[This piece appeared in the Durham Independent on March 30, 1994. It was the first op-ed I ever wrote. In fact, at the time, I probably wouldn't have known what the word op-ed meant--opposite the editorial page.]
Last fall George F. Will published an essay in Newsweek entitled “Sex Amidst Semicolons” (4 Oct. 1993), which catapulted overnight the sleepy college town of Antioch, Ohio–and the issue of date and acquaintance rape–to national attention. Before the week was out, Antioch students were the butt of Jay Leno and David Letterman jokes. Almost all of the major newspapers around the country carried spin-off articles and commentaries. Only three issues after Will’s essay appeared, Newsweek ran a cover entitled, "Sexual Correctness: Has It Gone Too Far?" (25 Oct. 1993) with a shadowy half-naked picture of a modern-day Adam and Eve. (Eve, by the way, is wearing bright red lipstick.) My father was correct in a phone conversation I had with him during that time: Antioch had become the laughingstock of the nation.
Like my father, the majority of the American public found the Antioch document laughable and ridiculous. Who ever heard of requiring someone to get verbal consent for each and every level of intimacy from “may I hold your hand?” to “will you have sex with me?” Most Americans summarily dismissed Antioch’s sexual conduct codes as yet another politically correct invention gone haywire. But few realize that with this dismissal also came a denial of what the Antioch codes were trying desperately to regulate.
It is a simple fact that too many people–especially those who haven’t been to college in well over a decade–consider date and acquaintance rape a myth. For example, according to Mary Matalin in her October 24 Newsweek article, “Stop Whining!” campus date rape is “overhyped” and those who whine do their sisters a disservice by moving the feminist agenda away from “economic equity” to “fuzzy-headed forays into cultural PC.” The introductory essay also tells women to “pipe down” if they don’t “have a serious problem,” and urges women to tell men to “bug off” when they are offended.
In a new book, The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus, Katie Roiphe argues that issues such as date rape–particularly how college students and the media talk about it–reduce women to helpless victims in need of protective codes of behavior. Discussion of “women as victims,” according to Roiphe, creates a campus hysteria that will erode many of the advances women have made since the 1950’s.
We cannot deny, however, that many college women are the real victims of real rape and while it’s not possible to accurately determine the percentage of women who will be date or “stranger” raped during their college experience, we can agree that all forms of rape in any percentage are unacceptable and that what is happening on campuses all across America is serious and cause for real alarm. We need to find a way to talk intelligently and constructively about the problem. And we must accept the fact that we cannot talk about date rape without first talking candidly about sex, consent, and victimization.
Men like George Will and my father do not understand the current environment on college campuses out of which Antioch’s unwieldy misfit was born. Many of our parents graduated before the campus turmoil of the late 60’s. How accurate is their perception of what college life is like for us?
According to the “Duke Women’s Handbook,” as recent as the 1950’s men were allowed only in dorm parlors and women couldn’t visit them without approved chaperones. This was the norm across the country. Women’s dorms closed at 10:30 p.m. on weeknights and 11:30 p.m. on Saturday nights. Women had to sign out and sign back in. Permission slips were often required to attend dances and women were expected home within a half-hour after the dance. Fortunately we’ve come a long way in four decades.
Today’s college women don’t have to sign in or out nor are they relegated to East Campus or any dormitory. Alcohol is much easier to get; privacy much easier to find; women much freer to sleep where they want; and many men, to be honest, still want the same thing on a Saturday night that they did in the 50’s. The present environment on college campuses must strike our parents as astonishingly liberated–and it is. But we’ve paid a price for our freedom. We now have all the ingredients on college campuses for an alarming new trend in date and acquaintance rape. And since our parents are no longer enrolled, we need to protect ourselves if they won’t.
George Will and others would have us believe that because date rape is hard to define, any attempt to talk or codify it “causes . . . an odd ‘crisis’ on campuses.” But the codes don’t create the odd crisis; the crisis creates the odd codes. Date and acquaintance rape has always existed; only two things have changed over the years–its frequency, particularly on college campuses, and the attempt to bring the issue out into the open.
The “Duke Women’s Handbook” (which contains mild versions of Antioch’s codes and has for several years) attempts to do just that: A man and a woman go out and he pays the check at a nice restaurant. They eventually wind up in his room and he pressures her for sex making her feel that she owes him something for the evening. She has been date raped. A woman goes to a party, meets a man, and spends the rest of the evening drinking and dancing with him. Her friends leave without her, and the man offers to let her spend the night because she feels unsafe walking home. They have sex despite her protests. She has been date raped. A man and a woman have been dating for a long time and he wants to have sex but she says that she’s not ready. He threatens to break up with her and either strong-arms or cajoles her to “make love.” She has been date raped. Were these scenarios violent? Probably not. Were they wrong? Yes. Punishable by law? That’s up to the courts to decide.
The important point here is that many men on college campuses refuse to accept that women have every right to want sex from them, every right to tease them, every right to deny them–and still spend the night. Unlike George Will and many of his generation, I wonder if women are clear enough and men careful enough to communicate what they want from one another once the lights go out and the hormones start colliding.
I think the answer to this question is what lies behind sexual conduct codes like those at Antioch College. Just because a woman wants to spend the night with a man does not mean that he’s guaranteed an orgasm–nor does it ever mean she’s “asking for it.” By the same token, it is not acceptable for a woman to assume that a man will get the message of what she wants through some sort of ambiguous body language–a covering of the breasts, a crossing of the thighs, a squirming of the body–or a half-whispered “I don’t think I want to.” Many of us young people don’t know how to act with the freedom we’ve been given. (I think our parents would agree.) But like our parents we still don’t know how to express ourselves in the dark.
The sooner we all get rid of the Victorian vestiges of silence and the silly notion that spontaneity preempts the need to communicate, the sooner we’ll have a safer college environment for both women and men. The Antioch document was a well-intended but bungled attempt at just that. Certainly young ladies and gentlemen–if they’re capable of having sex–are capable of finding appropriate times to ask one another if what they’re doing is okay. Getting “consent” is really the PC buzzword for being polite–something that should be intrinsic to all genuine relationships.
Is asking really too much to ask?
I find it one of the peculiar imbecilities of our time that a man can ask a woman out to dinner, but can’t find an appropriate way to ask her to make love. Now there’s something I wish George Will would write an essay about!
[Mark Franek is a graduate of Duke University (B.A. 1991, M.A.T. 1992). He lives in Montgomery, Al.]
