Girls & Sex

by Peggy Orenstein

  “I want to go home,” she said, but the other three were looking for another party.

  “No!” Maddie said. “Take me home!”

  “What’s your problem?” Paige asked, annoyed. “Why are you crying?”

  Maddie only cried harder, repeating that she wanted to go home. At that, the other three grew nervous. “Get her out of here,” someone said, and they dropped her off, alone, at a strip mall near her house.

  The next morning, during an early shift at her job at a neighborhood café, Maddie would periodically start to cry, though she couldn’t quite say why. “I knew something bad had happened,” she told me, “but I couldn’t put my finger on why I was so upset about it.” When she got off work, she asked a friend to meet her, and confided what she remembered.

  “Maddie,” the girl said, “you were raped.”

  Maddie denied it, but her friend knew Anthony, the boy driving the car, and called him on the spot. “You let this girl get raped in the back of your car!” she told him. He denied it, too, asking to talk to Maddie directly. She remembered his voice as gentle, soothing. “Look,” he said, “I know you had a bad night, and you’re upset, but you didn’t get raped. Stop telling people that.”

  “I’m not telling people that,” she said and hung up. When she and her friend got to her home, her friend said she was going to tell Maddie’s mom. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I don’t know what to do, and someone needs to take care of this.”

  Maddie went to her room so she wouldn’t have to see her parents’ reaction. A little while later, her father knocked on the door, a notebook in hand. She told him the story in as much detail as she could muster.

  “Why didn’t you say no?” he asked.

  “I did!” she said. “But then I just got drunker and . . . I don’t know. I can’t explain.” Maddie didn’t go back to school that Monday, or the day after that, or the day after that. She hardly got out of bed for a week. Paige, meanwhile, began spreading rumors, claiming that Maddie had cried rape because she was embarrassed to have lost her virginity in the back of a moving car. Strangers on Facebook posted that Maddie was “a lying whore.” Few classmates, boys or girls, took her side. “None of them knew what actually happened,” Maddie said. “I didn’t know what actually happened. I still don’t. There are still parts of the story I’m not clear on.”

  Not even her (now former) friends stood by her. “They’d say, ‘I wasn’t there, so I can’t judge if it was true or not.’ And I’d be like, ‘Why aren’t you just taking my side? I thought we were friends!’” Josh, unsurprisingly, called her a liar, too. He did contact her directly once, via text, early on. “Are you telling people I raped you?” he asked. She texted back that she was not. He never got in touch again. “Obviously no guy is going to admit to that,” she said. “I don’t expect him to. I don’t expect him to ever apologize. Why would he? In his eyes he didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not like he took me to a dark alley to rape me. He just really wanted to have sex, and I said no, and it hurt his pride.”

  One of the only people to stick by Maddie was Josh’s former girlfriend—or hookup buddy, or whatever she was: the one Maddie said he’d treated badly. “She believed me without question,” Maddie said. “That stuff with him pushing on my shoulders? He did that kind of thing to her, too. And there have been two other girls who told me he’s done similar stuff to them. But mine was the only time it turned into this huge mess.” Maddie shook her head and sighed. “I think he’ll get in trouble at some point, though.”

  Christmas break came, and Maddie hoped that, with it, the incident would be forgotten; it wasn’t. As December turned to January and classes resumed, the gossip spiraled out of control: Maddie was pregnant! Maddie had had an abortion! She withdrew from school and stopped going online or checking texts. Eventually, she enrolled here, at the community college. At least one of her female classmates, she has discovered, was there for the same reason.

  What Yes Means

  One of the Big Bads that conservatives warned of in the 1990s was that if alcohol-induced assaults were included in the definition of rape, college administrators would be swamped by vengeful girls who regretted their previous night’s encounters. As if it’s easy for a victim of sexual assault to come forward. As if girls have been readily believed. As if it weren’t social suicide. As if they wouldn’t be shunned, called sluts, blamed, harassed, and threatened. Consider the reaction in 2014 on CollegiateACB, a forum where students anonymously discuss campus issues, after a Vanderbilt University student’s rape accusations resulted in the suspension of a fraternity. Forum users demanded to know the identity of “the girl who ratted”—a name was actually posted—and called her, among other things, “manic depressive,” “a crazy bitch,” “psycho,” “NASTY AS SHIT,” “a no good CUNT,” and, over and over, a “snitch.” “This repeated use of the word ‘snitching’ in the thread,” wrote André Rouillard, editor of the school’s newspaper, “implies that the victim has revealed a secret that should have been kept hidden behind closed doors—under the rug and on floors that stick like flypaper and stink of old beer. . . . The OP [original poster] issues a rallying cry: ‘we need to stick together and prevent shit like this from being ok.’” By “shit like this” he didn’t mean rape; he meant girls’ reporting of it.

  Those trying to prove that campuses are rife with psycho young women just itching to ruin their male classmates’ lives were inadvertently handed an opportunity in the spring of 2015, when Rolling Stone magazine retracted an article on a gang rape at the University of Virginia that had fallen apart under scrutiny. I don’t know if that scandal will become the cornerstone of a new suppression of activism—these are different times than the 1990s—but as a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism investigation concluded, Rolling Stone’s editors “hoped their investigation would sound an alarm about campus sexual assault and would challenge Virginia and other universities to do better. Instead, the magazine’s failure may have spread the idea that many women invent rape allegations.”

  There are, absolutely, false charges of rape. To say otherwise would be absurd. But they are rarer than alarmists would like you to believe. Legally, a “false report” is one in which it can be demonstrably proven that a rape was not committed. When investigators find that assault did not occur, that is something else: an unsubstantiated or inconclusive report. Conservative pundits such as Hoff Sommers, Cathy Young, and Wendy McElroy—plus every troll ever on the Internet—assert that 40 to 50 percent of sexual assault accusations are actually false. (Although, oddly, as criminologist Jan Jordan has pointed out, while adamant that half of accusers lie, such critics believe women who recant are unfailingly truthful.) In her book Rape Is Rape, Jody Raphael explains that this statistic comes from a 1994 report for which Eugene J. Kanin, a sociologist at Purdue University, compiled one police agency’s characterizations of forty-five assault claims made over nine years in a small midwestern town—assessments that were not necessarily based on evidence or investigation. Kanin himself cautioned that his findings should not be generalized, and admitted, “Rape recantations could be the result of the complainants’ desire to avoid a ‘second assault’ at the hands of the police.” More credible, Raphael wrote, are seven rigorous studies conducted in the United States and the United Kingdom over more than three decades. They place false claim rates at between 2 and 8 percent, a number, according to FBI statistics, that has been steadily dropping since 1990, when the controversy over acquaintance rape emerged. Certainly it is important to bear in mind the potential for false claims, but our fear of them seems strangely disproportionate, especially given that most victims are not believed, that 80 percent of campus rapes are never even reported, and a mere 13 to 30 percent of assailants are found responsible among the sliver that are.

  Emily Yoffe, who also raises the specter of an “overcorrection” on campus rape, has objected that lumping psychologically coerced or pressured sex into statistics risks “trivializing
” assault. She, too, fears it would tempt any girl who “regrets making out with a boy who has ‘persuaded’ her” to file a complaint that could lead to his expulsion. “We may be teaching a generation of young men that pressuring a woman into sexual activity is never a good idea,” she acknowledged, “but we are also teaching a generation of young women that they are malleable, weak, ‘overwhelmed,’ and helpless in the face of male persuasion.”

  This is where she and I part ways. Most sexual interludes among high school or college students are, obviously, not violent: They are consensual and wanted, if not always reciprocal. That said, a sizable percentage is coerced; rather than “trivializing” rape, Yoffe risks “trivializing” the way such pressure is seen as a masculine right and how that shapes our understanding of consent—even of sex itself. Despite changing roles in other realms, boys continue to be seen as the proper initiators of sexual contact. (If you don’t believe me, listen to the outrage of mothers of teen boys when discussing today’s “aggressive” girls.) Boys’ sex drive is considered natural, and their pleasure a given. They are supposed to be sexually confident, secure, and knowledgeable. Young women, as I’ve said, remain the gatekeepers of sex, the inertia that stops the velocity of the male libido. Those dynamics create a haven for below-the-radar offenses that make a certain level of sexual manipulation, even violence, normal and acceptable. I don’t know that such acts deserve expulsion, but they are worthy of serious discussion. As Lorelei Simpson Rowe, a clinical psychologist at Southern Methodist University who works with girls on refusal skills, explains, “The vast majority of sexual violence and coercion occurs in situations that are not obviously dangerous . . . so if nine times you go out with a boy and engage in consensual activity, and it’s pleasant and you’re excited to be developing a relationship, that doesn’t prepare you for that one time when it switches.”

  While such transformations may be sudden, frequently, Simpson Rowe says, they’re not. “Guys will start saying, ‘Come on, let’s go further’ or ‘Why not?’ or ‘I really like you. Don’t you like me?’ There’s a lot of persuading and pleading and guilt-inducing tactics, along with a lot of complimenting and flattery. And because it’s subtle, you see a lot of self-questioning among girls. They wonder, ‘Am I reading this right?’ ‘Did he actually say that?’ ‘Did he actually mean that?’” Simpson Rowe and her colleagues have developed a training program that uses virtual reality simulations to help girls recognize and resist those cues. In pilot trials of high school and college students, incoming participants generally rated themselves as confident that they could rebuff unwanted advances or escape threatening situations. Yet, when role-playing a range of increasingly fraught scenarios—from a male avatar who badgers girls for their phone numbers to one who threatens violence if they don’t submit to sex—they would freeze. Simpson Rowe was quick to say that only perpetrators are responsible for assault, but assertiveness and self-advocacy are crucial defensive skills. “What we found is the importance of women being able to make quick, cognitive switches between normal sexual interaction and protecting their safety,” she said. “And part of that involves being able to notice when something has gone from being a normal interaction to pressure.”

  The girls in her program worried that a direct rejection would hurt boys’ feelings; they felt guilty and uncomfortable saying no. “Girls have all this modeling for being nice and polite and caring and compassionate about others’ feelings,” Simpson Rowe explained. “These are wonderful things—good characteristics. But because they’re so ingrained, a lot of women think this is how they’re supposed to be when faced with an unsafe situation, and they’re afraid of being seen as rude. The word that comes up a lot is bitchy. So, it’s kind of an ‘aha’ moment when they realize a guy who is pressuring and persuading and not stopping when you say you don’t want to do something is not respecting you or your boundaries—and at that point, you don’t have to worry about hurting his feelings. We emphasize how early the coercive process begins and help them respond to it before it ever gets to violence.” Preliminary data showed that three months after completing the ninety-minute training, participants had experienced half the rate of sexual victimization than a control group. Another risk-reduction program piloted among more than four hundred fifty Canadian college freshmen had similar results: a year later, rates of rape among participants were half that of girls who had only received a brochure. “We want to send the message that no one has the right to push or pressure you into what you don’t want to do,” Simpson Rowe said. “You have the right to stand up for yourself as loudly and physically as you want to and can.”

  Listening to Simpson Rowe, I thought about Megan, who told her rapist, “Thanks, I had fun.” I thought about another girl I met, a freshman in college, who told me her high school boyfriend had raped her twice—once while they were together and once after they’d broken up, when he lured her into his car at a party to talk. Both times, she was drunk. Both times she told him no. Both times he ignored her. “I probably could have pushed him off of me or rolled over or screamed loud enough so someone could hear,” she said, “but something prevented me from doing it each time. I’m a very strong person. I have very strong morals. I’m not embarrassed about talking about anything. But I didn’t do anything. It was kind of like being paralyzed.” I recalled Simpson Rowe’s words again in the summer of 2015, when I read the court testimony of a former student at St. Paul’s prep school in New Hampshire. A popular senior boy had assaulted her in the spring of her freshman year, she recounted, during an end-of-year rite known as “the senior salute,” in which graduating male students compete to have sexual encounters with as many younger female students as possible. Initially flattered by his attentions, she testified, she joined him in a dark maintenance room but was at a loss as to how to respond to his escalating aggression. “I said, ‘No, no, no! Keep it up here,’” she told the jury, gesturing to the area above her waist. “I tried to be as polite as possible.” Even as he groped, bit, and penetrated her, she said, “I wanted to not cause a conflict.”

  Each of those girls could have used a session in Simpson Rowe’s virtual reality simulator. At the same time, I also thought about a 2014 study in which nearly a third of college men agreed they would rape a woman if they could get away with it—though that percentage dropped to 13.6 percent when the word rape (as opposed to “force a woman to have sexual intercourse”) was actually used in the question. Teaching girls to self-advocate, to name and express their feelings in relationships, is important for all kinds of reasons, and it may indeed help some of them stop or escape an assault. Yet, just as focusing on girls’ drinking disregards rapists’ behavior, keeping the onus on victims to repel boys’ advances leaves the prerogative to pressure in place; it also maintains sexual availability as a girl’s default position even if, as feminist pundit Katha Pollitt has written, she “lies there like lox with tears running down her cheeks, too frozen or frightened or trapped by lifelong habits of demureness to utter the magic word.” Even if that girl were to say no loud and clear, the boy might not hear it.

  “Affirmative consent” policies—versions of the one pioneered by Antioch—have once again become the hope for change. In 2014, California was the first state to pass a “yes means yes” law directed at colleges and universities receiving state funds. Rather than requiring an accuser to prove she said no, it demands that an alleged assailant prove that there was “an affirmative, unambiguous, and conscious decision by each participant to engage in mutually agreed-upon sexual activity.” In other words, that a clear, enthusiastic “you bet,” either verbally or through body language, was given. Consent may also be revoked anytime, and a person incapacitated due to drugs or alcohol is not legally able to give it. That’s a fundamental shift in power relations, and twelve years after the “Is It Date Rape?” SNL sketch, fewer people are laughing. New York passed affirmative consent legislation in 2015. New Hampshire, Maryland, and Colorado are all considering similar bills. Ever
y Ivy League school except Harvard now has a version of “yes means yes” in place as well.

  Conservatives have predictably warned that thousands of boys will soon be ejected from colleges for trying for a good-night kiss. But the policies have made liberals uneasy as well. Ezra Klein, editor in chief of Vox, wrote that he supported the law, though he believed it would “settle like a cold winter on college campuses, throwing everyday sexual practice into doubt and creating a haze of fear and confusion over what counts as consent.” The anxiety on both sides reminded me of the 1993 fears about California’s then-innovative law against peer-to-peer sexual harassment in schools, which allowed districts to expel offenders as young as nine years old. But you know what? Twenty-plus years later, no fourth-graders have been shipped off to San Quentin for hazarding a playground smooch. Nor have school districts been bankrupted by a deluge of frivolous lawsuits. At the same time, the legislation has not stopped sexual harassment. It has, however, provided a framework through which students can understand and discuss the issue, and the potential for recourse, on a number of levels, when it happens. Remember Camila Ortiz, the girl who called out her vice principal when he told girls to cover up and “respect yourself”? She and a friend later organized a group of girls and boys to fight sexual harassment at their school. In the winter of 2015, group members addressed a meeting of the school board, presenting a petition signed by more than 750 students, both female and male; among their concerns was that the high school was out of compliance with both state and federal laws. The district’s policy is now being redrafted. No one was expelled; no one was sued; no one went to jail. Plus, the students got a great lesson in civic responsibility, leadership, and making social change. Increased awareness has also reduced tolerance for the winking acceptance of harassment and assault. Anheuser-Busch found that out in 2015, when the company unveiled a new tag line for Bud Light: “The perfect beer for removing ‘no’ from your vocabulary for the night.” American sensibilities had changed since the 1990s, as had the targets of influential comedians’ humor. So, rather than mocking overly sensitive women, John Oliver drew cheers from his college-age studio audience by skewering the frat-boy mentality that allowed the slogan’s approval: imagining Bud executives fist-pumping and shouting, “Sick idea, brah!” “That’s what I’m talkin’ about, a’ight,” “No, no, no, no. That’s what I’m talkin’ about, son!” and a wordless, “Blaaaaaaaaaaaah!” (The beer company had been forced several days prior to issue a public apology after news of the slogan had careened around Twitter.)