For the purposes of my question you can substitute analogy - really same inquiry- are they similar or somehow corresponding?
ToBeHonestt, are you a male?
@“Cardinal Fang” I am male
I am a female mother of daughters. I have been violently assaulted.
I would be just as angry and upset if I or my daughters were tattooed against our will for various reasons. Some of which are that we would look at the consequences of our assault every day, that others would be able to see that, and that a licensed professional would have been the person physically assaulting our bodies. I don’t think sex is the only type of assault that is very serious. I’m frankly shocked that anyone would think that being tattooed without consent is less of an intimate assault. I find that mind boggling.
I’m female, and for me the tattoo would be much worse. Which is not to minimize the impact of any kind of battery.
I would love to live in a world where sex isn’t uniquely important; without double standards, where women weren’t advised how to protect themselves from unwanted sexual assault childhood on. I don’t see how we can have all this cultural baggage and then say “now let’s not treat it as uniquely important”, even though I quite like the idea.
I am absolutely on board with eliminating patriarchal, especially religious, strictures against sex. In reality, US women are living through a time where their reproductive rights are being seriously challenged and diminished. There is a lot of discussion about “real rape.” I don’t see it as a hearkening back. This is reality today. I think right now a whole lot of folks consider chastity of women a property right of their families and their communities.
Yes, This is the real world. I thought the point to all this discussion was changing that reality. Changing the discussion from “no means no” to “yes means yes” changes reality somewhat. I don’t think we can stop 20 year olds from getting drunk and having sex. I think we can get them to change how they think about in advance and that may change how some decide to act. It used to be a norm to try and get a girl drunk so a guy could take advantage of her. It was a joke. No one jokes about that anymore, as far as I can tell. We can change attitudes. imho.
While I get what you are saying CF: that excuse that everyone else gets away with it has no bearing on one person being punished over another. Cheating is always prohibited. Drunken college sex, however, is very often mutually agreeable to both the man and the woman. While it may be against college policy (as is all drinking for under-age kids), it is only met with consequences if one party decides, usually after the fact, that they really didn’t want this to happen and were too drunk to consent. In some of those cases, the woman chose to drink to excess (but not to the point where she can’t walk or talk) and may well have given every indication to the guy at the time that she was into it. When she wakes up the next day and finds she can’t really remember or doesn’t recall giving consent, she believes (and I think most are not lying, they really are upset, confused and convinced this is the truth), decides it was assault. Those are the cases in which I don’t think the man should be labeled a rapist and thrown off campus, at least for the first time. Educated and maybe suspended, but not expelled.
I believe that is the situation in Hanna’s most recent example (with the addition of the man putting what happened into writing).
So posters are saying that they would be more upset about the tattoo over a drunken hook-up. Not more upset about a tattoo than believing they were or actually being sexually assaulted. It’s not clear to me what we are comparing the tattoo to.
I would be far, far more upset about a tattoo than a one night drunken hook-up. As someone said…a tattoo is forever, drunk sex is one night. I really think I’d regret the tattoo far more than regretting the sex.
Attitudes have really changed in my lifetime about drinking and driving. I supposed it is possible that attitudes will also change about drinking and sex. Though I’m inclined to agree with JHS that it seems less likely.
@HarvestMoon1, I am trying to analyze why we (including myself among “we”) so automatically accept that there is no level of equivalency between a tattoo – permanent physical disfigurement involving piercing the skin with needles, pain, and a meaningful risk of infection or allergic response – and, yes, sex. Obviously, most of us view sex as supremely intimate, personal, emotional, sacred, shameful. We think being sexually violated is especially traumatic with the potential for permanent or long-term psychic damage, and we generally agree that should be the case.
I’m just asking for a moment why we agree that should be the case, why it seems natural to make sex the subject of intense scrutiny (and therefore to require colleges to stand ready to police it to an extent and with consequences that go beyond any other kind of non-academic activity). I am thinking here about intoxicated sex, by the way, or poor communication sex, not straight-out forcible sex. I also believe that, with or without a “Dear Colleague” letter, colleges would be quick to discipline, and harshly, any student found to have held down another by force and given him a tattoo, or stolen his money, or broken his leg.
Here’s what sparked this. On the one hand, if there were a young woman who was undergoing trauma because she had had sex without her consent, I would be extremely critical of anyone whose response was “Oh, get over it. It’s not such a big deal.” On the other hand, if something like that happened to my daughter or my wife , what I would hope for her – and I think others on this thread have said essentially the same thing – is that she would get over it, and think it was not such a big deal. That it need not affect her life, or have permanent consequences. That she should not lose confidence, or fear anyone, on account of it. I don’t want her to blame herself, and I don’t want her to need to blame anyone else, either, unless she thinks that the person was acting maliciously and is a danger to herself and others.
What I take from this is that, while I appreciate that a sexual offense can be devastating, in the case of the people I love most I don’t think that it has to be devastating or indeed that it ought to be devastating. To a large extent, however, all of this discussion, and the whole Title IX policy, proceeds on the opposite assumption: that it will be devastating and that it presents a unique threat to the community. Clearly, we feel very different about rape than we do about other types of assault or battery, but I’m not certain that the reasons for that are good or healthy ones.
Finally, as a man, I am really hesitant to share these thoughts, and I fully expect to be attacked as an apologist for rape culture. Which I do not mean to be. I would like to get rid of rape culture, but I think quasi-legalistic college sex tribunals are a poor way to do that.
OK, I take the point about the drunken hookup that I agreed to, however drunkenly, at the time. I’d feel worse about a tattoo that I drunkenly agreed to than a drunken sexual encounter that I agreed to. In either case, I’d think it was my own fault for getting drunk and agreeing.
But a drunken tattoo that I never agreed to, even drunkenly, would not be nearly as bad as a drunken sexual encounter that I never agreed to.
870. "I also believe that, with or without a "Dear Colleague" letter, colleges would be quick to discipline, and harshly, any student found to have held down another by force and given him a tattoo, or stolen his money, or broken his leg."
JHS – what you are reacting to isn’t being a rape apologist. But rather the curious winding path by which federal jurisdiction came to be focused on this one particular area while not being focused on many other similar and quite important areas.
Colleges routinely deal with lots of kinds of student misconduct and potential crimes without any federal intervention, jurisdiction or interest. Those same types of misconduct and crime also get routinely handled outside of a college campus environment without any federal help, jurisdiction or interest.
But through some clever lawyering and the hook of title ix and federal funding, the Feds assert jurisdiction and intervene significantly with respect to sexual assault involving college students. But not for other types of crimes and misdeeds committed by college students. And also not for sexual assaults that happen pre-college or post-college (of which there are many). And also sexual assaults that happen to college-age women who don’t attend college (of which there are many). And also not sexual assaults that happen to enrolled college students during the 22 weeks a year that they are not around campus.
Such special intervention has been justified by the view that there’s an extremely high incidence of sex assault on college campuses as compared to the rest of the world. If you think there’s a huge epidemic of campus rape, then the federal intervention would make some sense.
But if you think the data on campus rape is iffy, then it all becomes very puzzling. The Feds intervene to provide special protection to my daughters for just one type of risk they face during just the 120 specific weeks of their lives when they happen to be on-campus as students.
For me the tattoo that I never agreed to would be exponentially worse than a drunken encounter that I never agreed to.
IM (admittedly limited) E, a complicating factor is that young adults don’t typically drink with the intent of loosening their inhibitions re tattoos. But they do (often) drink with the intent that they may let their hair down, so to speak, and do things they wouldn’t have done sober
@JHS I am not sure that I agree with your premise that we “think being sexually violated is especially traumatic.” I think being a victim of any crime is traumatic. I would be equally traumatized if someone broke into my home and stabbed me or if someone kidnapped one of my children. Those things are serious crimes and are treated as such - sexual assault should be no exception. But as other posters have repeatedly pointed out, the problems of proof make it a crime that is extremely hard to prosecute. There is far less accountability with sexual assault. It doesn’t get the benefit of the social deterrent that our criminal justice system effectuates with other crimes.
If you are asking why sexual assault should be the subject of scrutiny/policing by colleges, I would point out that they are also policing a lot of other potential criminal activity through their disciplinary committees. We seem to focus on the sexual assault tribunals here on this forum. My D’s school specifically acknowledges that they handle internally many “incidents that might give rise to civl or criminal liability.” The list of things they can handle internally include illegal possession of drugs, disorderly conduct, assault/battery, vandalism, stalking, theft, unauthorized possession of weapons, copyright infringement and racial/religious harassment. Sexual assault has been added to that long list by mandate of the DOE.
@JHS I am not sure that I fully understand your focusing in on “poor communication sex” or “drunken sex”. Surely sexual assault can happen under both those circumstances. Perhaps your point is that there should be more tolerance for the idea that things can more easily go wrong when alcohol or lack of communication is involved? But if some women are walking away from these encounters believing they were assaulted, then I would think more scrutiny rather than less is in order. Isn’t the whole idea to reduce the incidence of sexual assault on college campuses? Do we excuse or raise the threshold for other crimes because of alcohol or poor communication?
I don’t agree with a lot of what you wrote in your #870. I just don’t think that way of thinking will do anything at all to reduce assaults. I think the policies are an attempt at effectuating a cultural change on college campuses. That can only be a good thing in my mind.
And I don’t think you should feel at all hesitant to share whatever views you have on the matter. I may not agree but certainly there is value in considering opposing points of view.
I was held up years ago ago by five kids in Watts. One had a knife, one had a stick, one had bat. It was pretty scary at the time. And more scary because no one sitting on their porches watching us would call the police and it was long before cell phones. But no I was not traumatized.
That said while I was once in a train compartment with a flasher - I got out of there unharmed - I have never been a victim of a crime where I actually was physically hurt. I can’t pretend to speak for others who were.
I am uncomfortable with the idea of such draconian treatment of some (not all) drunken sex.
“Sexual assault has been added to that long list by mandate of the DOE.”
Schools have always had disciplinary procedures for all kinds of bad student conduct, including sexual misconduct.
But the federal government does not issue policy mandates for most of those items. But it does issue such mandates for campus sexual assault misconduct. But it doesn’t issue such mandates for sexual assault occurring before college, after college, during breaks from college, or to women who don’t enroll in college.
That’s pretty odd, and stems solely from a clever but tenuous extension of title ix.
And it does make you think. Thank you JHS for your series of thoughtful, thought provoking posts.