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.
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