The Diversity Delusion

by Heather Mac Donald

  8

  THE FAINTING COUCH AT COLUMBIA

  In February 2015, Columbia University—currently tied for fifth most-distinguished US academic institution in the U.S. News & World Report rankings—announced that all its students, undergraduate and graduate alike, would have to enroll in a “Sexual Respect and Community Citizenship Initiative.” This “new, required programming,” the Columbia bureaucracy explained, was designed to explore “the link between sexual respect and membership in the Columbia community.”1

  Columbia’s students were given a menu of “participation options.” They could watch a minimum of two preselected videos about “rape culture” and gender identity and write a “reflection” about what they had learned. They could attend film screenings about sexual assault and masculinity and engage in a monitored discussion afterward. They could create a “work of art” about the “relationship between sexual respect and University community membership.” Or, if they “identif[ied] as survivors, co-survivors, allies, or individuals who have experienced forms of secondary trauma,” they could attend workshops on “Finding Keys to Resiliency.”

  Options in the “Finding Keys to Resiliency” module included a “mindfulness workshop” on “cultivating nonjudgmental awareness and being more present for their experience.” If attending the book launch for SLUT: A Play and Guidebook for Combating Sexism got you too agitated about female oppression, you could unwind at a “knitting circle.”

  To help students organize their required “reflections” on the videos, Columbia provided a set of questions suggestive of a New Age encounter session: “Kalin (a speaker in a video) shares his ‘why’ for passion around prevention education. What is his why? If you have a passion for prevention, ‘what is your why?’” Another prompt suggested: “Reflect on the idea of manhood as discussed in this talk. What is the interaction of the constructs of manhood and power dynamics?”

  The Columbia administrators were careful to avoid any possible misunderstanding that they themselves had failed to “cultivate nonjudgmental awareness” when it comes to college sex. One of the films on offer, The Line: A Personal Exploration About Sexual Assault & Consent, is “told through a ‘sex-positive’ lens,” according to Columbia’s promotional materials.

  But Columbia’s “nonjudgmentalism” extends only so far. There was no give-and-take about participation in the Sexual Respect and Community Citizenship Initiative. The materials announced that it was “essential to arrive on time and participate” in the film screenings and discussions; late arrivals would not be admitted. Attendance at all events would be taken and passed on to the authorities. (This is a far stricter standard than Columbia applies to mere academic classes, where attendance policies are at the professor’s discretion.) Students who failed to log the requisite sexual-respect hours and complete the requisite sexual-respect assignments could be blocked from registering for academic coursework—or from graduating.

  The rollout, which hit just as students were taking midterms, was a shambles. The computer portals for registering often didn’t work; many students couldn’t find participation options that were still open and that fit into their class schedule or that weren’t restricted to specific groups such as the “LGBTQ community.” Despite the administration’s admonitions, some Columbia students decided that studying or researching their dissertation took priority over proctored discussions on “how gender affects relationships.” And so they neglected to do their sexual-respect assignments before the deadline ran out.

  Columbia soon lowered the boom. In July 2015, it started notifying the recalcitrant students that they were no longer in “good administrative standing.” Such a declaration is no small matter. Columbia treats a loss of administrative standing as seriously as an academic default; failure to repair one’s administrative standing can lead to dismissal. By July, however, the options remaining to laggard students for demonstrating “sexual respect” had shrunk. No longer could a student view a webinar on “Transgender Sexuality and Trauma” or attend Momma’s Hip Hop Kitchen to satisfy the requirement. By then, in order to restore his administrative standing, the non-sexually-respectful student could only watch a recorded TED Talk and write a “reflection” on his experience.

  One of those recalcitrant students was a PhD candidate doing serious archival research on a central figure in Western civilization. A number of his liberal graduate-student colleagues were also in trouble for not taking part in the initiative. “Even they felt the requirement was quite infantilizing and they had better things to do with their time, like actual academic work and teaching undergraduates,” he said. That Columbia would elevate this “burdensome distraction” to the level of actual academic responsibilities, he noted, is “yet more proof that universities have lost their bearings entirely.”2

  But the initiative signaled something more worrisome than just Columbia’s distorted priorities, according to this refusenik. “People like me might be losing the right simply to be silent, to be left alone,” he observed. “The initiative implies that agreement with an ideological code of sexual ethics is actually required for attendance at this institution.” In keeping with its “sex-positive” focus, the sexual-respect initiative never challenged the regime of drunken hookup sex. Instead, it simply assigned wildly asymmetrical responsibilities and liabilities within that regime, consistent with the current practice of college administrations everywhere.

  One of the initiative’s videos portrays two females drinking frenetically at a series of dance clubs; a male disengages one of them and escorts her to her dorm room where he has sex with her, allegedly nonconsensually because she is too woozy from the boatloads of booze she consumed to offer proper consent. The moral of the video is that bystanders should intervene if they think that someone is too drunk to agree to sex with a stranger. Fair enough, but several additional interpretations also come to mind. First, that university administrations should perform an “intervention” on the entire booze-fueled hookup scene. Second, that females almost always have control over whether they end up in a mentally compromised state and should therefore be careful to avoid such a condition. This second reading is unthinkable in today’s university, however.

  If Columbia felt compelled to take on the issue of “sexual respect,” it could have done so in a way that actually had intellectual value, had it remembered that its primary mission is to fill the empty noggins of the young with at least passing knowledge of mankind’s greatest works. Civilization has grappled for thousands of years with the challenge of ordering the relationship between the sexes and has come up with more sophisticated solutions than forcing males to watch videos on escaping the “man box.” Reading Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene would offer students an elegant take on sexual respect, albeit one grounded in the now-taboo virtues of chivalry and chastity. If “relevance” is necessary, Mozart’s Don Giovanni might provide an example of “bystander intervention,” as when Don Giovanni’s aristocratic peers try to hustle the peasant girl Zerlina away from his clutches.

  Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, however, were unblinkered about the male sex drive, something about which contemporary feminists can’t make up their minds. To recognize the specific hungers of the specifically male libido puts one dangerously close to acknowledging biological differences between the sexes. And it is precisely the force of the male sex drive that makes the norms of courtship and modesty so important for carving out a zone of freedom and civility for females.

  Feminists, by contrast, are inclined to reduce the male libido to a political power play that has more to do with keeping females out of the boardroom than getting them into the bedroom. If gender “power dynamics” are really what lead men to aggressively seek sex, then a lecture from a TED “anti-sexism educator” might be relevant. But if, in fact, men pursue sex because they want to have sex, then a different set of strategies is called for.

  Naturally, the Columbia initiat
ive embraces the conceit that college campuses are filled with shell-shocked female victims of rape culture who might collapse at any minute from the trauma of college experience. It is for them, explains Columbia, that the “Finding Keys to Resiliency” module was designed. The “Finding Keys to Resiliency” option allows “individuals who identify as survivors” and their “allies” to “incorporate wellness and healing into their day-to-day lives … from trauma-focused therapy to healing circles, from dance and movement to yoga and mind/body work.” If, however, you are a religiously conservative student who believes that premarital intercourse is immoral (a few such closeted throwbacks still exist), you are out of luck. There is no module for you.

  Predictably, the sexual-respect initiative created more trauma for Columbia’s wilting coeds, but not always in the expected ways. One “survivor” was forced to wait forty-five minutes outside her “survivors-only” workshop, only to be told that the workshop had been canceled. “Sitting there waiting with no word caused me to panic,” she told the Columbia Daily Spectator. The university had failed to provide her with a Victorian fainting couch.

  The sexual-respect initiative was undoubtedly triggered, to borrow a phrase, by Columbia’s most famous self-identified survivor: Emma Sulkowicz, otherwise known as the “mattress girl.” Sulkowicz belatedly claimed that she had been raped by a fellow student with whom she had been having intermittent casual sex. When Columbia, after a lengthy investigation, failed to find her alleged rapist guilty and expel him, she started carrying around a dormitory mattress in protest. This yearlong stunt, for which Columbia granted her academic credit, earned Sulkowicz rapturous accolades from the campus-rape industry and inspired scores of student imitators at other campuses. (Sulkowicz carried the mattress to her graduation and has since become a performance artist.)

  If anyone needed the qualification of being a “self-identified” survivor, it is Sulkowicz. After her alleged rape, she emailed her alleged rapist, begging to get together again. Two days after the incident, Sulkowicz texted him: “Also I feel like we need to have some real time where we can talk about life and thingz because we still haven’t really had a paul-emma chill sesh since summmmerrrr.” A week later, she suggested that they hang out together: “I want to see yoyououoyou.” Two months later, she texted: “I love you Paul. Where are you?!?!?!?!”3

  It took Sulkowicz six months to decide that she had been raped. Columbia was indubitably right not to find her sexual partner guilty, but it lost the public-relations battle anyway over its alleged mistreatment of rape “survivors.” Thus, Columbia’s burgeoning campus-rape boondoggles, including the “Sexual Violence Response” unit and the “Special Adviser to the President for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response.” This special adviser, a self-described decades-long “social-justice advocate,” was soon elevated to executive vice president, heading a new Office of Community Life. From there, she designed the sexual-respect initiative.

  I asked the Columbia administration how many students had lost their good standing as a result of not participating in the sexual-respect initiative. The chief of staff for the Office of University Life would only respond that “because it was a University requirement, there was a high compliance rate with the program.” That may, sadly, be true. Columbia, after all, has power on its side. Even the most obstreperous comments about the mandate on the Columbia Daily Spectator student-newspaper website were calling for civil disobedience within the confines of the initiative: “Make sure to record every word spoken. If just one feminist gets out of line: walk out, claim you were traumatized by a trigger and file a grievance.… Demand to take your class with men, because women trigger your false rape accusation.”

  The bitter humor of this “advice” reveals the absurdity of the entire enterprise. Such non-compliance would not mean that sanity and scholarship are holding their own on college campuses. It merely means that force is for now still necessary to snuff out the last vestiges of serious learning.

  9

  POLICING SEXUAL DESIRE: THE #METOO MOVEMENT’S IMPOSSIBLE PREMISE

  In fall 2017, Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein was credibly accused of ugly and possibly criminal sexual predation toward a succession of actresses. The media and university feminists greeted the revelation as a long-awaited instantiation of the “rape culture” conceit. Unlike in drunken campus hookups, the workplace power disparities in this case were real and large, and Weinstein’s interactions clearly nonconsensual. Soon, leading males in entertainment, the press, and politics were exposed as harassers and forced to apologize, in many cases losing their jobs.

  The resulting #MeToo movement, formed to out other workplace predators, inevitably adopted the epistemology of the campus rape movement. “Overly broad definitions of what constitutes sexual misconduct are now being legitimized in the work place,” observes Kimberly C. Lau, partner of Warshaw Burstein LLP. While the #MeToo incidents covered a broad continuum of behavior—from alleged rape, at one extreme, to an unwanted touch or kiss, at the other—the advocates usually ignored such distinctions: All men are guilty and deserve condemnation. Hollywood star Matt Damon discovered how reactionary the new dispensation had become when he faced outrage from feminist actresses and advocates for making the most banal of observations: “There’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right? Both of those behaviors need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated, right?”1

  The #MeToo movement will accelerate academic feminism’s conquest of mainstream discourse. The New York Times’s “gender editor,” a position created in fall 2017, penned an op-ed later that year that mimics the confusions around sex that we’ve seen on campus.

  Gender editor Jessica Bennett had unforced sex with a thirty-year-old acquaintance when she was nineteen because “saying ‘yes’ [was] easier than saying ‘no,’” as the op-ed’s title put it. She allowed the encounter to proceed out of “some combination of fear (that I wasn’t as mature as he thought), shame (that I had let it get this far), and guilt (would I hurt his feelings?).” Naturally, Bennett attributes her passivity and embarrassment at that moment to “dangerously outdated gender norms.” It is the patriarchy, she claims, that makes “even seemingly straightforward ideas about sex—such as, you know, whether we want to engage in it or not—feel utterly complex.”2

  Actually, it is not the patriarchy that makes sexual decisions “utterly complex”; it is sex itself, inherently subject to “fear,” “shame,” and “guilt.” Sexual seduction is carried on through ambiguity and indirection; exposing that ambiguity to light, naming what may or may not be going on, is uncomfortable and risks denial and rejection. “[D]angerously outdated gender norms” are not what make it difficult to say no to sexual advances; contemporary gender norms have confused these already fraught situations.

  Traditional mores, as this book has argued, set the default for premarital sex at “no.” This norm recognized the different sexual priorities of males and females and the difficulties of bargaining with the male libido. Sexual liberation changed that default for premarital sex to “yes.” A “no” now has to be extricated in media res. A contributor to the website Total Sorority Move described an instance of drunken college coitus several years ago that, like Bennett’s op-ed, limns the resulting state of affairs. Contributor Veronica Ruckh agreed to sex simply because stopping it would have involved providing reasons. “We have sex with guys, because sometimes it’s just easier to do it than to have the argument about not doing it,” observed Ruckh. She quotes other females who have been defeated by the “yes” default for sex: “To be honest, it would have been awkward to say no, so I just did it.” “Sometimes you have to have lunch with girls you don’t want to have lunch with, and sometimes you have to have sex with boys you don’t want to have sex with.”

  This situation would have been unthinkable sixty years ago. Then, there was no cultural compulsion to have “sex with boys you don’t
want to have sex with.” The assumption was that of course you would not, and that assumption gave females power to control the outcome. Now, however, females have to go mano a mano with male lust in a realm of potential embarrassment and uncertainty. The male sex drive will win in many of those cases.

  Feminists cannot acknowledge the divide between men and women when it comes to sex and sensibility. Doing so would violate what Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker calls the blank slate doctrine, a foundation stone of modern liberalism. One of that doctrine’s core tenets is that differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed. Ignoring biology, feminists recast difficult sexual interactions in terms of power and politics. Sexual harassment, real or imagined, is portrayed as an effort to subordinate females. Actually, sexual harassment is usually just about sex, even if differential power is used to obtain it.

  There is nothing inconsistent or hypocritical about liberal male icons championing feminist issues like abortion or equal pay while also putting heavy-handed or offensive moves on females. Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, and Harvey Weinstein (all #MeToo casualties) would all undoubtedly be thrilled to have a female president, since they would thereby be routing Red State misogyny. For now, however, they want access to private parts. (In another installment of the Times’s #MeToo series, male models claimed to have been sexually harassed by fashion photographers Bruce Weber and Mario Testino. “‘I felt helpless,’” read the front-page headline.3 According to the feminist interpretation of sexual harassment, these males are themselves victims of the patriarchy, the target of a political power play to subordinate men. The simpler explanation is: They were targets, if their claims are correct, of overreaching sexual desire, like most female victims.)