Panic Attack

by Robby Soave

  Nevertheless, some activists who count themselves in the believe-all-victims camp were undeterred. Zerlina Maxwell, a political analyst who hosts a progressive talk show on Sirius XM (the show’s Twitter bio describes it as “‘The Home of the Resistance!’ #Resist #GetWoke”),52 penned an article for the Washington Post titled “No Matter What Jackie Said, We Should Automatically Believe Rape Victims.” The headline was changed to “Generally Believe Rape Victims” after readers pointed out the absurdity of this position, though the original title is still evident in the article’s URL.53

  “Disbelieving women, then, not only compounds their trauma (often by making them doubt their own stories), but it also lets a serial rapist go free,” wrote Maxwell, citing the work of—you guessed it—David Lisak. “The time we spend picking apart a traumatized survivor’s narration on the hunt for discrepancies is time that should be spent punishing serial rapists.”

  Jessica Valenti, the writer and founder of the essential feminist blog Feministing, wrote that the inconsistency in Jackie’s story “does not mean she wasn’t raped at UVA.” Valenti wrote, “We already know that trauma victims often misremember details of their attack—but they also might give incomplete information because they are nervous that the full story will mean being blamed or disbelieved.”54

  The idea that victims of sexual assault are especially likely to forget key details because the ordeal was so traumatizing is quite popular among activists. It’s even taught to Title IX coordinators as part of federally mandated “trauma-centered” training. The Atlantic’s Emily Yoffe spent significant time researching the origins and prevalence of such training. In Yoffe’s telling, Rebecca Campbell, a professor of psychology at Michigan State University, is largely responsible for spreading these ideas.55 Her 2012 talk at the National Institute of Justice, in which she asserted that victims’ memories are scattered like “tiny Post-it notes” on a messy desk, is oft-referenced in Title IX training materials.

  But there are major problems with this way of thinking about trauma. For one thing, there’s a huge danger in telling adjudicators that if alleged victims seem confused, can’t remember what happened to them, or misstate the circumstances of their attack, this should be treated as confirmation that they are indeed trauma victims. Under these circumstances, how would Title IX investigators separate actual victims from those who are plainly wrong or lying?

  Second, the science is far from settled. Some neuroscience research, including the work of Harvard University psychologist Richard McNally, conflicts with Campbell’s position, and suggests that “extreme stress enhances memory for the central aspects of an overwhelming emotional experience.” When Yoffe asked UC Irvine psychology professor Elizabeth Loftus about the trauma-centered approach being taught to administrators, Loftus made an interesting point: it is reminiscent of the recovered-memory movement of the 1980s, in which therapists were supposedly able to help vulnerable people—often women and children—“remember” or otherwise dig up their buried past mistreatment. This was the bunk theory that undergirded the Satanic ritual abuse scare— a period of senseless panic and destructive McCarthyism in which second-wave feminism was morally complicit.

  This is quite a reckless combination of beliefs, when taken together: (1) all victims should be believed without question; (2) if victims seem unreliable, they are more likely to be telling the truth as a result of their trauma; (3) the man they accused has probably raped multiple women and will continue to do so until he is stopped. And yet it’s central to an activist movement that was incredibly successful over the last half dozen years in changing both norms and explicit policy relating to sexual misconduct.

  It’s easy to see how intersectionality reinforces these ideas. After all, the marginalized are the sole experts on their own marginalization, and it’s not their job to educate everyone else. When Title IX activists talk about sexual assault, everyone else is supposed to believe them and not ask questions. Asking questions could traumatize them all over again—words hurt.

  At many campuses, key faculty members—often in the fields of sociology or gender studies—have played an important role in circulating these ideas. Occidental College’s Danielle Dirks, a professor of sociology, is a prime example. In September 2013, two freshmen became involved in a sexual misconduct dispute. Immediately prior to the encounter, the woman, “Jane,” had texted a friend the message “I’m going to have sex now.” She also texted her soon-to-be partner, “John,” with a request for him to bring a condom. They then had sex.

  KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr., two men who have written extensively on campus sexual misconduct from a perspective that is sympathetic to due process arguments and skeptical of Title IX’s excesses, wrote about the Occidental case in their book The Campus Rape Frenzy.56 According to their account, Jane confided in Dirks, who “convinced Jane that she had been raped because she had been impaired by alcohol.” Dirks also believed that John “fit the profile of other rapists on campus” because he had a high GPA, was class valedictorian in high school, was on a sports team, and came from a good family. Dirks later claimed that Jane had misunderstood her.

  Jane eventually filed a police report. The officer investigating the case took a look at the text messages and concluded the evidence “supported a consensual encounter.” A prosecutor agreed and took no action against John.

  The Title IX proceeding went differently. At a hearing before a single adjudicator—where John was denied access to a lawyer—the young man was found responsible for sexual misconduct on the grounds that Jane had been too drunk to consent to sex. John protested that he had been drinking, too: if Jane was too drunk to have sex, then so was he. This argument did not sway the adjudicator, and John was expelled from Occidental.

  But professors are not always so important to student activism, and students have turned on professors who crossed them or otherwise failed to accede to a suitably extreme position. Few have learned this lesson as memorably as Suzanne Goldberg, a professor of law at Columbia University and vice president for student life. In 2014, the administration appointed her to revise the university’s sexual misconduct policies. A leading feminist attorney and gay rights hero—she served as cocounsel to the plaintiffs in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court decision that overturned sodomy laws—Goldberg would seem to be precisely the right person to meet the demands of Mattress Girl and the movement she created.

  Alas, in the fall of 2017, a group of activists stormed Goldberg’s Gender and Sexuality Law class.57 Led by student Amelia Roskin-Frazee, the activists read a prepared statement denouncing Goldberg’s complicity “in Columbia’s culture of sexual harassment.” According to Roskin-Frazee, “We are here today because despite the repeated efforts of student organizers, survivors at Columbia and Barnard are still endangered by administrators like Suzanne Goldberg.” Columbia was a particularly dangerous place for queer students, Roskin-Frazee claimed, and this fact represented a betrayal of Goldberg’s stated commitment to LGBT rights. (A generally applicable lesson of intersectionality is no one is good enough.)

  When I asked Roskin-Frazee if I could interview her for this book, she emailed me back a one-word response: “No.” I then pressed her for comment regarding her disruption of Goldberg’s class, again asking her to speak with me.

  “No means no,” she responded.

  It’s About Power, Not Sex

  Everyday Feminism published this on its website in December 2017: “10 Things Every Intersectional Feminist Should Ask on a First Date.”58 The very first question is not “What do you do for a living?” or “Where are you from?” or even “Is the food good here?” It’s “Do you believe that black lives matter?” Anything other than an enthusiastic yes is a deal breaker for the author, and white dates should commit to “decenter their whiteness”—or reduce the importance of white people’s achievements compared to those of minority communities.

  Dates must also swear allegiance to the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement agains
t Israel. (The acronym: BDS, not BDSM! That’s something else.) And they must accept that capitalism is inherently exploitative. (For more on the anti-capitalism at the heart of the activist left, wait for Chapter Six.)

  The article came across as parody to many, and non-leftists mocked it relentlessly on social media. But it was intended seriously, and it is in many ways a useful reminder that mere feminism is not enough for activist Zillennials: feminism must also be intersectional.

  “Intersectionality is the acknowledgment that oppression, an experience of oppression, is produced by a number of factors based on your identity,” Zeilinger told me when I asked her to define it. “Intersectional feminism is just a movement that acknowledges that, and also centers people who do have these experiences of oppression that maybe would make them even more marginalized and being really conscious about sort of correcting for that.”

  This position is in some ways admirable. Younger feminists are less likely to be content with generic girl-power sentiments, for example. They won’t automatically support female candidates; they want candidates who are good on the issues—and not just feminist issues, but the full gamut of progressivism. Millennial feminists didn’t unthinkingly vote for Hillary Clinton just because she was a woman: many, in fact, preferred Bernie Sanders, the more progressive candidate. During the 2016 Democratic primaries, a Reuters poll showed Sanders winning the support of 61 percent of young women, versus 28 percent for Clinton. In the Iowa caucus, Sanders beat Clinton among women twenty-nine and younger by a margin of six to one.59

  The Clinton-Sanders contest highlighted the divisions within feminism: many older feminists desperately wanted to see Clinton, a woman, occupy the White House, while many third- and fourth-wave feminists took an intersectional approach. That wasn’t true across the board—one major millennial feminist, the actress Lena Dunham, served as an important Clinton campaign spokesperson, and even published an article in her newsletter that described the former secretary of state as “an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself.”60 (Dunham declined to be interviewed for this book.) But older, high-profile feminists formed something of a monolith for Clinton. During an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher, Gloria Steinem herself chided younger feminists for “feeling the Bern,” suggesting they were only doing it for boys’ attention.61 Marcotte, the forty-year-old feminist blogger, strenuously attempted to convince the internet that Sanders supporters (nicknamed the “Bernie Bros”) were angry, sexist white guys, prone to harassing women who disagreed with them.62 (From what I saw, Sanders’s most vocal supporters were no more obnoxious than those of Clinton, Obama, Trump, Ron Paul, or any other political figure.)

  “I saw a ton of second-wave feminists and older feminists support Hillary,” Zeilinger told me. “For incredibly valid reasons, and reasons that a lot of [young] women did too, but also because it was very important to them that she was a woman. I heard the phrase ‘I just want to see a woman elected in my lifetime’ so many times.”

  It would be a mistake to think that this generational divide has rendered older feminism obsolete, however. Feminist icons like Steinem, Brownmiller, and the writer bell hooks are often quoted in activists’ social media posts on Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. As with other kinds of activism, emerging feminists learn about the movement primarily from their peers, social media, celebrity influencers, and even family members.

  Of all the ghosts of feminism past, it is Steinem who has managed to stay relevant—and strangely so, given her long history of questionable stances (her role in the Satanic ritual abuse panic, the excuses she made for Bill Clinton’s mistreatment of women, and her recent bashing of young women who supported Sanders). In 2016, Vice Media aired her TV show, Woman with Gloria Steinem, on its network, Viceland. During the 2017 #MeToo uprising, after Vice was accused of fostering a hostile workplace for women, the company formed an advisory committee to course-correct and foster inclusion.63 Steinem was immediately named to it, prompting palpable relief from many feminists. Bitch Media, another online feminist news outlet, said that Steinem would help Vice “get its shit together.”64

  Steinem has endured, and so has the second wave’s obsession with believing victims. It’s a belief with consequences: many of them undeniably good, given the number of sexually abusive media figures run out of Hollywood and politics in recent months. But it’s also liable to be abused by zealots. I’ll never forget a conversation I followed in a feminist Facebook group. One male participant had posted an image of two female news reporters caressing the oiled chest of Pita Taufatofua, the muscular male Tongan flag-bearer at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.65 The guy posting the image asked, in rather trolling fashion, whether this was not an example of female-on-male sexism.

  A female graduate assistant replied with a definitive no. “If you understand how the patriarchy works, then you understand how sexism can only be inflicted on oppressed genders,” she wrote. “Go do some research please.” Much like anti-white racism, anti-male sexism can’t possibly exist—because, according to intersectionality, men are not a marginalized category.

  — FIVE —

  LGB VS. T

  RADICAL TRANS ACTIVISM

  “Fuck you, scared bitch,” a student shouted at Kimberly Peirce as she took the podium.

  Peirce, a filmmaker, had been invited to Reed College in the fall of 2016 for a screening of her landmark 1999 film, Boys Don’t Cry. The movie tells the true story of a transgender man, Brandon Teena, who was murdered by bigots. For audiences in the 1990s, it was one of the first major films to portray a trans person in a positive light—prior to Boys Don’t Cry, the most well-known trans character in cinema was probably Buffalo Bill, the psychopathic serial killer in Silence of the Lambs (not exactly an inspiring figure). Peirce herself has identified as a lesbian and genderqueer, and her movie contains a message of acceptance.

  To say that Peirce was not well received at Reed would be a considerable understatement. Students hung profane posters near the podium; one read “You don’t fucking get it.” Waiting at the podium itself was a “Fuck you” poster, and students screamed other expletives at Peirce, bringing the event to an early close.

  One would be forgiven for presuming that Reed must be some kind of Christian fundamentalist college brimming with intolerant, homophobic students, but alas, no: Reed is among the most liberal campuses in the country, according to the Princeton Review.1 The students who jeered at Peirce were leftists.

  In the eyes of these students, Peirce was a traitor. For one thing, she cast the cisgender Hilary Swank in the role of the trans character, a casting choice that marginalizes trans identities and contributes to trans erasure.

  For another thing, Peirce profited from the exploitation of a trans person. Her film depicted violence against a trans person. This was unforgivable, in the students’ view, even though it actually happened and Peirce’s goal was to shed light on a tragic, socially significant event. (Recall from previous chapters that the young activist sees no distinction between words and actions and does not recognize important nuances; thus, making a film about the murder of a trans person is itself akin to violence.)

  Lucía Martínez, an assistant professor of English at Reed College who identified herself as a “gay mixed-race woman,” posted a comment on an article about the Peirce shutdown in which she confessed that these students terrified her.

  “I am intimidated by these students,” she wrote. “I am scared to teach courses on race, gender, or sexuality, or even texts that bring these issues up in any way—and I am a gay mixed-race woman. There is a serious problem here and at other [selective liberal arts colleges], and I’m at a loss as to how to begin to address it, especially since many of these students don’t believe in either historicity or objective facts. (They denounce the latter as being a tool of the white cisheteropatriarchy.)”2

  The “cisheteropatriarchy” is the intersectional progressive’s nemesis. It refers to cis (as opposed to trans), heterose
xual (as opposed to homosexual), and patriarchal (as opposed to female-centric) oppression.

  Reed’s activist students were upset about a lot more than just the cisheteropatriarchy, of course. The activist group Reedies Against Racism launched a continuous protest against Humanities 110, a mandatory first-year course that they say “perpetuates white supremacy” by neglecting to include black authors. (The group did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this book.) But the Peirce incident is illustrative, because it reveals a larger truth: the battles over gender, identity, and sexual violence on college campuses are at least as vicious as the battles over anything else.

  Nationwide, the movement for LGBT equality has come a long way in a very short time. During my own school years, the word “gay” was often used as a slur, and people who openly identified as something other than heterosexual faced bullying and harassment. Conservatives successfully made gay marriage a wedge issue in the 2004 election, galvanizing the country’s social conservatives. President Bush was reelected, and Republicans picked up seats in Congress.

  A dozen years later, gay marriage is legal across the nation, and LGBTQ people enjoy unprecedented social acceptance. Kids find it strange that it was ever acceptable to mock people for their sexuality; it’s more okay to be gay—or bisexual, or asexual, or even unsure—than ever before.

  Except in the view of religious conservatives who still believe gay people are going to hell—a not insignificant number of Americans, to be sure, but an increasingly outnumbered (and aging) minority—this progress is admirable. Liberals, libertarians, and even many socially tolerant Republicans and conservatives agree that members of the LGBT community deserve the same rights and dignity as everyone else. I, too, celebrate these strides. And I join other libertarians and social liberals in wanting transgender people to achieve acceptance and equality as well.