Northwestern University film professor Laura Kipnis wrote an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education last winter in which she pushed back against stricter university rules about romantic relationships between students and teachers.
A feminist and a product of the time, she said, between the Pill and the AIDS epidemic when women enjoyed a new sexual freedom, she resented the fact that university administrators now were trying to take that freedom back with oppressive regulation.
Professors had been sleeping with students — and students had been seducing professors — for eons without it being criminalized as an abuse of power. Now those intergenerational relationships, many of which resulted in marriage and children, were being cast as a kind of incest.
She called it "sexual paranoia," and she said it had also been taken to an extreme during the recent high-pitched discussion of rape on campuses. Sex among students used to be experimental, she wrote. It might be awkward or embarrassing or feelings might get hurt, but it wasn't seen as a criminal act.
"Mutual drunkenness" could now result in a secret tribunal with no rules of evidence and a student's expulsion without an opportunity to confront his accuser or present his side of the story, she wrote.
The essay appeared in February, and Northwestern students immediately protested and demanded that the university president repudiate Ms. Kipnis' point of view.
To make matters worse, two graduate students filed a Title IX complaint against her, saying her characterization of an incident between a student and a professor would have a chilling effect on other students' willingness to file complaints of sexual harassment.
A Title IX complaint is a big deal. If a university is found to have violated the law against sexual discrimination, it can lose federal funding. A formal investigation was held, Ms. Kipnis was questioned and recently found not to have committed any wrong. She was incredulous of the entire process, and rightly so, I think.
There's nothing like sexual politics to super-charge the verbosity on college campuses, and Ms. Kipnis' opinion that the concern for the safety of women students had infantilized them certainly did that. "Students are not trauma cases waiting to happen," she wrote. And "murky situations" are not rape.
This point of view was echoed in an essay in The Washington Post by commentator Cathy Young. In it she described several ill-advised sexual encounters she had had in her life. There were mistakes, she said, not sexual violations.
"[T]his crusade against 'rape culture' oversimplifies the vast complexity of human sexual interaction, conflating criminal sexual acts such as coercion by physical force, threat or incapacitation — which should obviously be prosecuted and punished — with bad behavior," Ms. Young wrote. "Despicable behavior is not always criminal."
The guys aren't liking this campus rape culture conversation very much either. They feel as if women students assume they are predators and that they hold immense power over them. An accusation of sexual assault — in which the male is very often not granted due process — can end a college education and a career.
The pendulum has swung too far, Ms. Young argues. Feminists have successfully beaten back the shameful treatment of rape victims by police and the unfair burden of proof placed on them in court. But today, "no means no" has become "only a clear and sober yes means yes."
No parent would have trouble with that standard for their college daughter. But it this new layer of consent being proposed in which every make-out session is regularly interrupted by the query, "Is this OK?" is its extreme.
Sexual consent free of uncertainty is an impossible goal, Ms. Young writes. And that means any sexual encounter can be construed as an assault, and that trivializes real sexual violence.
Human sexual relations can be transactional, but they can also be enormously complex, and they come with the risk of everything from embarrassment to real trauma.
We are right to want to protect our daughters from either or both, but we risk hindering their emerging sexual agency and their independence by scripting every relationship for them.
And worse, we risk ruining the lives of our sons.
Susan Reimer's column appears on Mondays and Thursdays. She can be reached at sreimer@baltsun.com and @SusanReimer on Twitter.com.