Against “Sexual” “Assault” “Awareness”

Ted Everett

SUNY Geneseo

Philosophy colloquium 4-24

1. Introduction

This is part of the first draft of a paper on sexual assault, much of it rough and hastily constructed, and what's true everywhere else is also true here, namely that everything I have to say is tentative and open to discussion.  Philosophers take this openness and tentativity for granted at colloquiums, which are always informal and often impromptu gatherings for precisely this purpose: to propose new ideas and kick them around (ordinarily in somewhat smaller rooms), and with a secondary purpose of giving ourselves a good excuse to go out drinking afterwards.  Sometimes they're technical discussions on questions no one understands including the speaker, sometimes they're provocative discussions on questions of great interest to the general public (that's what this one was intended to be), but they are never supposed to be political events at which people make speeches. So I hope you're not expecting one.

One more preliminary thing:  I do want to thank Heidi Savage for so generously, and quite courageously, offering to share her time and her extremely hard-earned insights on this difficult topic, and to step into a discussion that had already provoked a shitstorm of hostility before the first word had even been read (or, to be frank about it, written).  So, if anybody here would like to know what philosophical integrity looks like, there it is.

Okay, so here's the talk, which for the sake of time I've hastily and heavily redacted since it turned out to be way too long.

SAA is a national and international movement aimed at combatting violence against women, which has also been responsible for changes in federal law and the laws of many states regarding SA. And in the background of this movement is a large and growing body of feminist theory of sex, gender, and violence, including what is known as rape culture theory (RCT). This background theory is also taught in courses here at Geneseo and elsewhere, and promoted in other campus venues, and according to the Lamron was prominently featured at the SAT. Thus, just on Monday, for example, the Geneseo Gold Leadership program offered a workshop called “Shift Rape Culture Now: Victim Blame Dialogue”, and in Washington a couple weeks ago the White House released a statement on the signing of this year’s Violence Against Women Act, which claimed in accordance with RCT that American culture "enables rape" and that this culture "must be changed".

I'd like to question some of the doctrines and slogans that underlie the current SAA movement, as I believe that every controversial claim ought to be questioned and doubted and criticized; which is to say, through philosophical analysis of its concepts and principles. I have no personal commitments about this stuff, but here is my tentative position in brief. The problem of sexual assault is very serious and very real but has been exaggerated in academic and government reports and policies and laws in such a way that it has burgeoned lately from a problem to a crisis, and from a crisis to a constant emergency that seems to trump or even overwhelm attention to other violent crimes or any other problems or purposes with which it might compete. Things like the claims that 25% of women at Geneseo are sexually assaulted while they're here, strike me as having several unfortunate consequences, among them:

- that women are too afraid of ordinary, decent men.

- that men in general, and college men in particular, are being unfairly stereotyped and targeted for hostile and discriminatory treatment.

- that SA is receiving too much attention relative to other serious college problems like alcohol abuse (which has claimed a human life at Geneseo every other year or so since I've been teaching here) and that a disproportionate emphasis on programs concerning SA can also detract from other essential needs, such as maintaining long-established principles of academic freedom or fairness in campus judicial processes.

- that the SAA movement both reflects and encourages the kind of "zero tolerance" mentality that I believe is causing or exacerbating or concealing all kinds of problems in our society, by focusing attention on borderline cases of bad things rather than on central cases, a phenomenon I call "edge focus".

- that the SAA movement changes its own central orientation from one of advocacy for others to one of seeking and asserting power for itself, and the exaggeration of its initially legitimate grievances and laudable goal of making campuses safer for women, endorsed and supported by well-meaning sympathizers in positions of authority, becomes a pretext for intolerant and even threatening behavior towards people that its leaders perceive, rightly or wrongly, as their enemies.

- that to the extent that RCT and other controversial concepts and principles common to the SAA movement are then imposed dogmatically on students as established doctrine, not to be discussed and criticized like any other theories, this turns colleges into culturally gated communities that cannot prepare their students for life in a wider world where there is more than one permitted point of view about these issues.

- and, perhaps most importantly, that college women are being encouraged to see themselves too much as vulnerable victims with less control than men over their own lives, as less capable of handling their problems by themselves, as dependent on special institutional protections for their physical and emotional safety, and in general as people with less autonomy and correspondingly less moral responsibility than men – in short, too much like children rather than adults.

This is not the goal of feminism as I understand it. Instead, I think that the exaggeration of the dangers women face from ordinary, decent men plays perversely into many men's tendencies to treat women like children, that is, to patronize them as a way of protecting their feelings, to hold them to lower intellectual standards than those to which they hold themselves and other men, and ultimately not to take them seriously as individuals and moral equals; and that it simultaneously flatters many men's own view of themselves as stoical adults who take responsibility for other peoples' problems and who take pride in the fact that they don't mind being blamed unfairly. This mistake cannot be corrected through demands for pacification on the part of women who rightly suspect that men are pacifying them. The only ultimate solution to this problem lies with individual men and women speaking frankly with each other under the strongest possible presumption of mutual good will

What I would like to do is to examine some of the concepts of the SAA movement (sexual contact, consent, and so on) against the background of state law, Geneseo policy, and the research on which that policy is said to be based, together with some analysis of what I take to be the three main SAA slogans, "rape is rape", "no means no", and "don’t blame the victim". And then I'll try to get into a more general critique of the RCT that underlies the non-standard moral and scientific principles and the confusing language of the SAA movement, and finish if I can get this far by sketching a few elements of an alternative conception of sex and gender relations that I believe is both more accurate as an explanation of ordinary sexual activity in American society, and more respectful of women as autonomous adults.

2. Consent and 25%

[the next section of this paper is a detailed critique of the SAS done here at Geneseo a couple of years ago. I can't read this section here because it's very long and would take up way too much time. But I can briefly state its main point, which is that in my view this survey and its results do not begin justify the claim that 25% of Geneseo women get sexually assaulted while they're here, a claim that our administration has endorsed and has allowed to be plastered all over campus, even though it makes our college look like a violent hell-hole rather than a wonderful and generally quite safe place to get an education, which is what it really is. I think the reason they don't find this a horrible problem for public relations is two-fold: first, that all the competing colleges where there is a strong SAA movement get the same result of 25%, and indeed, the phrase "one in four" is almost a mantra of the movement, so the number is not really shocking anybody about Geneseo or making anyone feel especially unsafe here as opposed to somewhere else; and second, they understand that the majority of Geneseo students don't take the 25% number very seriously, despite our making them "aware" of it almost constantly, beginning during their first few days on campus with the mandatory SAA instruction that forms a considerable part of our orientation program for new students.

There are three sorts of problems with this survey and many similar ones with respect to everyday standards for scientific survey research, but that are not considered serious problems for research within the SAA movement, namely sampling problems, framing problems, and ambiguities in the questions. This does not entail that there are not good reasons for SA research to run on different standards than ordinary social science research, but people who broadcast the 25% result should make it clear to everybody that these differences exist.

I'll just extract three quick points about one question on the survey, then move on. This is the first question in the survey:

1. Since starting college, at Geneseo, how many times have you been fondled, kissed, or

touched sexually when you didn’t consent to it because you were overwhelmed by another

person’s continual arguments and pressure?

First, I think this question depends on an unreasonably broad conception of what constitutes sexual assault. As far as I can see, getting pressured into taking a kiss from your grandmother after you say no and tell her that kisses are yucky, would be sexual assault by the criteria here (and incest too, I guess, as well as child molesting). That strikes me as having gone too far. Second, in order even to understand this question grammatically it must be presupposed that being "overwhelmed" by verbal arguments (whatever that might be taken to mean) constitutes lack of consent. But people talk each other into doing things that they're reluctant to do all the time. Sometimes this is even the morally best thing to do someone else, i.e. to persuade them that they ought to do something they actually ought to do, or that they owe you or another person some act of consideration. Why is it simply assumed that persuasion in sexual matters not only constitutes lack of consent, but is also always wrong, when this defies our understanding of persuasion in all other cases, unless we are speaking about children and the mentally disabled who are not seen as competent to make their own decisions under verbal pressure from adults.

The single most import fact about this survey, I believe, is that the great majority of women who gave answers that contributed to the statistic 25%, denied outright that they had been sexually assaulted. There are two ways to understand this denial: either as evidence that something is very wrong with the survey or its interpretation, or that this "denial" on the part of victims indicates that they don't understand what happened to them.

3. Proportionality and "rape is rape"

Let me discuss the three tautological slogans of the SAA movement that I think are also very problematic in their actual use. What does it mean when somebody says "rape is rape" (or SA is SA)? Obviously, rape is rape in the same formal sense in which everything is everything. But surely that aspect of the statement "rape is rape" doesn't need to be repeatedly pronounced. What, then, is being denied or ruled out, when we say "rape is rape"? The only possibility that I can see is that someone would falsely think that there are rapes that are not rapes. But nobody could think that as a whole thing, de dicto: "some rapes are not rapes", without breaking the logical Law of Identity just mentioned. I think the way the slogan is really being used is more like this: whatever comes to be defined as rape ought be treated like any other rape, without distinction as to whether people see it as a borderline or controversial case. The people who use the slogan are opposed to anybody saying "yeah, I guess this case is technically a rape, if you want to be fussy about it, but let's not treat this instance like the other instances because it's just kind of an iffy case." Instead, they want us to recognize that all rapes are equally rape, and ought to be treated as such, not graded according to whether it’s an obvious or iffy case, or whether it’s a controversial or non-controversial case.

The problem comes when this principle is taken to imply that all rapes are equally bad, or equally deserving of punishment, which abandons the proportionality that is essential to justice in ethics and law. If we insist on acting according to rigid categories rather than acknowledging that things fall along ranges of degree, including degrees of evil and degrees of illegality, then we are likely to lose sight of morally crucial discriminations between good and better, bad and worse, and the proportionately different attitudes and actions they require.

Imagine that somebody wanted to use the analogous slogan, "murder is murder". In fact, some people do, namely those who believe that fetuses at any stage are babies, so killing these babies by abortion is murder, and…"murder is murder". Even supposing that they might be right about the rights of fetuses, does it seem to you that this is a reasonable slogan for them to use, suggesting as it does that women who have abortions and doctors who perform abortions are actual murderers who ought to be treated like any other murderer? I don't think it is, precisely because it vitiates proportionality. Only fanatics generally shunned by mainstream anti-abortion activists actually think that "murder is murder" in that sense.

So it should be with "rape is rape". Though rape can be as bad as murder, there are clear-cut cases (metaphysically, epistemologically, and dialectically), and there are intermediate and borderline cases, so there are morally better (this of course means relatively better) and worse cases. We should bear that in mind when considering metaphysically intermediate cases between what is sexual assault and what is not sexual assault; epistemologically intermediate cases where are far as one can from evidence it could have been one or the other; and dialectically intermediate cases where reasonable people don't agree on which it is; and that moral judgment supervenes on all of these intermediacies. Proportionality should govern judgment and punishment in all such borderline cases, whether they're ultimately classified as sexual assault or not.

4. Autonomy and "no means no"

We also hear the tautology "no means no" quite a lot inn SAA presentations. It is probably the most successful slogan of the entire movement, and certainly the one that's penetrated furthest into ordinary English discourse, which makes it ripe for philosophical analysis if any slogan is. So, what does it really mean, beyond the trivial generality that everything means everything? The way it seems to be intended is that the word "no" has to be respected in a certain way that it is not always respected. So, how? How are people are being told "no" and then not respecting this appropriately? The paradigm is that someone asks someone else for sexual activity of some sort, their interlocutor says "no", and then the first person keeps pressing the point instead of giving up. But wait - in ordinary discourse, people argue with you all the time when you've already said no once or many times; otherwise there'd be no chance of ever getting anyone to change their mind, even for perfectly good reasons that are not easily expressed. So, why should a single utterance of the word "no" count as definitive in sex, when it does not in any other case?

I don't suggest that no is ever meaningless; indeed, it always constitutes refusal. But it doesn't always constitute final refusal. For example, it's never okay to take your neighbor's lawnmower after they have said "no" in any form, just because the way they said "no" was less than definitive. It's still up to you to convince your neighbor to permit something before you can claim any consent at all. Thus, when my roommate argues me into going out for beer, I might say no several times: "No, I don't think so"; "No, I'm sorry"; "No, I really can't"; and the like, and at no point is he licensed to presume the opposite of "no", for example by grabbing my car keys and marching away, until I have clearly conceded the point. But in the meantime, I have permitted my friend to keep up the argument, up to the point where I finally gave in. I clearly could have stopped the conversation any time I wanted to, simply by saying "no" in a conclusive way. For example, "no, and that's final", or just "no!" in a sharp voice. So, in the intended sense, in ordinary situations "no" doesn't mean "no"; "no!" means no. Ironically, it's now become a common way of saying "no" conclusively to use the formula "no means no". If I'd said "no means no" to the friend who kept trying to talk me into going out for beer, he would have had to break the rules to keep arguing the point. Thus, weirdly, in ordinary discourse, "no means no" is false, but "'no means no' means no" is currently true.

So, once again, as so often in the rhetoric of SAA, we are left with sexual discourse seeming to produce its own semantic, pragmatic, and moral principles quite different from those of non-sexual intercourse among adults. Why does this keep happening? What is wrong in general with speaking ordinary English about sex, too, and playing by the ordinary moral and linguistic rules we use to talk about almost every other activity?

5. Responsibility and "blaming the victim"

We are constantly told not to "blame the victim". But to say that someone is "blaming the victim" is not by itself a logically complete statement. In order to decide whether any such claim is true we need to be told at least two further things: what crime the victim is the victim of, and for what crime that victim is being blamed. The (nearly) tautologous reading that makes it seem obviously true is that we should not blame a victim of the crime X for crime X. So, in the cases we care about tonight, shouldn't blame the victim of a sexual assault for the sexual assault. Well, of course we shouldn't. How can the victim have sexually assaulted herself? In that sense, everybody can easily agree that victim blaming is flatly absurd. But if that's what's going on, then how can we account for the fact that so many people are said to be doing it? If victim-blamers were so deeply irrational they probably couldn't even carry on a normal conversation. No, what's commonly being alleged of victim-blamers is not that they're irrational in any cognitively fundamental way, but rather that they're morally bad, or at least making a bad mistake.

Surely it is possible to reasonably blame the victim of one crime for committing some totally unrelated crime. For example, if somebody commits a murder and is then robbed of his wallet on the street, surely it isn’t wrong to blame him for the murder, just because he is now the victim of the theft. Therefore, it must be some crime or error that's related to crime X for which the victim is being falsely blamed. What is it? In the vague terms of the sexual assault awareness movement, victim blaming seems to mean: falsely accusing someone of causing another person to victimize them: they did it, but you also made it happen.

Sexual cases to one side, there seem to be three broad categories where we do commonly take victims to be at least somewhat blameworthy: provocation, recklessness, and negligence. All three behaviors are most plausibly understood not as uniquely causing their own victimization, but as culpably increasing their probability of victimization. Provocation is a victim's behavior that works on the intentions of the criminal. The provocateur makes someone desire to harm them who would not do so otherwise, or desire it to a threshold degree that they would not have reached. Imagine that a person from one ethnic group is trying to enrage a peaceful person from another by hurling offensive epithets at him. Like most behaviors, this sort of behavior can come in various degrees of nastiness, and ordinarily one relatively mild instance of some verbally mocking behavior is not taken to be grounds for beating the mocker to a pulp. But no one is expected to retain his ordinary self-control after experiencing a long and escalating series of deliberately offensive efforts to make him lose his cool. Depending on context and common sense, most of us would say that there's a point of hassling beyond which any reasonable person could (and maybe should) be driven (as we say) to retaliate physically against his tormentor, perhaps even with disproportionate force, given our sympathy for him in all that he has stoically withstood so far. Now, even if the taunting victim has no legal right ever assault the person who had been taunting him, and even if technically he broke a law more serious than the charge of harassment for which the taunter is liable, judges and juries will probably be inclined to treat him sympathetically under the so-called "fighting words" doctrine. Even if he receives the full legal penalty, people are still likely to blame the victim verbally in cases like this by saying that the he was asking for it, or that he had it coming to him.

Depending on the circumstances, reckless behavior often similarly licenses the blaming of victims according to ordinary standards. If I get roaring drunk and go into some public bar in Oakland that's been long understood to be a hang-out for the Hell's Angels, and I start singing show-tunes at the top of my lungs, as I usually do when in my cups, this isn't a provocation of the Hell's Angels who drag me out into the alley behind the bar and beat the crap out me, but most people would say that I deserved some blame for what happened to me, either by choosing my venues and audiences recklessly, or by recklessly getting roaring drunk in the first place. This wasn't provocative behavior in the usual sense, but it was incredibly stupid behavior with foreseeable consequences.

The same goes for negligence. Suppose I have a very expensive DaVega bicycle, and I like to ride it around Central Park at night, and one night I get really hungry, so I just lean the bicycle against a park bench and go get myself a slice of pizza. Half an hour later, I come back, and guess what?, the bicycle has been stolen. Now, I surely am the victim of a crime. So, should this victim not be blamed? Well, certainly not for stealing the bicycle (the idea of stealing your own bike doesn't even make sense, right?). But that doesn't mean that I cannot be blamed for anything, and in particular that I cannot be blamed for losing the bike. In fact, I certainly would be blamed for losing it if it had been a bike I'd borrowed from somebody else. In either case, I'd be the only person to have lost the bicycle, since I was the only one negligently leaving it somewhere where it was very likely to be stolen. So, if my friends and family and the police called me a fool (not a thief, mind you, but a fool) for doing that, or told me that I was "asking for it", this would be true according to the standards of ordinary discourse, although a little harsh towards somebody who'd just lost an expensive bicycle.

Do not misunderstand me on the point of this analogy. I agree with the SAA movement that we should never blame the victim in a serious sexual assault. But I disagree on the questions of what for and why. Consider: is there anything analogous in sexual activity to an expensive bicycle? I think there is, although I certainly don’t have in mind things like the woman's virginity, or virtue, or her family's honor, or anything at all like that. I think the thing that's lost, the thing that's stolen from a woman in a rape or other serious SA is what the SAA movement calls her sexual autonomy. For once, I agree with them on something; this is precisely the right concept to use. A woman's sexual autonomy is something that any woman naturally has and that is naturally precious to her, entirely regardless of whether she prefers to have a lot of sex, or little, or none, and regardless of with whom or how she wants to have it. And sexual autonomy is something that we all ought to hold precious, too, for those we care about, and we should help them guard it from the analogue of theft.

So, how do we best do that? Surely one thing we ought to do is teach the girls and tell the women that we care about not to be reckless with this precious thing, their sexual autonomy, say by getting roaring drunk around a bunch of strangers. This is this is not to tell any woman that she doesn't have a right to get roaring drunk around a bunch of strangers, and therefore to risk her own autonomy in that way – just as I have a perfect right to risk my bicycle by walking away from it in Central Park. I absolutely do have that right, and any woman has the right to pass out drunk around a bunch of strange men unmolested. Nobody has a right to take away the sexual autonomy of a recklessly drunken person any more than people have a right to steal an unlocked bicycle. Still, if she were my daughter or anybody else I had some slender influence over, and she got roaring drunk around a bunch of total strangers, and luckily got away without being harmed, I would scream at her just the way I'd scream at her if she drove home drunk in a car – probably something like this: "Do you not realize, you freaking idiot, that some asshole might well have raped you in that situation?" And if she answered "Sure, Dad, but I had every right to do it, so if I did get raped it would have been somebody else's fault. Don't blame the victim", this would be a crazy thing for her to say. The point of sexual prudence is not to guarantee that when you get raped it'll be somebody else's fault. The point is not to get raped in the first place when you can avoid it by taking reasonable steps. So, if you're being really reckless, you are indeed blameworthy for that recklessness because of the foreseeably hugely increased likelihood that you will lose your sexual autonomy. Now, on the other hand, if you already had, deliberately and very stupidly, gotten yourself passing-out drunk in some situation where you weren't surrounded by protective friends, sand then had actually been raped: I wouldn't dream of saying that you'd asked for it or that you'd had it coming (I have no use for such expressions myself, in any case) but I would still believe that you bore some responsibility for losing the precious thing that has predictably been stolen from you. Repeating to make it very clear, I would never think of openly blaming a reckless victim of serious SA, but this is not because she wouldn't have been blameworthy in fact for her reckless stupidity. It's because blaming someone for recklessness after it has cost them something precious would be cruel.

If you are being sexually provocative, or reckless, or negligent in such a way that you are likely to get raped by wicked people, and you haven't been raped yet, the good people who care about you should blame you and scream at you to try to make you realize that you should be more prudent. But if you had gotten raped, then regardless of your recklessness, the only right thing to do then would be to try to help you recover. Blaming the reckless victim after she's been victimized would be like screaming at your idiot son to stop telling racist jokes loudly in public after his jaw had been shattered by the people he'd enraged, or at your drunk-driving daughter after she'd smashed up the car and gotten paralyzed. But this is also why we should blame the potential victims, and in the loudest voice, if that will stop them from behaving so provocatively, recklessly, or negligently that they probably will get beaten up, or crash the car and sever their spinal cord, or pass out around visibly untrustworthy people and get raped.

Why does the SAA seem so hostile to this kind of argument, the kind of argument for prudence with precious things that is a hallmark of good parenting and caring friendship in every other context?

6. Conclusion

The answer to all these questions about the non-standard semantics, pragmatics, and ethics of the SAA movement seems to be RCT. If RCT is true, then biasing surveys is justified, at least in principle, as ways of trying to coax survey respondents to say what RCT predicts that they will not say under ordinary survey conditions, because according to that theory women have been intimidated and shamed and made to feel responsible for bad things that have happened to them in a kind of slave-like false consciousness. It also accounts for the unusual diction of the SAA movement, including how the slogans of the movement have been used in their own special ways, not as the tautologies that they initially appear to be, but as peculiar substantive principles which are applied almost exclusively within the movement, like "rape is rape" and "no means no" "and don't blame the victim." It all fits together.

But then, that's the problem: it does all fit together into a potentially, and I think actually, quite insular and amazingly brittle ideology, which can seemingly only defend itself against the doubt that other theories and research programs welcome (or at least grudgingly accept) as an essential part of healthy intellectual life only by attacking anyone who criticizes them, on the grounds that they and the college women they claim to represent are physically and emotionally in such grave and constant danger from rape-culture that all critics must be seen as enemies of women. What would happen, then, if any one main thesis of this tightly interconnected set of principles practices were successful refuted or even publicly and plausibly criticized on many campuses, I suspect, is that the whole thing might collapse, because theories and the research methods and the statistics and the definitions and the moral principles within this paradigm really don't make much sense in ordinary language or by ordinary scientific standards or when applying ordinary moral intuitions, or when following ordinary rules of law and principles of justice. It's one big theory with its own language and rules and its own leadership and putative constituency.

This is all useful and morally necessary in order to transform an unjust society that enables and encourages sexual violence into a just society where women are safe from men and treated with respect and justice, changes that would ultimately be liberating for the men themselves, not just the women they oppress. But only on one condition: that RCT is actually both sufficiently true and a sufficiently exhaustive explanation of the problems women currently face. If RCT is not the truth, or not nearly enough the only truth, then something very bad is going on, at Geneseo and practically every other college in the country, and I don't mean the reasonable campus safety measures that we all agree about. If RCT is mainly false, as I believe it is, we are indoctrinating an entire generation of young women into a fearful and intolerant view of the men around them, and an intellectually rigid stance towards any issue that comes anywhere near sexual relations between men and women. This makes it almost unavoidable that college men and women will be almost as suspicious of each other as they typically attracted to and charmed by each other and inclined to the romantic and sexual relationships and the deep, trusting friendships between men and women that make the world a tolerable place for most of us.

It is time to repair the damage to trust between good men and good women that RCT and the exaggerations it promotes inside the SAA movement have done so much to destroy. This must begin with fearless and frank exchanges of ideas, not among people who already agree on ideology, but among people who disagree. This begins with breaking the power of theories over our discourse and our relationships, and in particular the theory that women in our society are not really competent to speak for themselves as individuals because they're too intimidated by pervasive sexual assault even to recognize it when it happens to them.

The traditional "rape culture" that we always hear about supposedly says that when women claim that they've been raped, you can't believe them. The new Rape Culture Theory says that when women claim they've not been raped, you can't believe them. Here is my theory. Let us take actual women seriously as they are, in preference to any theory about women. Let us treat each woman in the same way that we treat each man – that is, as an individual, autonomous adult. Let us believe whatever she says about what has happened to her, unless we have specific reason not to believe her in particular on this occasion. And let us take to heart her own interpretation of its meaning in her life, the complexities of which no theory, and no other person, can fully appreciate.