel like I was abused or raped, or violated. I wasn’t. And yet I think there are people who look at it and be like yes, you were raped and she should go to jail for that. Or she should be punished in some way for it, but I don’t think that accomplishes anything. I think it was much more useful for myself and for her to be like “Hey, that wasn’t consent. I don’t hold this against you but don’t do that.” But at the end of the day, like, not giving consent is not giving consent.
Many of the assaults we describe feature students who were not interpersonally skilled and who had sex with people they didn’t know well, sometimes when they were very far from sober. Some people might judge sex under those conditions to be wrong, coarsening, or exploitative. Our point is different: the body is a social canvas, and when people do things with their bodies, these experiences are a training ground for what feels normal. Years ago, doing fieldwork in rural Mexico, Jennifer taught her young sons to kiss strangers hello—an act at which they initially recoiled in horror—in order to conform to local expectations about good manners. In a few months, through a combination of stern glances, some gentle shaming, and positive social reinforcement for good behavior, they dutifully began to offer up their cheeks, experiencing as normal what had previously disgusted them. (In subsequent years, there’s been an active discussion of those type of forced kisses as a crucial teachable moment about consent and boundaries.) In an analogous way, a lot of the sex that students have with people they do not know well socializes them, in an intimate and embodied way, to regard noncommunicative, largely narcissistic encounters as consensual sex. Although there are certainly assaults that look very different from consensual interactions, for Diane, Elliot, and many other students, consensual sex is often characterized by limited communication and even less intimacy.14 And so, disturbingly, the experiences they had that were consensual often look very similar to those that were not. This is part of why being accused of assault can be so confusing. Previous sexual experiences, consensual though they may have been, set the stage for subsequent assaults, in large part because the main question they asked was, “what do I want?” in a context where no one—parent, teacher, mentor—had ever talked to them about what sex was for, or taught them to also ask the other person, “What do you want?”
Diana and her friend talked about what happened. Elliot didn’t listen to Katie that night, when he kept trying to convince her to have sex after she’d repeatedly said no; and he didn’t listen to her later, when he blew it off when her friend came by to convey that she wanted to talk about it. Later, having been sensitized about nonconsensual sex by the consequences of his actions, Elliot was able to say to his girlfriend, “Hey, that wasn’t consent. I don’t hold this against you but don’t do that.” For better or worse, consent doesn’t just happen in the moment. It is something that people process over time. The problems of communication are not just in the moment of sex, but also in the temporal arc before and after. Remembering that the assaults in these two stories represent a very particular subset, those grounded in entitlement and self-absorption rather than an intentional violation of another’s boundaries, what we frequently saw was a fundamental problem with communication around sex: before, during, and after.15
Martin’s story illustrates the risks created when young people’s curiosity about sex is sated only by pornography, untempered by family conversations about values and relationships or school-based sex education. What happened went unreported, and he did not label it assault. Maybe it wasn’t an assault. But based on his narrative, the other person felt uncomfortable during the interaction and, for a reason we cannot know, also felt unable to say so. Leaving aside the sex part, it sounds scary to be choked harder than desired by a much larger person and to feel unable to stop what was happening.
The story came out in fragments, over the course of several rather disturbing interviews. Martin could not remember receiving any sex education at all in the wealthy but very rural Idaho community in which he’d grown up. He was emphatic—not only had he never spoken with anyone in his family about sex, but he would never want to: “My sex life is my sex life. I don’t ask—I have no interest in knowing what my parents do, I have no interest in knowing what my brother or sister does . . . because of all the people I’d want to talk about sex with, do I really want to talk with people like my mom and dad and siblings about it?”
More than two dozen US college campuses feature BDSM clubs or student interest groups, and it’s important not to confuse BDSM itself with assault.16 For example, Lydia, who was into kink (her story appears in Chapter 5), was among the most scrupulous and intentional sexual actors we met. She expressed a well-developed sense of her own and others’ sexual citizenship, a meticulous and pleasure-oriented approach to sexual communication, and deep fluency in the erotics of consent.
Martin’s interest in BDSM was more of a private thing. The students at the campus club did not feel like his people. His ample BDSM knowledge, primarily from watching pornography, extended to specific actors and their specialties. But in at least one instance, his self-taught sexual skills, combined with his insistence on negotiating the terms of a sexual encounter in advance, led to a “complicated” experience. When asked if he’d ever reflected back on a sexual experience and felt that something nonconsensual had happened, Martin said “I did, one time, actually have something like this, where a week after something happened with a girl, she was like, ‘So, I wasn’t actually feeling this way.’ And I mean actually that got me a little mad.”
So, she was there, and we were starting to do stuff. . . . What she had explained to me—she liked to be defiant . . . which gets the person more aggressive. But she kept being defiant, to the point of, she never said anything, and so it got to the point where she didn’t feel comfortable with it, but she didn’t say anything about it.
We asked how he would have known the difference between a performance of defiance as part of a sexual scene and someone’s actual objection to what was going on.
So when I say defiant, I mean, in a very teasing way. So it’s like, you tell her something, and she says she’s not going to. It’s more like, “I’m not going to do this, you have to do this. . . .” There was no change in her tone of voice and stuff like that. . . . It was said in a very teasing-y way, and she kept using that same voice, instead of a much more serious “no, don’t do this.” There wasn’t a shift in her attitude.
Martin was distressed, recounting what happened after, when she texted him. “She said she wasn’t comfortable in the moment, and I was just like, ‘I really don’t know what I could’ve done there, in that situation, ’cause you weren’t doing something very key to the whole aspect.” Martin provided a little more detail:
it was kind of ridiculous because she got mad but—well, no. . . . So apparently, I was at one point choking her really hard . . . but she never said anything throughout the whole thing, she just kept egging me on for some reason. . . . She never said anything like, “Don’t do that,” it was more, it was always just like more teasing essentially. . . . She was not articulating—like she was not being how you should be when you are being submissive, on account of it requires a lot of communication. . . . She said it was too rough afterwards, like through text. I was like, “You never said anything . . .” and she was like, “I was afraid to.” And I was like, “No.” I was like, “What?” I didn’t really understand that well . . . because she was saying she didn’t like—she thought I was being too rough and stuff, but she didn’t say anything during. I’m just, like, I don’t know what you want me to do with this.
Martin met that woman through an app, but to focus on the digitally mediated element of their connection is to miss that these were two complete strangers engaged in a complex sexual interaction, each seeking his or her own physical gratification, without having established even a safe word, much less an in-person understanding of the other’s communication styles and sexual preferences. Martin had absorbed the campus messaging around consent to the extent that he always negotiated it up front, discussing through the app what he was into, what the other person wanted, and what was not on the table.17 As he lived out his fantasy of finding the perfect submissive to his dominant, his acceptance of a temporal separation between consent and sex—not just agreeing to sex, but planning it—was just a more extreme version of how many students “do” consent, where consent involves agreeing to go back to someone’s room. Once in that room they pretty much assume that consent has happened. Being in a scene scripted around overpowering his partner posed real challenges for his capacity to notice her discomfort. Learning about sex from pornography is like learning how to drive by watching automobile ads in which professional drivers do stunts. But those car ads warn, “Professional driver on closed course. Do not attempt”; with pornography, there’s no warning label.18
We’ve met Tim before. He’s wealthy, attractive, and determined to be known as a man who provides the party. He drinks copiously, often in combination with marijuana or cocaine. He was the man in Chapter 2 who told us the story of being assaulted, and being upset that he couldn’t report it because since he was drunk, the woman could just turn the story around on him and he’d be the one to get into trouble. Tim started his freshman year with a boldness verging on arrogance. He had a credit card, with the bill paid by his family every month, no questions asked, and a fake ID he’d secured months before arriving on campus. Early in orientation week, he bought some handles of vodka and threw a party in his room, inviting his teammates, and some women he had gone to high school with and others he deemed attractive. Tim recounted how they did shot after shot—nothing out of the ordinary for him. Midway through the party, one of the women he’d invited leaned over and asked him if he wanted to go back to her room. Tim nodded to one of his teammates as they left together.
Things escalated quickly. Soon they were naked, but she didn’t have a condom, and she wanted him to use one. Tim dashed back to his room to get one. He flashed the condom as he left the room—the victor, going to claim his prize. The party-goers who had stayed, continuing to drink the booze he’d procured, cheered him on. Her door was locked, but when she heard him outside she let him in. Tim quickly undressed. As he was putting on the condom, he saw her reach for her phone and type a single word:
“Help.”
She’d sent the message to a group text that included several women Tim knew from high school. They were just a floor away, at his party. Tim quickly threw his clothes on and went to talk to them. He hadn’t done anything! he exclaimed. They hadn’t even had sex yet! She’d asked him to get a condom! She was drunk. Crazy, even. Tim insisted that these women come back with him to her room to convince her that she didn’t need any help. When they arrived at her room she was naked, jumping up and down, laughing and largely incoherent. They all left.
We don’t know why she texted “Help” to her friends, and why she couldn’t say something to Tim at that moment. We have his story. He told us that the next day she started flirting with him again. He was upset, and determined “never to go there” because she’d implied he had done something wrong, that he was going to rape her. For a while he avoided her. Several months later they had sex.
This story is unclear. It was likely also unclear to Tim, and to this woman, given how much they had had to drink. But what is clear is that this woman was incapable of consent. At face value, Tim’s narrative—her erratic behavior, her incoherent babbling and laughing, their heavy drinking—conveys incapacity. So clearly, they shouldn’t have had sex, right? But we can also see why Tim wouldn’t think of it as an assault. She’d asked him to get a condom. It doesn’t meet the “affirmative consent” standard that appears in an increasing number of state laws, but it is a pretty common way for students to signal consent.19
Yet when someone who is out-of-their-mind drunk asks for keys to the car so they can drive home, we don’t give them those keys. We don’t say to ourselves, “Yes, this is what they really want to do.” Instead, we think, “Wow. This person is in no condition to make this decision right now. And I’m not going to facilitate it, even if it means I pass up a potentially delightful ride home. And now I have to wait more than an hour for the next bus.” It may seem condescending. It may compromise the other person’s agency, refusing to give them what they’re asking for. But there are plenty of situations where we say to ourselves, “This person may say they want this, but they’re really too incapacitated to make that decision.” Why should sex be any different?
While we often think of alcohol as creating risks for victimization, what became clear to us was how much it created risks of perpetration. A vital conclusion of our work is that students should be attentive to how much they are drinking because being drunk means having hugely compromised judgment. They might assault someone.20 And that doesn’t just apply to men.
Cheong, the khaki-clad, no-longer-smoking student from Hong Kong whose swan boat excursion with his girlfriend appears in Chapter 5, asserted that his approach to consent—“I get to know a person sufficiently long enough and also, I don’t move that quickly”—enabled him to engage in sex without forcing a partner. And he initially responded “not really” to the question about whether he’d ever had a sexual or intimate encounter that, in retrospect, might not have been fully consensual. But then he recounted two incidents in which his advances had been unwelcome. Both were the form of assault—unwanted sexual touching—that was most prevalent among the students that SHIFT researchers surveyed.21 In the first—which he brought up twice during the relatively short interview, suggesting that he found it relevant to our examination of sexual assault—he “stole a kiss” from the girl who eventually became his girlfriend. They were out at a jazz club for the evening during one of their early dates, and “She was taken aback. She was like, ‘Oh, I don’t want that.’”
Another time, a woman with whom he later became friends described to him something he’d done at a party—something he did not even remember. “She said that I was pretty drunk, and that as she walked in, I slapped her on the butt.” Cheong laughed nervously at this point. “I don’t remember anything like that happening.” When we asked him how he felt about it, he said he was “really taken aback, really shocked that I would do something like that, ’cause it’s not something”—more nervous laughter—“I can imagine myself carrying out.” He said that when she told him, he was “apologetic,” and when we asked him if he would describe what happened as sexual assault, he did not hesitate: “Yes, I would say so.” We asked if he told anyone. More laughter, this time lighter. “I mean, I still joke about it with her, but we don’t go telling people that I slapped someone.” But it was a learning experience: “It made me want to be more aware of the stuff that I do when I’m drunk, just so I don’t do anything stupid that I might regret or that might offend someone, ’cause I wouldn’t like my butt to be grabbed by some random stranger.”
For Cheong, the experience of being touched in a way that made him uncomfortable was part of his emerging understanding about the need to be respectful of women. One night out at a bar downtown, he described a girl as “overly affectionate” with him, to the extent that—he laughed as he shared the memory—he was “running away from her” all night, as she repeatedly hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. “That made me uncomfortable because I did not see her that way and I’m not usually touchy with girls.” He was uneasy—both about the interaction and the decision to confront her. As they walked to the library the next day to prepare for the econ review session, he shared with her that he wasn’t crazy about what had happened. She’d been so drunk, she didn’t actually remember. It was even more awkward because he had to spell it out. She was apologetic, and said that it was also kind of ironic, because “she’s had it happen to her on several occasions. . . . Guys tend to be pretty aggressive, so it is something she’s come to expect but not a situation that she would like to be in.”
Cheong was very reflective about sex, trying to be considerate of other people, and to learn from his experiences, and yet those two incidents of unwanted sexual touching, combined with the fact that the first time he and his girlfriend had sex they had never discussed that she was a virgin, points to the problems of a script in which men’s job is to move the ball down the field. This analogy frames sex as a game people play against an opponent. It’s not playing with a partner; it’s scoring against them. The implication is that there are winners and losers. But what if we changed this script to think less about offense and defense—about trying to “steal a kiss”—and more about being on the same team, where a win for both people requires conversation about which plays sound good?22
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Our introduction to the campus landscape raised the larger question about what is required to prepare students to interact respectfully across many forms of social difference. Queer students talked about how much work they had to do to teach others how to respect them. We heard parallel stories from racial and ethnic minority students. The amount of emotional labor that it took to educate their peers about simple principles of respect was exhausting. That work’s cognitive and emotional burden created differences in how these students felt about their college experience. Recognizing others’ sexual citizenship, like their broader citizenship, takes effort, feedback, and practice. And yet young people have been left to figure it out for themselves—with the primary responsibility of educating students about how not to harm others shouldered by those who are disproportionately the objects of violence, and often the most precariously positioned.23
The silences around sex produce harms—harms that cannot be addressed by adding fear-based messages about campus sexual assault to the “risk-avoidance” sex education that has left this generation of youth so underprepared for navigating sexual intimacy. Bringing sex out of the closet can’t just be volunteer work by those who are having “weird” experiences, or who label what happens as assault. There are lots of reasons why people don’t want to report their experiences of assault. But one of them is that victims are concerned about the person who assaulted them. That person may be a friend, a part of their community, someone who has been decent before. Institutions might consider, at the discretion of those who are assaulted, a process of “no-fault reporting,” as exists on many campuses for alcohol abuse.24 If someone has been drinking too much and is at risk to themselves, students can let a resident advisor know, so that their friend gets counseling.25 If the framework is predators on the prowl, there’s no reason to give sanctuary to assaulters. But victims often want recognition and repair, not revenge. And those who assault others often think about what they’re doing as having sex, not assaulting someone. What if, then, we found ways to convey to people how others were experiencing sex with them? That it wasn’t okay? What if this communication could occur in ways where those who were assaulted didn’t have to be worried about “ruining the life” of another person, perhaps one they cared about? That would transfer the work of educating young people back to parents and caregivers, to religious communities for those who are a part of them, and to adequately trained and institutionally supported teachers and campus health promotion services. This would be far better than what we’re doing now: leaving it to the victim to decide whether to do the emotional and practical work of talking through what happened and why it wasn’t okay with the person who assaulted them, or with whom they had that “rapey” encounter.26 It certainly would be better than demanding that they don’t just educate that person, but enter into an adversarial process against them.
We began this chapter with Diana for a reason: to remind readers that men aren’t the only people who commit assault. A lot of attention has been paid to the ideas of a campus “rape culture” and the “toxic masculinity” that produces sexual violence. We don’t deny the power of these ideas. But there are a lot of assaults for which those concepts provide insufficient explanatory power; the SHIFT survey showed that nearly one in six men experienced assault by senior year and, as we’ve noted, the highest rates of assault are found among LGBTQ students.27 Assaults of men and of LGBTQ students require a different accounting of campus power relations. Doubtless, Eddie’s cluelessness about the potential toll of having sex with women for whom he does not particularly care feels toxic—or at minimum, excessively self-involved. But let’s return to Diana one last time. She was working with her therapist on her tendency to treat others as objects to be consumed along the path to her own self-realization. Where were the adults in her life, teaching her to treat other people as humans rather than objects?28 The question is not what’s wrong with Diana, or Eddie, or Elliot, or Tim; they are products of communities and institutions that see “triumph” in having sex with someone deemed “high status,” and of families and peers like Elliot’s, who actively maintain silence about all things sexual. Eddie learned somewhere to think of sex as an obligatory form of reciprocation. Martin’s only tutor in navigating intimacy was pornography. What kind of ecologies have we created that make these kinds of projects seem reasonable? How are we raising such enormously successful young people, who have learned other lessons so well, yet who feel entitled to ignore the citizenship of those with whom they share some of their most intimate moments?