Girls & Sex

by Peggy Orenstein

  In any case, I would argue that waiting to address rape until college is years too late. Sexual assault is even more common among secondary students; the difference is that their schools don’t have the same duty to report it. Twenty-eight percent of female college freshmen in a 2015 survey of a large private university in upstate New York said they had been victims of either attempted or completed forcible or incapacitated rape before college—between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. As in the early 1990s, many of the recent incidents that have shocked the nation also took place among younger kids. In the fall of 2012, Steubenville, Ohio, became the Glen Ridge of its day after two football players hauled a drunk, insensible sixteen-year-old girl from party to party, taking turns sexually violating her, spitting on her, even urinating on her as classmates looked on, some cheering. Like the Glen Ridge jocks, who would, without asking their partners, Scotch tape photos to their high school’s trophy case of themselves in flagrante delicto, these boys weren’t content simply to assault their victim; they needed to document the “achievement.” One member of the Steubenville “rape crew” tweeted such gems as “Some people deserve to be peed on” and “You don’t sleep through a wang in the butthole” and “Song of the night is definitely Rape Me by Nirvana.” Another boy posted a picture of the victim on Instagram, her head lolling back as the boys carried her by her wrists and ankles. In a YouTube video, a laughing young man calls her “deader than,” respectively, Nicole Simpson, John F. Kennedy, Trayvon Martin, and the toddler Caylee Anthony. Was online bragging about rape part of a new, ominous trend? A year earlier, a pair of boys in Louisville, Kentucky (fine students and athletes at a prestigious Catholic school), made news when they passed around cell phone pictures of themselves assaulting a sixteen-year-old who lay drunk and semiconscious in her kitchen. Audrie Pott, a fifteen-year-old from Saratoga, California, committed suicide after photos of an assault perpetrated while she was passed out drunk were posted on the Internet. Ditto Rehtaeh Parsons, a seventeen-year-old girl from Nova Scotia, Canada, who was gang-raped while incapacitated.

  Tracking those incidents, it struck me how often the words funny or, more commonly, hilarious came up among boys recounting stories of women’s sexual degradation. When, during the Steubenville video an off-camera voice says rape isn’t funny, Michael Nodianos, then a high school baseball player, responds, “It isn’t funny. It’s hilarious!” One of the Louisville boys told police he thought it would be “funny” to take pictures of himself assaulting his victim. A young woman I met at a California university told me how, freshman year, a male resident of her dorm invited her to watch a video he’d shot on his phone of a friend having sex with a girl who was out cold. “Come look at this,” he had said. “It’s hilarious.” A boy on a midwestern campus I visited, recalling the first time he saw hard-core porn, remembered thinking that was “hilarious,” too; his classmate used the word while describing how the “ugly band girls” were the most sexually active in his high school. “Hilarious” seemed to be the default position for some boys—something like “awkward” for girls—when they were unsure of how to respond, particularly to something that was both sexually explicit and dehumanizing, something that perhaps actually upset them, offended them, unnerved them, repulsed them, confused them, or defied their ethics. “Hilarious” offered distance, allowing them to look without feeling, to subvert a more compassionate response that might be read as weak, overly sensitive, and unmasculine. “Hilarious” is particularly disturbing as a safe haven for bystanders—if assault is “hilarious,” they don’t have to take it seriously, they don’t have to respond: there is no problem.

  The photos shared by the assailants in Steubenville, Louisville, Nova Scotia, and Saratoga revictimized the girls—potentially in perpetuity, as the images could be endlessly copied, downloaded, and passed along. They also provided unique evidence that crimes had indeed been committed, though that made neither conviction inevitable nor punishments necessarily more severe. One of the Steubenville rapists was given a year in juvenile detention; the other got two years, including credit for time already served. The Louisville boys were ordered to perform fifty hours of community service, which, until the local newspaper intervened, they were fulfilling by putting away equipment after lacrosse practice. Two of Audrie Pott’s assailants received thirty-day sentences in juvenile detention, to be served on weekends; a third served forty-five consecutive days. Rehtaeh Parsons’s attackers were placed on probation. As in Glen Ridge, there was often a groundswell of sympathy for the boys in these cases: claims that their actions were unusual, a one-time mistake; anguish over the damage convictions would do to their bright futures; denunciations of the girl involved. One of the Louisville assailants took his appeal straight to his victim, texting her to ask that she stop pursuing her case against him. “There is another way to deal with this other than jeopardizing our lives forever. . . . I’m not a bad person just a dumb one.”

  “You don’t think you ruined my life forever?” she shot back.

  Uncool

  Through another series of jumbled, and by now somewhat alcohol-tinged, events, Maddie found herself in the backseat of a car with Josh, heading to the party she was supposed to have gone to in the first place. A boy named Anthony, another senior, was driving; his girlfriend, Paige, rode shotgun. Maddie ignored them all, focusing on the texts she’d begun trading with Kyle, occasionally yelling at her phone. Josh, seeming truly concerned, asked what was wrong. “There’s this guy I’ve been in love with for a year and a half,” Maddie told him, her voice teary, “and I lost my virginity to him and now he’s had sex with another girl.”

  “Have you had sex with anyone else?” Anthony asked from the front seat.

  “No,” Maddie said, still weepy. “I only have sex with people I’m in love with.”

  “Well, that’s your problem!” Anthony told her. “If you just have sex with someone else, you’ll get over it!”

  Maddie may have been upset with Kyle, but she wasn’t stupid; she ignored Anthony’s “advice.” The group drove around for a while, but they couldn’t find the party. Maybe, Anthony said, it had already been broken up by the cops. The boys suggested they head to a familiar park instead, and the girls agreed. When Anthony drove to a wooded area that Maddie didn’t recognize, she didn’t say anything—she didn’t want to appear uncool in front of older kids—but she surreptitiously took a screenshot with her phone. The next day, the Geotag showed the boys had lied: they were nowhere near where they claimed to be. Anthony and Paige strolled off into the trees, leaving Maddie alone with Josh. He pushed her against the car door and began to kiss her. Maddie didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to be kissing him. She felt angry, confused, maybe a little scared. “God damn it,” she thought, “what am I supposed to do?” She tried to tell herself it would be over soon: Anthony and Paige would come back and they’d go to a real party, where she could ditch Josh. When she described what she actually said to him, though, she used the tiny, helpless voice teenage girls lapse into when they’re uncomfortable, when they don’t want to offend. “I was like, ‘Okay, we don’t have to keep doing this, get off now!’” she said.

  Josh grabbed her wrist and pulled her deeper into the woods. He backed her against a tree and began kissing her again. “I knew this was not good, that I needed to leave,” Maddie said. But where could she go? When Josh began pushing down on her shoulders, she shrugged him off. He persisted. She moved his hands. After a few more tries, he finally said, “Oh, is that too hard for you? Do you not want to do it?”

  “No, it’s not ‘too hard,’” Maddie replied, “I just don’t want to do anything with you.” To spare his feelings, she said it was out of respect for her friend, the one he’d called “crazy.”

  “She doesn’t have to know,” Josh said.

  Maddie shook her head. “No. I just don’t want to.” At that, she said, Josh began to pout, acting injured and rejected. Just then, Anthony began honking his car horn.

  T
hey scrambled into the backseat and Josh brandished a bottle of rum. “I don’t know where the top is,” he said, “and we can’t drive with an open bottle in the car.” He thrust it toward Maddie, adding, “So you have to drink it.”

  Maddie shook her head. She did not want to drink any more.

  “Oh, it’s okay,” Anthony explained. “Rum makes your blood alcohol go up, but you won’t feel drunk.”

  Maybe she was just trying to get through a dicey evening, trying to avoid antagonizing two large, older boys; besides, Anthony wouldn’t start the car until that bottle was empty. “Be cool,” she told herself as they passed it around. “Just get yourself home, get to bed.” She tried faking a few sips, but in the end, she guesses she downed about six shots. After that, her memory fragmented. She recalled crying more over Kyle’s betrayal. She remembered going to a fast-food drive-thru. She remembered Josh pulling her onto his lap. And then she blacked out.

  Don’t Tell Girls Not to Drink; Tell Rapists Not to Rape

  At the heart of the argument over consent is another argument over alcohol. How drunk is too drunk to mean yes? How drunk is too drunk to be unable to say no? Who bears responsibility for making that call? An estimated 80 percent of campus assaults involve alcohol, typically consumed voluntarily; often both victim and assailant (or assailants) have been drinking. As I wrote earlier, the party culture on college campuses (as well as in many high school communities) can act as cover for rapists, especially repeat rapists. Yet in 2013, when Emily Yoffe wrote on Slate DoubleX that girls should be warned that heavy drinking increases their vulnerability to having sexual violence perpetrated against them, she was pilloried for victim-blaming. The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Jezebel, Salon, Huffington Post, the Daily Mail, Feministing, and even colleagues at Slate DoubleX itself labeled her a “rape apologist.” During the ensuing furor, a generation gap emerged. Older women—that is, women the same age as Yoffe (a category that includes this author)—thought her advice sounded sensible. She wasn’t, after all, saying that a drunk girl deserved to be raped or that it was her fault if she was. Nor was she saying that sobriety guaranteed protection against sexual assault. She only seemed to be voicing what most of us would tell our daughters: alcohol reduces your ability to recognize and escape a dangerous situation. Women metabolize liquor differently from men, too, reaching a higher blood alcohol level drink for drink and becoming more impaired than a guy the same size and weight. Given the prevalence of binge drinking on campus, shouldn’t they know that?

  Many young women, though, countered with a stance similar to the one they held on dress codes: don’t tell us not to drink, tell rapists not to rape. If you really want to reduce assault, they said, wouldn’t it be equally, if not more, logical to target boys’ alcohol abuse, especially since perpetrators are about as likely to be drinking as victims? Alcohol has proven to have a profound influence on would-be rapists’ behavior. It lowers their inhibition; it allows them to disregard social cues or a partner’s hesitation; it gives them the nerve they may not otherwise have to use force; and it offers a ready justification for misconduct. The more that potential rapists drink, the more aggressive they are during an assault, and the less aware of their victims’ distress. By contrast, sober guys not only are less sexually coercive but will more readily step up if they believe an alcohol-related assault is in the offing.

  Activists are correct in saying that the only thing that 100 percent of rapes have in common is a rapist. You can shroud women from head to toe, forbid them alcohol, imprison them in their homes—and there will still be rape. Plus, you will live in Afghanistan. To me, this seems like another of those both/and situations. I have a hard time defending anyone’s inalienable right to get shit-faced, male or female, especially when they’re underage. What’s that, you say? Harmless collegiate rite of passage? Six hundred thousand students ages eighteen to twenty-four are unintentionally injured each year while under the influence; 1,825 die. Teens who drink in high school, confident in their heightened alcohol tolerance, are at particular risk of harm in college.

  I happen to live in Berkeley, California, the town where my state’s best and brightest come for their education—the average high school grade point average of incoming freshmen here is 4.46. Yet, in the first two months of the 2013/14 school year, paramedics transported 107 of these smarty-pants students, all perilously intoxicated, to the hospital. During “move-in weekend” alone, the volume of calls about alcohol poisoning to 911 was so high that the city had to request ambulances from neighboring towns; the local ER was overrun with drunk students, forcing diversion of those vehicles elsewhere. (Heaven help the “townie” who happened to have a stroke or a heart attack on one of those nights.) In that same two-month period, incidentally, campus police cited exactly two kids for underage drinking. And yet when binge drinking rises, so does sexual assault. As part of an investigative story by the local ABC-TV affiliate, a paramedic who responded to some UC Berkeley calls, his face blurred and voice distorted to avoid reprisals, told a reporter that he had personally stopped a group of these top-tier college boys as they dragged an unconscious girl out of a party; one admitted he didn’t even know her. “Who knows what their intentions were?” the paramedic mused. Nine rapes were reported in the first three months of the 2014/15 school year; five on one night when members of a non-recognized fraternity allegedly slipped “roofies” into their female classmates’ drinks, rendering them defenseless.

  As a parent, I am all for harm reduction. So I will absolutely explain to my daughter the particular effects of alcohol on the female body. I will explain how predators leverage that difference by using liquor itself as a date rape drug, and how bingeing increases everyone’s vulnerability to a variety of health and safety concerns. I know that getting loaded can seem an easy way to reduce social anxiety, help you feel like you fit in, quiet the nagging voice in your head of paralytic self-doubt. Still, knocking back six shots in an hour in order to have fun—or, for that matter, to prove you are fun—is, perhaps, overkill. Nor is it ideal to gin up courage to have sex that would otherwise feel too “awkward”—even if the results are consensual, the sex will probably suck. Two people who are lit may both behave in a manner they will later regret—or not fully remember, making consent difficult to determine. Should that constitute assault? Students themselves are divided. Nearly everyone in a 2015 Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll of current and former college students agreed that sex with someone who is incapacitated or passed out is rape (a huge and welcome cultural shift). But if both people are incapacitated? Only about one in five agree; roughly the same percentage say that is not assault, and nearly 60 percent are unsure. That’s understandable, given the paradox of students’ sexual lives: drunkenness is obligatory for hookups, yet liquor negates consent. There are bright lines—lots of them—and they are too often crossed. But there are also situations that are confusing and complicated for everyone. Recall Holly, who mixed Red Bull and shots (a combination that makes a person appear deceptively sober) before blacking out? Maybe she seemed coherent and eager to have sex; maybe her partner was equally drunk and oblivious; maybe he was stone-cold sober and consciously targeted her; she’ll never know.

  So I’ll tell my daughter that it’s possible to make mistakes, that not all scenarios are as clear as we would like. That said, if, for whatever reason, she does get wasted—because it’s part of the culture she’s in or because she wants to see what it feels like or because the drink didn’t taste strong—and, God forbid, is targeted for assault, it is positively, in no way, under any circumstances, her fault. I will tell her that nothing ever, ever, ever justifies rape. Victims are never responsible for an assailant’s actions and need not feel shame or be silenced. If I had a son? I would be equally clear with him: drunk girls are not “easy pickings”; their poor choices are not your free pass to sex. I would tell him that heavy drinking, in addition to potential long-term physical harm, impairs boys’ ability to detect or respect nonconse
nt. I would say that if there is any doubt about a girl’s capacity to say yes—if the thought even flits across his mind—he should, for his own safety as well as hers, move along. There will be other opportunities to have sex (truly, there will be). So although I get why, for both parents and policy makers, focusing on girls’ drinking is tempting, it is simply not enough.

  “Maddie, You Were Raped”

  Later, Paige filled Maddie in on what had happened. The boys dared her to kiss Paige, which she did. Then she kissed Josh, crowing, “I’m the queen of the car because all of you like me the best!”

  “If you really want to be queen of the car,” Anthony told her, “you have to have sex in the car.”

  “Okay,” Maddie replied, turning to Josh. “Let’s do it!”

  Maddie insisted on a condom, which made Paige believe the girl was lucid. Anthony, who had one, passed it back to Josh. Maddie remembered, sort of, telling Josh to take off her pants because, drifting in and out of consciousness, she was too drunk to do it herself. She remembered waking up at one point as the car sped through the side streets of her town; she was on top of someone but didn’t know who it was or how she’d gotten there. When she realized the person was having intercourse with her, she began to cry. “But I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t really move,” she said. “And I don’t think he realized I was crying because he was so into what he was doing.” There are more shards of memory, but they are much the same: confusion, tears, incapacitation. Finally, Josh finished, and Maddie rolled to the corner of the car, managing somehow to pull on her pants.