On Violence and On Violence Against Women

by Jacqueline Rose

  One thing, however, is absolutely clear, and that is the energy, commitment and imagination of the students who have launched and are struggling to keep up the anti-harassment campaign. For the past decade, the US alt-right have been baying at ‘rape-culture panic’ and targeting universities. A culture of grievance, they claim, is spreading from colleges across the whole of the US, as if educational institutions were worst exemplar and cause of the ‘nanny state’ (as so often in the discourse of the right, the greatest danger is presented as a heady combination of money, aka welfare, and sex). In September 2017, Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Education Secretary, announced that she was rescinding the Obama-era ‘Dear Colleague’ guidance on Title IX. The new guidance describes the letter as ‘well-intentioned’ but ‘stacked against the accused’, with no reference to the historic backdrop which made the strongest possible support for complainants essential. ‘In the forty-five years since the passage of Title IX,’ it asserts, ‘we have seen remarkable progress toward an educational environment free of sex discrimination.’50 Anti-harassment activists might disagree. Even before the 2016 election, it was clear that DeVos would do ‘her damnedest’ to roll back measures which, however flawed, young women students see as progress.51 In June 2020, eighteen Attorneys General lost their case when they brought a lawsuit against DeVos and the US Department of Education to block the final rule which limits Title IX to cases of sexual misconduct that occur within ‘an educational program or activity’, on the grounds that it will ‘reverse decades of effort to end the corrosive effects of sexual harassment on equal access to education’ and will require institutions to ‘completely overhaul’ their current systems for addressing sexual misconduct in less than three months amid the coronavirus pandemic.52 This is the world in which anti-harassment activists – ‘fierce, ruthless, determined’ – have been making, and continue to make, their case. In their bid for ‘sexual empowerment’, writes Grigoriadis, they have ‘cast off the language of victimhood’. They want a world in which rape will no longer be what historically it has been: ‘a property crime, the woman’s fault, or a man’s privilege’.53 They want to be listened to and believed; they want an end to sexual harassment.

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  It would be wrong to assume that all self-defined feminists believe that Title IX, and the struggle against harassment it represents, has been unequivocally emancipatory for women. If #MeToo has acted as a great unifier of women, the responses to it have laid bare some of the most prominent fault lines inside feminism itself. Though covering the same terrain as Blurred Lines, Laura Kipnis’s Unwanted Advances – Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus feels as if it comes from another planet. Grigoriadis mentions it once in parentheses as an ‘anti-Title IX manifesto’. She is being measured; I would call it a tirade. Kipnis sees herself as belonging on the side of freedom, which now has to fight back against a repressive, stultifying, mollycoddling administrative world (the echoes of the alt-right critique of Title IX are striking). There is a feminist back-story to this argument. Twenty years ago, in Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, Jane Gallop had made a plea for the erotics of teaching – a case which had in fact been made more effectively by bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress three years before. hooks had been careful to place her argument for the thrill of learning in the context of the US history of racism. All her teachers at Booker T. Washington Elementary had been black women who, although they never stated it in such terms, were fired up by a ‘revolutionary pedagogy of resistance’.54 For these women, rousing their students was to transgress a racial heritage that did everything it could to suppress black thought and desire. Later, in hooks’s case, after she became a teacher herself, such transgression went on to include at least one sexual liaison with a student. All this changed with racial integration. Black children bussed to white schools quickly discovered that their passionate enthusiasm in the classroom was seen as a threat to white privilege. They were cut down to size. This – hooks is citing Buddhist Pema Chodron – could, I think, fairly be called a manifesto:

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  My models were those who stepped outside of the conventional mind and who could actually stop my mind and completely open it up and free it, even for a moment, from a conventional, habitual way of looking at things … If you are really preparing for groundlessness, preparing for the reality of human existence, you are living on the razor’s edge, and you must become used to the fact that things shift and change. Things are not certain and they do not last and you do not know what is going to happen. My teachers have always pushed me over a cliff.55

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  Likewise – though not exactly – Kipnis is arguing for the myriad, uncontrollable and often sexual nature of human behaviour and thought. Grigoriadis is there to remind us, however, that you can be on the side of the complexity of life and mind without, as Kipnis does, turning against Title IX as the devil’s work (I barely exaggerate).

  Unwanted Advances opens with the moment when Kipnis found herself charged under Title IX for writing an article in which she had opposed a new directive banning all sexual relations, even if consensual, between undergraduates and faculty. She was seen as taking the wrong side, encouraging discrimination and betraying the progressive cause. Gallop had been treading similar ground when she argued that all teaching relationships were in effect ‘consensual amorous relations’. As a student, Gallop had seduced a number of her teachers and come to no harm. She viewed the experience as a ‘conquest’, which made her feel ‘cocky’ and in touch with her own ‘power’. She was most excited by students who wanted to be like her (perhaps not something to boast about). She announced at a conference that graduates were her ‘sexual preference’, which unsurprisingly did not go down very well. The charge of harassment was brought against her after she passionately kissed one of her graduate students in a crowded room; she admits she got off on the spectacle.56 Gallop, Kipnis and Jennifer Doyle have in common that they all find themselves embroiled in university statutes on harassment, although in the case of Doyle the comparison stops there, as she was the one bringing a case under Title IX against a student who had been harassing and stalking her.

  Sexual harassment comes mainly from men to women, faculty to student – recently there have been a flood of cases in academia, both in the UK and in the US, which include some of today’s most illustrious male intellectuals. We should not, however, lose sight of the fact that neither women nor men automatically pitch up in the most obvious place. In August 2018, Avital Ronell, distinguished professor of German and Comparative Literature at New York University, was found guilty of harassment against a male graduate student (Judith Butler, one of a group of academics who had written in her support when the story first broke, apologised after the finding and the release of the legal transcript). Likewise in the movie industry: Asia Argento, the Italian actress and director, and one of the first women to publicly accuse Harvey Weinstein, reportedly paid off a young actor who accused her of sexual assault when he was seventeen (in the US eighteen is the age of consent). Such stories must be acknowledged, though feminism surely needs to be wary of the uses to which they are put, as if their mere existence lets the men involved in the preponderance of cases off the hook. As I read Unwanted Advances, I could not help asking: whose side does Kipnis think she is on? She would probably see that as a compliment.

  Kipnis’s previous book, Men – Notes from an Ongoing Investigation (2014), opens with a paean to Larry Flynt, the editor of Hustler, a magazine she considers disgusting – ‘it grossed me out’ – but finds herself celebrating for its pornographic assault on American prudery and social hypocrisy which she places in the tradition of Rabelais.57 When she accepts an invitation to meet Flynt, he is in a gold-plated wheelchair, the result of an assassination attempt years before by a white supremacist enraged by Hustler’s interracial slant. She is not, therefore, wrong that there is a progressive stripe embedded in the monstrosity of the magazine, although to find
it you have to dig deep. Kipnis is open about the pleasure she gets as a woman writing about men: ‘potency’, ‘a bit of lead in your pencil’ (rather like Gallop’s language of sexual conquest).58 In an earlier book, Bound and Gagged – Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (1996), she opened with the case of Daniel DePew, stung by a San Jose police undercover officer who lured him to a hotel room and got him enthusiastically to engage with the idea of a snuff movie in which he would play executioner and which would involve the kidnapping and murder of a child. As Kipnis saw it, DePew, who was sentenced to thirty-three years in prison, had been arrested for a fantasy – ‘a crime that never happened’. It sounded more to me as if he had been caught making a plan.

  Whether today’s focus on harassment is making people afraid of their own thoughts seems to me a fair question. But, already twenty years ago, this strikes me as an odd use, or misuse, of fantasy. For psychoanalysis, unconscious fantasy, as distinct from conscious fantasy or daydream, is not something you want to happen; indeed it is often something that would horrify you if it came to pass in real life. This is an easier idea to grasp than it might first appear. One student told Grigoriadis that he understood that women’s rape fantasies are not real because ‘men don’t want their penises cut off but dream about it anyway.’59 For any such fantasies, you cannot and should not be punished – most often the voice chastising you in your head for even having such a thought is punishment enough. Men in a hotel room discussing how to murder a child would not make the cut (fantasy would be no excuse).

  This may feel far from Title IX, but I think it is central. By her own account, Kipnis’s strongest identifications are with men – ‘lead in my pencil’, ‘daddy’s girl’ – especially those she feels have been targeted by injustice: Larry Flynt, Daniel DePew and, at the heart of Unwanted Advances, Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University. Ludlow was the subject of Title IX complaints from two students concerning inappropriate sexual behaviour, in one case rape. He was found guilty of sexual misconduct and resigned on the point of termination. One of his accusers had been a freshman major in his class, the other a postgraduate student – in the book, they are given the pseudonyms of Eunice Cho and Nola Hartley. Kipnis has written the case for the defence. You could argue that she is trying to redress the balance, a term I have always considered to be corrupt in an unbalanced world (I have also noticed that the demand for balance only ever arises when you clash with the official position or are seen to be on the wrong side of a debate, never when your views are welcome).

  For Kipnis, the administrative behemoth which is Title IX is part of a backlash against the intellectual and sexual freedoms seized over decades by feminists, and is endangering student autonomy, intellectual spirit and the impulse to learn. A mental and sexual straitjacket is turning women students into passive victims, who are, or see themselves as, totally the prey of men. (Isn’t being the prey of men precisely what anti-harassment activists most hate?) She wrote her book when, having expressed sympathy with Ludlow, he gave her access to a stash of over two thousand emails and messages between himself and Hartley, with whom he had been in a relationship for more than a year. When she is critical of Ludlow, it feels like a concession: ‘Let me be honest: you are not going to find me arguing that Ludlow showed fantastic judgement’ (independently of the main charges against him, he admits that during his career he had two undergraduates in his bed).60 She also fairly demonstrates that the Title IX investigators in this case, and not only this case, are heavily inclined towards the plaintiff. But, as I see it, she makes the fatal error of confusing her critique of what have clearly been injustices under Title IX with tearing the woman complainants’ evidence to shreds. Even allowing that Kipnis is driven by the wish for women to claim back their sexual agency over their own lives, the feminist aspect of this way of proceeding escapes me. Challenged on Facebook, Kipnis responded that Unwanted Advances is ‘a polemic, not journalism. It’s a work of opinion. It’s based on reporting, and a close reading of the available documents, but the heart of the book is my interpretation of that material.’61 The Philosophy Graduate Association had accused her of ‘unauthorised exposure of private material and of reckless unfounded speculation’ against Nola Hartley.

  One of my key questions in this book is what role psychoanalysis can play in opening up our understanding of the complexities of our inner, sometimes violent, sexual worlds. One of the most humane aspects of psychoanalysis is the way it brings mental life, however troubled, out of its dark shameful corners and into the light. Psychoanalysis does not judge. Its findings cannot be adduced in a court of law (which has not prevented lawyers invoking the idea that women might have unconscious rape fantasies to get a rape charge dismissed). In Unwanted Advances, terms like hysteria, projection and paranoia – paranoia in the title – are thrown around, alongside ‘witch-hunt’, as if they could be used to settle political debate, with no regard for the way they have classically been used to persecute, insult and silence angry women. And other oppressed groups. ‘I am thinking of paranoia,’ writes Sara Ahmed on her Feminist Killjoys blog, in relation to racism, ‘and the good reasons for bad feelings.’62 (In a racist world, ‘paranoia’ on the part of racial minorities might just make perfect sense.) It is also worth remembering that psychoanalysis began by listening to the voice and stories of the hysteric, who had previously been dismissed as insane (at the turn of the twentieth century in France, hysterics were being incarcerated as ‘the dregs’ of society in the Paris asylum La Salpêtrière).63

  Faced with contradictory behaviour on the part of one of Ludlow’s two main accusers (‘both flinging herself at Ludlow in a sexualised way and also feeling victimised’), Kipnis does not hesitate to offer a wild diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, a serious condition which means that the patient, instead of being happily, or rather unhappily, neurotic more or less like everybody else, sits on the boundary between neurosis and psychosis. One of its components, we are told, is ‘provocative or seductive behaviour’, at which point I find myself wanting to evoke Jane Gallop as an ally.64 Victimised and seductive – far from being the sign of mental disturbance, this might instead be grounds for hope. It suggests that a woman’s ability to seduce has not been completely quashed by ambient violence. Is it disordered, in a sexually disordered world, for a woman to feel something of both?

  As for the rush to mental casualty, I was once stopped in the mid-1970s by a colleague in the car park at Sussex University – an important detail because the car park was some way from the Arts Building so always allowed time to talk. Laughingly, he told me that a woman student, who was of course clearly disturbed, had brought a charge of sexual misconduct against him. ‘Laughingly’ because he said he happened to be innocent in this one case. Adding insult to injury, he was therefore boasting of all the rest. This moment came to mind when I read Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s account of their first meeting with Harvey Weinstein, on the eve of their exposé in the New York Times. Weinstein denied having done the dreadful things to women of which he was being accused: ‘He wasn’t that bad. He then smiled sardonically: “I’m worse.”’65

  At Sussex, I subsequently discovered, my colleague was known as ‘the groper’; all the new women students were forewarned. By the time we got to the building, I had managed to expostulate that the charge of mental disorder should never be brought against a woman making a sexual complaint – the idea of setting yourself up as judge in your own case being even more unacceptable in the sphere of psychic and sexual life. Later, when I confronted a second colleague on behalf of a student who had appealed to me, he was simply enraged that I did not unequivocally support his denials (he too turned out to be a serial offender). Needless to say, there were no official procedures anywhere in the system for dealing with such cases. But it is only now, looking back on these moments, that I realise just how inadequate was my response.

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  Like Paul Nungesser at Columbia, Peter Ludlow
had been named and shamed. This can indeed be seen as summary justice, which is one of Kipnis’s main charges against Title IX. The same case can be made in relation to Liam Allan, a Sussex student accused of rape, against whom all charges were dropped in December 2017 when previously undisclosed evidence was released to the court (he had been on bail and banned from campus for a year). Citing senior barristers, The Times’s headline described the ‘scandal’ as ‘the tip of the iceberg’; police and prosecutors are now, according to one QC, biased in favour of women rape plaintiffs; a subsequent letter suggested we are living in a ‘culture of victim belief’.66 Given the obscenely low, indeed rapidly declining, level of rape convictions in the UK, that would be something of a turnaround in itself (nor, to my knowledge, has the systematic discrediting and disbelief of women who bring rape charges to court ever been graced with the term ‘culture’.) ‘Scandal’ and ‘tip of the iceberg’ sound to me like the language of backlash. An analysis of rape cases in September 2019 uncovered systematic police flaws at the expense of the most vulnerable, with rape regularly recorded as an incident rather than a crime, resulting in no investigation taking place.67 One result of the Liam Allan case was to make confiscation of a plaintiff’s phone and disclosure of private messages a central part of rape investigations (children reporting rape are being told to hand over their phones).68