Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Rape Culture and the Limits of Law

Let's come back to politics with a post on a nice uncontroversial issue: rape.    As everyone knows this issue is in the news, what with campus codes, Bill Cosby, and so on.    Like everything else, from Afghanistan to police shootings, it has become a partisan issue, although it really shouldn't be.

At the outset, I think it's foolish to argue if 20 percent or only 3 percent of women on campus have been raped.   For one thing, it's a circular question: like the question "how many people on campus are racists?" you will get a different answer depending on your definition.   It also doesn't help much: women who believe they've been abused or unlikely to be comforted by the argument that it wasn't a "legal" rape.  The same for whether particular, highly publicized cases were true, invented, or somewhere in between.  

What I think is more interesting is why this has become such a hot issue and what exactly can be done about it.   I suspect the answer to the first question is a mix of legal and technological change.  A generation or two ago, there were more or less accepted courting rituals: you asked someone on a date, invited them back to your room (apartment), proceeded to kissing and various kinds of touching (the term "fondling" is almost a laugh line now), until, or perhaps beyond, actual intercourse.    It was of course possible for someone to short-circuit this system by proceeding directly to home plate, but this was so socially unacceptable that only a small number of people were likely to attempt it, unless the power balance was radically uneven to begin with (see Bill Cosby, above).

Nowadays, with texting and similar innovations, people are more likely to find themselves in an intimate or quasi-intimate situation without any intermediate stages, increasing the likelihood that they will perceive the situation in radically different ways.   This is especially true when alcohol is involved, as it usually is.   One campus male defended himself  by saying that his behavior couldn't possibly be rape, because the woman was already naked when he entered her bathroom, and she made no affirmative effort to lock him out.    If that qualifies as a defense argument, it's clear that we have a problem.

I suspect that the increasingly bizarre nature of college admissions also plays a role, especially at more elite campuses.   Elite student bodies nowadays are a mix of about 60-80 percent nerds who were inventing websites in high school and about 20-40 percent jocks, legacies, and others admitted for essentially nonacademic reasons.   A male jock and a female nerd present a vast cultural difference, not to mention an acute physical mismatch.    The likelihood for misunderstandings, or simple exploitation, is exponentially greater.

Finally are political changes, although even here, the issue are confusing.   The new rape codes have attracted criticism less for the "yes means yes" aspect, which most people agree is reasonable, than for the lack of due process afforded defendants and (sometimes) victims--a common feature of college disciplinary procedures which is in theory separable from the substance of the codes.     The draftspersons also made the common, but correctable, mistake of trying to cover every possible situation in the code, when a little creative ambiguity might have served their purposes better.   Many of the most vociferous critics of the codes have been liberals who are concerned about their broader implications for individual rights,

The best one can hope for is that legal reforms will stimulate a change in consciousness that makes the law less important--something like what happened to drunk driving, or alcoholism in general,  in the last generation.   There are some signs that this is happening.   This month's Atlantic has a story about Michael Kimmel, a professor at Stony Brook who writes books with titles like Guyland and The Politics of Manhood and believes there would be less rape if men (especially young men) changed their conception of manhood.   At a West Virginia football game, I saw men and women selling t-shirts against sexual violence.    It's easy to make fun of things like this, but this is how social change starts.    Give it a chance.


And speaking of my other career . . .

Perhaps demonstrating that law professors don't have enough work to do, I recently published three short stories, "Avi's Story" [republished], "Iced Cortado," and "The Descent of Man," each available at http://works.bepress.com/michael_livingston/ or https://www.fictionpress.com/u/1007887/LawProfMike [the latter uses a pseudonym as is customary at such websites.]  Any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is wholly coincidental.   Except perhaps me.

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell: Forty Years Later

I read somewhere that everyone, or at least every Jewish male, goes through a Dylan phase at some point in their lives.   We saw him in concert a couple of weeks ago, and since then my phase appears to have begun: either buying the CDs I somehow missed or getting them from the library; reading the Robert Shelton biography; trying to play Simple Twist of Fate on the living room piano (the shift from B to B flat, each time he realizes he's not going to get her back, is apparently the key).    I'm still a long way from a meta-theory, but herewith a few observations:

1.   With the perspective of time, I think Dylan's influence is actually bigger than it seemed 40 or 50 years ago.   BD (before Dylan), the words to popular songs were more or less interchangeable.    Today, with the advent of rap, one could argue that they're pretty much everything.   This isn't all Dylan, of course: as Shelton points out, the technique of half singing/half speaking was originated by Black bluesmen, many of whom couldn't sing any better than he can, and it's been taken in directions he probably never imagined.    But his influence is unmistakable.

2.   There's a growth and change in Dylan that is absent from all but a bare handful of other artists (I'm thinking of Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and maybe Paul Simon as examples).   The most obvious case in point is Blood On The Tracks (1975), which I think is actually better, or at least more nuanced, than his earlier, more famous albums (I'm not alone in this opinion).   But even his recent stuff--if not quite at the same level--is totally different from what he was doing before, not to mention what other people are doing now.    I remember a New York bar, back in the 1980s, that had a Dylan imitation contest with separate prizes for each category (early troubadour Dylan, post-motorcycle accident voice change Dylan, born again Dylan, and so forth).   It's hard to imagine this for any other rock artist, or that anyone would go if they held it.

3.  Even Dylan's obnoxious traits seem to make him more human in a way that (say) Mick Jagger's or Paul McCartney's don't.    Who hasn't had difficulty in relationships, feuded with co-workers, or had their mother complain that he doesn't come home often enough?   For that matter, who--with the possible exception of Jagger and McCartney--looks the same way they did in 1967, and who really even wants to?

The comparison with Joni Mitchell, with whom he has at times feuded, is a fascinating one.    Both wrote intensely autobiographical, moody, and (at times) self-pitying songs; both dabbled in art, Mitchell with rather more success; both changed styles in ways that frequently left their fans behind, and neither seemed much to care.   Blood on the Tracks and Court and Spark, two of my favorite albums, came out within a few months of each other and have remarkable similarities in structure and content.  I read recently that, when they appeared on the same bill in the 1990s, someone interrupted Mitchell's set shouting, "We want Bobby!"   Mitchell put her guitar down, stared at the heckler, and shouted "I'm just as good as he is!"   In this sense, at least, she is.


Friday, December 26, 2014

I'm back . . . or really, never left

As you may know, or have perhaps forgotten, Milan to Mumbai hasn't posted for a couple of years.    I've decided to revive it with the following changes:

1.   There's a slightly different URL <lawprofmike.blogspot.com>   Google, which runs everything, wouldn't let me used the old one and I couldn't find the right password to revive it.   What was that story about Halston losing the right to use is own name?

2.   I'm probably going to write less about politics.   I'm not running for office anymore, and besides, it just got people angry.   I'm too old for that now.

3.   On the positive side, I'm hoping to talk more about things that are really important: art, music, literature, coffee, and so forth.   In a word, culture, however that might be defined.   This may not get me more readers, but it will probably be more enjoyable.

Happy Holidays . . . and Welcome Back!