For as much as I complain about how little has changed in the decades since feminists first began a national conversation about rape, there are some noteworthy differences between the twenty-first century and the 1970s or even the ’90s.
I’ve avoided loading down this book with detailed stories of individual rapes, for instance, because I feel those testimonies can easily be found elsewhere these days. That wasn’t the case when Susan Brownmiller was writing Against Our Will or when Robin Warshaw was interviewing survivors for I Never Called It Rape. Women simply sharing their experiences was radical and revolutionary for a long time. Now it seems that new venues are appearing every day for survivors to open up about what they’ve endured. More and more, people are disclosing what used to be seen as shameful secrets, refusing to carry the burden of self-blame. I feel comfortable leaving that focus to them and to other writers on rape culture.
But I’ve referred to my own 1992 rape throughout this book, without going into detail, and that feels like a bit of a cheat. Plus, it just so happens that one of the worst things that ever happened to me is a good way to introduce all of the recent changes that give me hope for our culture—hope that one day, after some more time and collective effort, we’ll be able to say, “‘Rape culture’ is a ridiculous overstatement,” and mean it.
My Story
I was seventeen. It was my first week at college on an idyllic New England campus with fewer than five hundred students. It was one of those schools with no grades and little structure, where creative nerds went in hopes of productively expressing all the resentment we’d built up over years of traditional education. Our dorms were white colonial houses with green shutters, set alongside an expansive lawn, and on the weekends, we took turns hosting house parties that looked a lot like stereotypical Greek keggers, except for most of us being too artsy and historically unpopular to acknowledge the resemblance.
I was wearing a tight dress, borrowed from a “friend,” although I hadn’t been there long enough to have any real friends. I was, in a general sense, interested in meeting guys and maybe even having sex, although I never had before. I was drinking a lot—for the third or fourth time in my life. Punch, probably vodka-based. For a long time, I told myself and anyone else who had to hear this story that it was Everclear—Everclear punch was a thing in the ’90s, if you weren’t there—because grain alcohol would explain how I got so drunk, so fast. But being seventeen years old, nine hundred miles from home, and desperate to be liked would also explain it pretty well.
He approached me on the dance floor with a drink. We danced. I liked that part. He went and got me more drinks, because he was over twenty-one, and I liked that part, too.
At some point, we went outside. I don’t know where I thought we were headed—could I have been naïve enough to think he was just walking me home?—but I know I stopped right there on the lawn between two dorms and kissed him. I liked that part, too, not so much because of the kiss itself, which was sloppy and awkward, but because going to parties and kissing boys on the way home implied that yes, college life was indeed going to kick high school’s ass.
The part I liked lasted a very short time before he pulled me down on the ground. Before I’d even adjusted to being on a different plane, he pulled my underwear off and put his penis inside me.
I said “Stop,” and wriggled around enough that his dick fell out. I slurred some other words at him, along the lines of “No, wait, please.” And whatever I may have imagined before that moment, during my gym class self-defense unit or while walking through parking lots with a car key jutting out between two fingers, that was it. That was all the fight I had in me.
It’s possible he didn’t hear a no, specifically, or that my words were unintelligible. It’s not possible he didn’t know I was asking him to stop, or that he genuinely thought he had a willing partner at that point. Let’s be clear about that.
When he finished, he stood up and walked away without a word. I felt around on the grass for my underpants and couldn’t find them anywhere. There were a few other people milling around outside the doors of the house hosting the party, too far away to notice me. Otherwise, I was alone. I looked across the lawn at three white colonial houses with green shutters and wasn’t completely sure which one I lived in. That’s when I started sobbing.
My roommate woke up when I came in, still hysterical, and rushed to comfort me. She held me as I cried and told her I’d just had sex with a guy I didn’t know, and my underwear was somewhere out on the lawn. The next morning, she marched me into our R.A.’s room, where I told the whole story and heard someone say for the first time, “Honey, that’s called rape.”
The R.A., the roommate, and I went to the hospital. I was only focused on preventing pregnancy and STDs, but the emergency room doctor—a man whose kindness and gentle manner I will never forget—explained what a rape kit entailed and asked if I wanted them to call the police and collect evidence. Two thoughts went through my head at that point: (1) I never got his name, and (2) if the police got involved, my parents would find out.
Even though several people had by then told me, “Honey, that’s called rape,” and I was starting to get it, I could only think about the fact that I’d gotten drunk out of my mind and had a penis inside me, two things my parents would surely disapprove of. Eventually, months later, I told them, and they were actually quite supportive; my mom even flew out that very weekend to visit. (Like the churlish teenager I still was, instead of being grateful, I mostly felt angry at her for making me miss one of the big, annual themed house parties.) But on the morning after, the thought of having to explain it to them was utterly terrifying, so I declined the rape kit. What was the point in collecting evidence against someone whose name I didn’t even know, anyway?
I wasn’t yet accustomed to living on a campus with fewer than five hundred people, which teaches you how few five hundred people really is. It didn’t take a day before I spotted him in the dining hall and viscerally understood the phrase “My blood ran cold” for the first time. (There were so many firsts for me, just then. College freshmen have no idea how young they are.)
“That’s him,” I said to the friend I was with, although again, “friend” was a strong word for people I’d known less than two weeks. “That’s the guy.”
This particular young woman was a sophomore, and she recognized him, a senior. A “nontraditional” senior, in fact, that is, someone nearly a decade older than I was. There were a few of those around.
“Oh, no,” she assured me. “That’s ____. I know him. He would never do that.”
And that was it, for several months. I never saw anyone else on campus I thought it might be, and I always felt a little weird around that guy, but again, it was a small campus. I occasionally even talked to him at parties. I hung out with people who considered him a good friend. I told myself he couldn’t have been the guy who raped me—that must have been someone who didn’t live on campus—because my not-yet-a-friend had sounded so sure, and people I liked really seemed to like him. Between the age and class difference, we didn’t run into each other much, so it wasn’t a big deal.
It went on like that until one day, I heard a rumor: That guy had raped somebody else.
And somebody else. And somebody else.
The person who told me that had no idea I’d once picked him out of a crowd as the guy who raped me—she was just sharing gossip about a mutual acquaintance. But that’s what initiated Phase 2 of my rape story.
I sought out the people behind those rumors and learned he’d even been formally accused of rape through the school’s channels before—by a student long since gone—and his “punishment” was writing her a letter of apology. (He’d also taken some time off, possibly not voluntarily, which explained his advanced age. Obviously, though, the college had welcomed him back.) I met another woman, a senior, who told me he’d raped her during a semester abroad, while she was sick in bed, loaded up on cough medicine with codeine. She wasn’t willing to add her name to a complaint against him, but she offered to support me any other way she could.
It would be a very strange coincidence, I thought, if this guy who had a history of forcing himself on intoxicated woman, and whom I’d identified as my rapist less than twenty-four hours after the fact, was not, in fact, my rapist. I went back to the (now real) friend who’d originally told me, “He would never do that” and told her what I’d learned. She was aghast. She, too, offered to support me however she could, including testifying about that conversation in the dining hall and explaining that she’d steered me away from my gut reaction.
What happened to me is similar to a million other campus rape stories, but I want to note one thing that was different from many: I had loads of support. My friends, for the most part, never doubted me and certainly never blamed me. When I was still too afraid to tell my parents, yet unable to pay the hospital bill that came for my exam the morning after, my older sister stepped up to take care of the debt and keep my secret. That emergency room doctor was the best anyone could ever hope for in that situation. A pelvic exam is never pleasant under the best of circumstances, but I still recall how kindly he spoke to me, reaffirming that I’d been violated and I had a right to seek justice, without pressuring me to do anything I wasn’t comfortable with. And the advantage of being at a tiny, emphasis-on-liberal liberal arts college is that I had access to many people who were informed about sexual violence and knew enough to help me heal instead of adding to my trauma.
It still got ugly from there. Not worse, given that point A was being raped, but it got ugly.
There was the other doctor, for instance, the one I saw on campus six months later for follow-up STD testing, whose disdain for sexually active young women was palpable. There were the mutual friends of my rapist and me, who had no idea how to treat either of us once I started telling people who it was. There were the nonmutual friends of his, who thought I was making it all up, and shot looks and comments to that effect in my direction. And then there was the hearing.
When I filed a complaint, it went to the school’s sexual harassment committee—there was no sexual assault committee—which set a date to hear my argument and his. In addition to the friend who testified that I’d identified this person as my rapist, other friends of mine offered quasi-legal affidavits attesting, in essence, that I’d been really fucked up all year. The rape triggered depression and anxiety, which led me to skip a lot of classes and blow off a lot of homework. By this point, it was the end of the year, and I’d passed two out of six courses.
I told my story to the committee both in writing and in person. He told his story, separately. As far as I know, his argument was that he couldn’t remember anything specific about the night in question, but he definitely had no recollection of anything I was talking about. This may even have been true. One of those mutual friends had said to me earlier, “Do I think he’s the kind of guy who would rape somebody? No. Do I think he’s a blackout drunk who does a lot of things he doesn’t remember? Yes.”
We were both thanked for our time and told to wait for a decision.
I went home for the summer, after telling the school I wouldn’t be returning in the fall, even if they would have accepted me on academic probation. I didn’t know where I’d go from there, but I knew I could never go back.
The decision came in the mail. The committee had concluded that yes, I was the victim of a rape, and it had seriously affected my studies. They would see that a note about personal difficulties was added to my transcript, a small mercy that would make it easier to convince another college to let me in later. They did not, however, believe that I had necessarily identified the correct suspect. The man I believed had raped me, who had already been through this whole process after another woman accused him, and who had reportedly raped at least one other student, would be allowed to graduate with his degree.
One member of the sexual harassment committee was a professor in his major department. He was the rapist’s advisor. No one saw this as a problem.
I don’t know where my rapist is now or if he’s alive, for that matter. I’ve never even Googled his name; I’m occasionally curious, but when I think about typing it into a search bar, I’m stopped by the same superstitious dread I felt as a kid when someone pulled out a Ouija board at a party. I don’t want to invite him back into my life like that, even in a way that can’t possibly hurt me. So I assume he’s probably pretty much as I last saw him: a messed-up alcoholic who can avoid hitting bottom indefinitely as long as he can get somebody to give him a pass at a crucial moment. He’d be pushing fifty now, so maybe that doesn’t work as well as it used to. Maybe he’s been sober for years. Maybe he’s in prison for raping someone else.
You know what the worst—no, second worst—part for me is? More than twenty years later, I still haven’t fully banished the thought that maybe I was wrong, and it was just a coincidence that the guy who made my blood run cold had been accused of raping other women. I mean, technically, it’s possible—which is one reason why I haven’t named him here. It’s possible that I don’t know who raped me and never will, which would mean I went through the humiliation of that hearing, and the socially miserable lead-up to it, for absolutely nothing.
But the worst part is, twenty years later, stories like that are still nauseatingly, shamefully common on college campuses. When people ask me about my rape, I usually describe it as “your typical After-School Special. Drunk at a party, first week of college, you know the rest.” And they always do.
Rapists know it, too. My rape was a singular experience in my own life, but so many elements of it were positively textbook. Studies have shown that freshmen are especially vulnerable in the first few weeks after they arrive at school—some administrators call it the “Red Zone”—because they’re likely to be inexperienced drinkers without a local support system, using alcohol to lessen social anxiety.1 Predators exploit this, just as they exploit the fact that someone who flirts with a guy and leaves a party with him is unlikely to be believed when she says she was raped. (Again, my story varies from the typical one in that everyone believed me when I said I’d been raped—just not when I said I recognized my rapist a day later. It’s fascinating how all of the usual bullshit about what you were drinking and what you were wearing and how much you did consent to falls away, if you give people another option to avoid believing a particular guy committed a particular rape.)
On the other hand, over the two years that I’ve been working on this book, I’ve seen changes I never imagined would come. And the difference in how people are responding to campus rapes, at both the institutional and the grassroots level, is one of several causes for genuine hope I’d like to leave you with.
Student Activists Demanding That Colleges and Universities Live Up to Their Responsibilities Under Title IX and the Clery Act
The federal law that would eventually be known as the Clery Act—technically the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act—went into effect in 1991, a year before my rape. It’s named after a nineteen-year-old woman who was raped and murdered by a fellow student in her dorm room at Lehigh University in 1986.
Only after their daughter was killed did Jeanne Clery’s parents learn that the violent crime rate (including rape, robbery, and assault) at Lehigh had been unusually high in the preceding years; that most campus crimes nationwide were committed by other students; and that the school’s security system was prone to abuses. (Clery’s murderer, who lived off campus, entered her dorm through doors propped open by residents.)2 They sued the university and used the resulting settlement money to found Security on Campus, a nonprofit dedicated to informing the public about campus crime, and began pressuring Congress to pass legislation requiring colleges and universities to improve security and report all crimes.
The act that eventually passed required colleges and universities receiving federal funding—that’s most of them—to keep a public crime log, release an annual report of violent crimes on campus, and issue timely warnings to students about unsolved recent crimes, among other things. In 2013, President Obama signed the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act, which amended the Clery Act to strengthen and expand those requirements. The following year, the Office of Postsecondary Education issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” (DCL) offering guidance on the matter:
Notably, VAWA amended the Clery Act to require institutions to compile statistics for incidents of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking and to include certain policies, procedures, and programs pertaining to these incidents in their annual security reports [ASRs]. . . .
For example, the statute requires institutions to specify in their ASRs the procedures that they will follow once an incident of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, or stalking has been reported, including a statement of the standard of evidence that will be used during any institutional conduct proceeding arising from such a report.3
A previous guidance document, the April 4, 2011, DCL from the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, regarding schools’ responsibilities under Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972, explained that colleges are to employ the standards of a civil court (“preponderance of the evidence”) rather than a criminal court (“beyond a reasonable doubt”) in determining whether a report of sexual harassment or violence is actionable.
Prior to that, most of us thought of Title IX, which protects students from sex-based discrimination, in terms of the positive impact it had on girls’ and women’s school athletics. (There’s even a manufacturer of women’s activewear called Title Nine.) But the OCR’s Dear Colleague Letter reminded everyone that “sexual harassment of students, which includes acts of sexual violence, is a form of sexual discrimination under Title IX.”4 In a nutshell, the nineteen-page letter says this:
If a school knows or reasonably should know about student-on-student harassment that creates a hostile environment, Title IX requires the school to take immediate action to eliminate the harassment, prevent its recurrence, and address its effects.5
This document marked a historic shift in the government’s approach to sexual assault on campus, but that’s not even my favorite thing about it.
My favorite thing is that two years later, survivor-activists Dana Bolger and Alexandra Brodsky got together and founded Know Your IX, an information clearinghouse for students to learn about their legal rights under Title IX and the Clery Act (more on that in a moment), and explore resources for campus-based activism. Through their website (KnowYourIX.org), speaking engagements, and visibility in both social and mainstream media, these young activists have taken the message of the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter straight to the students who are meant to be protected by it.
Know Your IX is one of several survivor-activist networks, including End Rape on Campus, founded by Annie Clark, Andrea Pino, and Sofie Karasek, and SurvJustice, founded by Laura Dunn, that have been hard at work on behalf of student survivors over the last several years. (Pino and Clark are featured in the 2015 campus rape documentary The Hunting Ground, from the same team behind The Invisible War. The simple fact that such a film exists is also noteworthy progress.) In 2013, those activists launched a campaign called ED ACT NOW to pressure the federal government to enforce its own guidelines. The group noted that the Office of Civil Rights had, up to that point,
never once sanctioned a college or university for sexual assault-related Title IX violations. Instead the agency quietly concludes investigations, asks universities to sign voluntary resolution agreements (VRAs)—essentially signed promises to do better next time—and issues no finding of violation. In the high stakes game of college rankings and university branding, schools get off scot-free: their reputations intact and with little incentive to make meaningful changes in the future.6
On July 15, 2013, dozens of ED ACT NOW activists traveled to Washington, DC, to deliver a petition with over one hundred thousand signatures, “calling on the OCR to conduct timely, transparent, coordinated, and proactive investigations; involve survivor-complainants in the process of arriving at any resolution to an investigation; and issue meaningful sanctions against non-compliant schools.”7 This led to meetings with officials from the Department of Education and Department of Justice, and the creation of a White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault.
Just let those words sink in for a moment. The White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. That, I must admit, is something I never saw coming—neither in the aftermath of my rape in 1992, nor while I was writing the proposal for this book twenty years later.
Not Alone, the task force’s first report, was issued in April 2014. It promotes bystander intervention (and specifically, engaging men in the fight); confidential consultation options for victims not ready to make a formal report; comprehensive sexual misconduct policies; trauma-informed training for school officials; better disciplinary systems; and partnerships with the community. And it promises increased transparency—including a website, NotAlone.gov, where students can directly file Title IX complaints—as well as improved enforcement.
Survivors did that. Students did that. The young people who are going to be running everything before we know it did that.
That gives me hope.
The Proliferation of Affirmative Consent Legislation and Policies
In the introduction to their 2008 anthology, Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti wrote:
The goal of Yes Means Yes is to explore how creating a culture that values genuine female sexual pleasure can help stop rape, and how the cultures and systems that support rape in the United States rob us of our right to sexual power.8
Throughout the anthology (to which I was honored to contribute an essay), feminist and womanist writers argue for moving beyond the old battle cry of “No means no” and reconceptualizing sexual consent as something that must be given affirmatively—better yet, enthusiastically. In her essay “Offensive Feminism,” feminist journalist and former attorney Jill Filipovic explained the concept as follows:
Feminists insist that men are not animals. Instead, men are rational human beings fully capable of listening to their partners and understanding that sex isn’t about pushing someone to do something they don’t want to do. Plenty of men are able to grasp the idea that sex should be entered into joyfully and enthusiastically by both partners, and that an absence of “no” isn’t enough—“yes” should be the baseline requirement. . . . If women have the ability to fully and freely say yes, and if we established a model of enthusiastic consent instead of just “no means no,” it would be a lot harder for men to get away with rape. It would be a lot harder to push the idea that there’s a “gray area.”9
In 2008, it was pretty much only feminists talking that way about consent—advancing the radical notion that it’s incumbent upon men (and women) to ensure that their sexual partners actually want to have sex. But six years later, “Yes Means Yes” was beginning to be discussed seriously as a legal standard, not just a lofty ideal.
In September 2014, California governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 967 into law, requiring colleges that receive state funding for financial aid “to adopt policies concerning sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking that include certain elements, including an affirmative consent standard in the determination of whether consent was given by a complainant.”
That standard is described like so:
An affirmative consent standard in the determination of whether consent was given by both parties to sexual activity. “Affirmative consent” means affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity. It is the responsibility of each person involved in the sexual activity to ensure that he or she has the affirmative consent of the other or others to engage in the sexual activity. Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent. Affirmative consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time. The existence of a dating relationship between the persons involved, or the fact of past sexual relations between them, should never by itself be assumed to be an indicator of consent.
Basically, if at any point, you’re not completely sure your partner is into what you’re doing, you need to stop doing it (if you’re a student at a college that relies on state funding, and you don’t want to risk getting thrown out). This is neither rocket science nor appalling government overreach. This is being a decent human being.
Shortly after Bill 967 passed, writer, actor, and director Mindy Kaling’s sitcom, The Mindy Project, aired an episode in which the necessary conflict between the show’s two leads—who had entered a happy, loving relationship after two seasons of will-they-or-won’t-they?—was all about issues of consent within a committed relationship. As the show opens on a shot of the bedroom door, we hear Mindy and Danny happily getting it on. Suddenly, Mindy yelps words to the effect of, “Danny! That doesn’t go there!” followed by a clumsy separation and a bullshit apology: “I slipped.”
Danny didn’t slip, of course; a running joke throughout the show is that no man has ever “slipped” and ended up with his penis in the wrong hole. But over the course of the episode, these two people speak frankly about their sexual desires, sincerely apologize for lies and other relationship failures, and eventually come to a perfectly reasonable, grown-up agreement: if you want to try something drastically different in bed, ask first.
I thought the episode was groundbreaking not just because it was the first depiction of attempted anal sex on network prime time, but because I can’t recall ever seeing adult partners on TV negotiate their sexual boundaries, in and out of bed, using words. And for my money, the episode is a perfect illustration of what “affirmative consent” is all about.
About one split second after his girlfriend said she isn’t cool with what he is doing, Danny stops—not just the offensive act, even, but the whole sexual encounter. That’s being a decent human being and taking responsibility for ensuring that “consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity.” Mindy’s lack of enthusiasm is portrayed as an instant boner killer, as it damn well should be.
Sure, in an ideal world, boyfriends would always ask before trying to penetrate a new orifice—and they definitely wouldn’t try to cover it up with a weak lie after the fact. (In the show, Danny is duly shamed for that crap, by the way, and Mindy doesn’t forgive him until he’s apologized and they’ve agreed on how to handle things in the future so neither of them ever feels unsafe.) But to my mind, the episode sent exactly the right message about consent—it’s not a black-and-white contract you sign before having sex, but an ongoing series of communications between sexual partners, whether that takes place during a single encounter or over several years.
Again, that fact should neither frighten nor confuse anyone who’s had sex before. When you become sexually active, you quickly learn that sex as it’s practiced in the real world nearly always demands small, quick renegotiations as you go along. Sometimes a long-term partner wants to try something new in bed, and sometimes even the old things hurt if you do them at the wrong angle. Sometimes the person on the bottom wants to be on top, or somebody’s arm gets squished, or a head bashes into the headboard. Sometimes, an act that felt great when your partner started it actually makes you feel sore after a couple of minutes, and you need it to stop, even though you enthusiastically consented to the act before and loved what was happening up to that point.
Real people having real sex deal with this shit all the time. Practicing affirmative consent means being cognizant of how your partner’s responding to everything that happens, doing everything you can to make sure you’re both happy, and respecting the other person’s boundaries even when they conflict with your immediate desires.
In other words, it’s what decent people already do, without being told.
Far from making sex more confusing and unfounded rape accusations more likely, the affirmative consent model offers us all a measure of extra confidence that as long as we pay attention to our partners’ responses, looking for active enthusiasm and making changes as the situation warrants it, we’ll never accidentally stumble over the line between sex and rape—because that’s really more like a wall that some people deliberately scale.
And if for some terrible reason we ever find ourselves falsely accused by a consensual sex partner, we’ll be able to say honestly and assuredly that we received numerous indications of enthusiasm throughout the encounter—not just that we never heard a no or took a punch to the face.
Imagine, for instance, if Mindy reported Danny for putting his penis in her anus without consent—technically, she could argue that his attempt to “steal fifth base” was an assault. In that case, Danny could honestly tell investigators that prior to that moment, she was moaning, saying yes, telling him what he was doing felt good—and the second she told him what he was doing didn’t feel good, he stopped. He was constantly aware of her level of engagement, and he respected the boundary she set. He should have asked first (and if they both wanted to have anal sex, they should have prepared better for it; that’s not something to do on the fly, kids), but he was immediately responsive when she called time out.
That’s a way better defense than “Well, she was lying still for most of it, not saying ‘no’ or throwing me off her, but when she did yell at me to stop, I stopped.” It’s also a description of way better sex. Who would want a partner who’s not clearly expressing enthusiasm throughout the encounter? Someone who’s looking for a victim, not a partner, that’s who.
By mid-October 2014, bills similar to California’s were under consideration in New York, New Jersey, and New Hampshire. The State University of New York had already transitioned to an affirmative consent standard at all of its campuses, and according to Inside Higher Ed, the whole Ivy League, save Harvard, had adopted a version of “Yes Means Yes” in their sexual assault policies.10 The National Center for Higher Education Risk Management reported that eight hundred colleges and universities had done the same.
That gives me hope.
The Internet and Young People
In the last chapter, I discussed several ways in which the internet propagates rape culture, but I’d be remiss if I neglected to mention what an effective tool it can be in combating rape myths, connecting survivors, and providing information.
Besides the federal government’s NotAlone.gov and other information clearinghouses like KnowYourIX.org and CleryCenter.org, local and national resources for violent crime victims are only a five-second Google search away. The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) operates a National Sexual Assault Online Hotline, in addition to their telephone hotline and informative website, which help connect victims with local resources. Heather Corinna’s Scarleteen, a marvelous website about sexual health for young people, offers a “bully-free zone” where teens can discuss assault and abuse (among many other topics), plus live chat and SMS services that enable them to ask direct questions of nonjudgmental adult educators. Information-wise, it’s an amazing time to be young.
Trolls and bullies notwithstanding, the internet can also foster meaningful social connections. Just as important as the increased accessibility of organized services is the increased accessibility of other people who have endured similar experiences. On Tumblr and Twitter, on feminist, LGBTQI, and Social Justice Warrior blogs, survivors are telling their stories, exploding the myths that sexual violence is rare and being a victim is shameful. After I was raped in 1992, I went to my roommate, my RA, and the library for information and comfort. I met a few other women on campus who confided that they’d been victimized similarly but none of us had any idea how widespread the problem was. But if I were a college student today, I could find endless educational resources and connect with too many other survivors to count, without even leaving my bed. (I mean, leaving your bed is good, folks. I recommend it. But when you’re lonely and depressed, the internet can be a lifesaver just as easily as it can make things worse.) This proliferation of voices sharing stories and demanding change has had a profound impact on the cultural conversation around rape and sexual assault, simply by (finally) growing too loud to be ignored.
Comedians Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, hosting the seventy-first Golden Globe Awards, boldly joked at Cosby’s expense before an audience of nineteen million viewers. Referring to the fairy tale musical Into the Woods, Poehler described the trials of the female protagonists: “Cinderella runs from her prince, Rapunzel is thrown from a tower for her prince, and Sleeping Beauty just thought she was getting coffee with Bill Cosby.”
Fey and Poehler followed up that expertly crafted rape joke (see?) with marble-mouthed impressions of Cosby’s Jell-O Pudding ads, the kind every half-assed comic has had in their repertoire since the mid-1980s—only their version of the avuncular dessert-maker mumbled cheerfully about spiking the pudding. The Golden Globes audience was visibly shocked and uncomfortable, which was at least partially the point. As Spencer Kornhaber wrote in the Atlantic, that second gag was
an attempt to redefine Cosby’s public persona permanently. Right after Robert DeNiro with “you talkin’ to me?,” Cosby’s one of the most commonly impersonated figures in American culture. People who tuned in last night will probably find it harder to do or see someone do that impersonation now without thinking about rape. That’s a significant development for anyone who thinks that public figures should be held to account when there’s strong evidence they’ve used their fame to take advantage of others.11
A few weeks later, during the Saturday Night Live fortieth anniversary special in early 2015, Kenan Thompson impersonated Cosby in a Celebrity Jeopardy sketch that reinforced this new definition of the older comic’s public image while highlighting how fast the change had happened. Thompson’s Cosby appeared in a “Video Daily Double” about cocktail mixing, which was almost immediately cut off by Will Ferrell’s horrified Alex Trebek: “Oh, oh, dear God, no! I’m very sorry! We filmed that in June!”
I must admit, I’ve felt a bit like Fake Trebek while writing this book. Every time I finished writing up one high-profile case or aspect of the emerging national conversation on sexual violence, some new development would demand a rewrite. (Like, for instance, the news that more than twenty-five women had accused Bill Cosby of rape or assault.) I know that by the time you read this, scores of new stories will have broken, which is frustrating for me as an author, but incredibly heartening for me as a human being. In the nineties, it seemed that we all went through a brief phase of fretting about date rape, then promptly forgot all we’d learned, but in the 2010s, it feels more as if a dam has finally burst. It feels as if maybe, finally, this conversation won’t taper off until sexual violence does.
That gives me hope. So does the generation that’s keeping it going.
In September 2014, Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz began a long-term performance piece that would serve as her senior art thesis: carrying a fifty-pound, extra-large twin mattress everywhere she went on campus, until the school imposed some punishment on a fellow student who, she reported, had raped her two years before. Sulkowicz didn’t approach any authorities until—like me, twenty years earlier—she heard another woman complain of abuse by the same man. (Two other people reporting he sexually assaulted them came forward after Sulkowicz did.) After a university hearing, Sulkowicz was told—like me, twenty years earlier, albeit for different reasons—that there was not enough evidence to warrant punishing him.12
It’s the same basic story as countless other campus rapes—and the reason why organizations like Know Your IX exist. But Sulkowicz made sure hers was different. She refused to accept Columbia’s decision quietly and devised a way to ensure the school couldn’t keep it hidden. Mattress Project (Carry That Weight), as she titled her performance piece, quickly captured national headlines. The image of a young victim lugging around a replica of her own crime scene, reifying the burden of being a woman in a rape culture, was irresistible.
And that, in turn, led to the image I want to leave you with. On October 29, 2014, Columbia students deposited twenty-eight mattresses at the door of university president Lee Bollinger, one to represent each complaint in the Title IX case pending against their school. At 130 other universities on that same day—organized via social media and the website CarryingTheWeightTogether.com—students held mattresses aloft like protest signs, expressing support for survivors and demanding that their institutions do better.
This being the internet age, photos of the protests soon made the rounds, and by about the fifth one I looked at, I was in tears. All of these young people—men, women, nonbinary—assembled to say, as publicly and visibly as possible, Enough is enough. I believe that’s what—that’s who—will move us from a rape culture to one that respects women’s autonomy, takes sexual violence against any person seriously, and holds perpetrators accountable. As for the rest of us, the least we can do is try to keep their path forward clear.