Earlier this week, I wrote about the most interesting liberal case for campus policies — embraced voluntarily in some cases, and recently imposed by the state government in California — that require so-called “affirmative consent” as a condition for licit undergraduate sex relations … thus lowering, perhaps dramatically, the burden of proof required to expel a student for sexual assault. Today I want to quote from a couple of conservative arguments for the new standard’s virtues.
(You may ask: Am I deliberately avoiding writing about the ongoing events in Rome? For now, yes. But only for now.)
These arguments overlap in certain ways with the Ezra Klein piece that I took up earlier, in that they stress the value of instilling a certain amount of fear in young men contemplating a drunken hook-up. But they treat that fear not (or not just) as a means of shifting of some burdens in casual encounters from young women to young men, but as a potential spur to a remoralization of some kind … or at least a form of pressure against promiscuity and in favor of monogamy.
First, here is Conn Carroll:
Will this put more college men at risk of being expelled or suspended from school for sexual activity with women? Yes … I do, however, believe that men in committed relationships will face far, far less risk of false accusation than men who sleep around … if you are in a committed relationship there is very little chance each new amorous encounter with your partner will result in hard feelings either way. But if you are constantly switching partners, each new pairing is a roll of the dice. You have no idea how each woman will react the next morning. If you sleep around there are simply way more opportunities for things to blow up in your face.
And here is Heather MacDonald, wrapping up a provocative Weekly Standard essay on “neo-Victorianism” on campus:
[Conservatives should] leave laments about the inhibition of campus sex to Reason magazine … To be sure, the new campus sex regime puts boys in danger of trumped-up assault charges heard before kangaroo courts. But the solution is not more complex procedural protections cobbled over a sordid culture, the solution is to reject that culture entirely. Just as girls can avoid the risk of what the feminists call “rape” by not getting drunk and getting into bed with a guy whom they barely know, boys, too, can radically reduce the risk of a rape accusation by themselves not getting drunk and having sex with a girl whom they barely know. Mothers worried that their college-bound sons will be hauled before a biased campus sex tribunal by a vindictive female should tell them: “Wait. Find a girlfriend and smother her with affection and respect. Write her love letters in the middle of the night. Escort her home after a date and then go home yourself.” If one-sided litigation risk results in boys taking a vow of celibacy until graduation, there is simply no loss whatsoever to society and only gain to individual character. Such efforts at self-control were made before, and can be made again.
… Society has no interest in preserving the collegiate bacchanal. Should college fornication become a rare event preceded by contract signing and notarization, maybe students would actually do some studying instead … Maybe colleges should assign and grade some real homework instead of wasting faculty and administrator time drafting cringingly lurid consent scenarios … Parents might get some value out of their extortionate tuition payments, and boys might catch up to girls’ graduation rates.
There are no sympathetic victims in the campus sex wars. While few boys are guilty of what most people understand as rape, many are guilty of acting as boorishly as they can get away with. Sexual liberation and radical feminism unleashed the current mess by misunderstanding male and female nature. Feminists may now be unwittingly accomplishing what they would never allow conservatives to do: restoring sexual decorum.
I think this is a compelling description of how campus culture could respond to these policies, and of course I think the “be monogamous; be a gentlemen; don’t get blackout drunk” advice that Carroll and MacDonald offer to young men confronted with such rules is excellent counsel. But as I noted in my last post, there are a lot of forces (beyond just the ideological ones that conservatives tend to stress) pressing campus culture in a pro-bacchanalian direction, and I’m doubtful that this policy will somehow be influential enough, or contradiction-heightening enough, to really represent the “breakdown” for sexual liberation that MacDonald discerns. And while it might theoretically encourage a modest (so to speak) return to decorum in courtship and coupling, that hope might also be the socially conservative version of the wishful thinking that leads some feminists to speculate about collegiate men becoming more awesome bed-mates under the influence of Yes Means Yes.
Let me tell a somewhat different, less hopeful story about how young men might respond to these kind of rules and procedures. Based on what we know about both the incidence and the reporting of rape, it seems very unlikely that any campus policy is suddenly going to make assault allegations commonplace, in a way that would have them intruding frequently into the social life of the typical college-going male. Instead, “yes means yes” will create a kind of black swan situation, where only every once in a while a man gets expelled for rape under highly ambiguous circumstances. And because the injustices or possible injustices will be rare, that “every once in while” will not actually have much of a deterrent effect on men confronted with an opportunity for a drunken hook-up, in the same way that other very occasional disastrous consequences of binge drinking (e.g., death) seem remote to young men (or young women) who head out to get hammered on a typical Saturday night.
Which is not to say that the new policy won’t have a cultural impact. But its impact, in the scenario I’m sketching, will be akin to the impact of the stories that Fox or MSNBC fasten on to whip up their respective audiences: It will be a distant-seeming outrage that mostly feeds a sense of grievance and persecution among the men who might (but mostly won’t) suffer unjust treatment at the university’s hands. Which means that rather than being a spur to some sort of reborn chivalry or new-model code of male decency, it will mostly encourage the kind of toxic persecution fantasies that already circulate in the more misogynistic reaches of male culture. See, the feminazis really are out to get us, the argument will go, and in bro lore the stories of men railroaded off campus won’t be seen as cautionary tales; they’ll be seen as war stories, martyrologies (in which even actual, clear-as-day predators are given the benefit of the doubt), the latest battle in the endless struggle between the Animal House gang and Dean Wormer … reincarnated now, in our more egalitarian feminist era, as a castrating Nurse Ratched.
The new standard of consent, in this scenario, will be neither reasonable enough to be embraced as a model nor consistently punitive enough to scare men away from drunken wooing. Instead, it will be have a randomness, an arbitrariness, and an occasional absurdity that will encourage a mix of resentment and resistance. And as such, it will lock in an aspect of contemporary sexual culture that social conservatives probably don’t talk enough about: The kind of toxic misogyny that feminists rightly call out and critique, but that also exists in a kind of twisted symbiosis with certain aspects of feminist ideology – answering overzealous political correctness with reactionary transgressiveness, bureaucratic pieties with deliberate blasphemy, ideologies of gender with performative machismo.
In James Poulos’s vision of the “pink police state,” which I’ve cited before in these discussions, our emerging cultural-political regime has two features, two distinctive elements. The first is the official administrative element — a regulatory system that claims sweeping and invasive powers in order to make the world safe for individualism, because only such powers can effectively domesticate, make safe and fun and hygienic, what would have once been considered transgressive or anti-social behavior, be it sexual or pharmacological or what-have-you. That’s clearly part of the dynamic driving Yes Means Yes: When consent is the only standard, when the cultural ideal is a world where almost anything goes, it takes what even some of the policy’s defenders concede is an extraordinarily invasive legal code to police the remaining gray zones.
But the second element of the pink-police-state culture, Poulos writes, is the inevitable reaction to what happens in the official realm. The system may seek to “domesticate and incorporate new choices, new practices, and new identities, sublimating once-transgressive lifestyles into cosmetic virtues understood to aid the health and safety of the regime.” But that process of domestication will never be complete, because it will “always propagate zones of transgression against health and safety as defined by officialdom.” That is part of what we see at work, I think, in the explicit misogyny of frat provocations, online harassment, “Gamergate”-style culture wars … a kind of twisted macho transgressiveness that flourishes in symbiosis with the very forces seeking to bring a restrained masculinity fully into the “health and safety” matrix.
The goal of social conservatism – and not only social conservatism, of course – should be to find ways to break this cycle, to replace the symbiosis of overreach and reaction with a more humane synthesis, founded on norms and codes that don’t require star chambers to enforce, and don’t ask people to choose between Antioch College rules and the boys of Phi Delta Theta. Those goals are not obviously attainable in the present cultural dispensation, and the path to them can seem extremely obscure. But I’m very doubtful that embracing the pink police state is the right first step to take.