Time For Another Links Post

• The case of Katie Hill bothers me at multiple levels, not least because I largely think whatever people decide to do with their genitals in their private lives is their own affair. Yes, it was gross that her vengeful ex-husband leaked photos. Yes, it violated House ethics rules for her to sleep with an underling — but is that reasonable? Is the presumption now that all consensual sex between subordinates and supervisors is intrinsically unfair and coercive? I find myself agreeing, in part, with Jessica Valenti’s assessment of the situation (she was taken down by “revenge porn”), but this is the #MeToo world Valenti and her compatriots designed. Arguably, Hill created a #MeToo victim in the staffer, and those are the stakes here. For Valenti, women can only ever be victims, which says a great deal about her thought processes.
• Remember when Wired didn’t suck? It has to have been 20 years ago or more. The only reason I can think of for them to write this disingenuous, lazy piece, “Trans Athletes Are Posting Victories and Shaking Up Sports“ is to garner hate-clicks:

  Transgender athletes are having a moment. At all levels of sport, they’re stepping onto the podium and into the headlines. New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard won two gold medals at the Pacific Games, and college senior CeCé Telfer became the NCAA Division II national champion in the 400-meter run. Another senior, June Eastwood, has been instrumental to her cross-country team’s success. At the high school level, Terry Miller won the girls’ 200-meter dash at Connecticut’s state open championship track meet.
  
  These recent performances are inherently praiseworthy—shining examples of what humans can accomplish with training and effort. But as more transgender athletes rise to the top of their fields, some vocal opponents are also expressing outrage at what they see as transgender athletes ruining sports for cisgendered girls and women.

  “Training”, I suppose, which equals “going through male puberty and then simply declaring yourself to be female”. The question of motive inevitably arises, and while, yes, it’s easy to impute the urge for easy podium places and trophies as the primary draw of this cheating approach, it also is irrelevant. (CeCe Telfer particularly strikes me as mercenary enough to be in this class.) Biological males are stronger than women, on average and especially at the right side of the bell curve. This is not hard. Bending over backwards to cater to the delusional, narcissistic, and even sociopathic is absolute nonsense.
• Deadspin was at its best when pursuing stories other sports media wouldn’t touch. I seem to recall they were unafraid of the Joe Paterno fall to earth caused by his covering for Jerry Sandusky and the latter’s buggering of young boys, and they likewise went after Ray Rice (though that story broke on TMZ Sports). Now comes the news that editor Barry Petchesky has been fired amid a “stick to sports” edict from new owners G/O Media (the second rebranding since they were spun off the old Gawker Media in bankruptcy court). I have a hard time mustering much concern for him and those who quit in sympathy, mainly because a site that feels it meet to give airtime to a grown-ass woman rape-shaming her pre-sexual son has not only lost its way, it has gone insane.
• A free press is only interesting to people who work in it if they can get paid, apparently, so former Time editor Richard Stengel is penning stupid op-eds in the Washington Post claiming we need to gut the First Amendment, because, reasons.
• Emma Sulkowicz is now fun at parties because, libertarian, or something. Protip: apologize to Paul Nungesser, then I might believe some of this stuff is anything other than a stunt to get your name back in the news.
• First Circuit Court of Appeals to John Doe in Doe v. Boston College, scheduled for argument next week: sorry, Jeanne Suk Gearson, your attorney whom you have paid for many weeks if not months of preparation, may not defend you in court, because, reasons. This is the court putting its finger on the scales of justice, and if I were a betting man, I would put money that this is a politicized punishment.

"Is There A Smarter Way To Deal With Sexual Assault On Campus?" Asks The New Yorker

A steaming heap of dogma from Jia Tolentino, who had the incredible gall necessary to write that

Seven years ago, the Office of Civil Rights, under President Obama, issued a “Dear Colleague” letter, reasserting that sexual violence on campus was a violation of Title IX, and pushing universities to handle sexual-assault cases in a timely, transparent, accuser-friendly manner.

Two out of three ain't bad? Then there's the friendly interview with serial liar Emma Sulkowicz that conveniently omits the fact that Sulkowicz filed her report months after the alleged incident, or Cathy Young's embarrassing revelations of Sulkowicz's friendly text messages in the wake of the purported "assault". The two principles of the study at the center of the piece, Jennifer Hirsch and Suzanne Goldberg, meet at a conference and resolve to conduct an "enthnography". It sounds really important! Except, of course, what they mean is, "unverified stories".

They call the ensuing project SHIFT, whose clumsy retronym stands for "Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation". Already we know we are among advocates who know what they want to find and do. They're smarter! They've got Ideas!

... Hirsch and Mellins think about sexual assault socio-ecologically: as a matter of how people act within a particular environment. They are doggedly optimistic that there is, if not a single fix, a series of new solutions.

But, rape is hard to prove! Can we expand it?

Today, the D.O.J. defines sexual assault as unwanted sexual contact, which means that groping counts, as does attempted assault. The crime hinges on intention, and there are often no witnesses, which makes it uniquely difficult to adjudicate in any legal system, let alone one made up of college administrators. Campus judiciary systems don’t have a criminal court’s investigative powers or evidentiary procedures, but they do have many of a criminal court’s responsibilities. To complicate matters further, everyone involved in the process—accuser, accused, administrator—essentially works under the same roof. Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Secretary of Education, has called the current approach a “failed system,” and said that she would seek to replace it.

"It might seem simpler to let the criminal-justice system handle things," Tolentino intones, "but universities have a responsibility to insure that women have equal access to education." Pesky due process! (But wait, aren't women already a majority of students enrolled in college?) And then there's all those juicy staff positions:

Columbia now has twenty-three staffers with Title IX responsibilities, including case managers, investigators, and administrators, and provides free legal services to accusers and accused. The school’s gender-based misconduct policy is thirty-one pages long.

Somebody has to hire all those Womyn's Studies majors, not to mention attorneys who skipped class on the day they taught rape in crim law. It's a good thing, because in the end, Hirsh likens the situation to that with drunk driving; included in the "solutions" for that problem are

new laws, and social change, as school and community programs taught people to designate a driver and to intervene when a wobbly friend grabbed his car keys. It also involved changes to the physical environment: cities established police checkpoints, and offenders were required to install Breathalyzer locks on their cars. Citizens lobbied for better street lights, more speed bumps.

 What possible analog exists for these among sexual assault? Chastity belts? Whatever it might be, there's no doubt that some idiot will propose it, and it will rush through the legislatures in California, Illinois, and New York with hosannas. At last! Sexual assault has been cured! Meanwhile, young men will find themselves spied upon and spat upon for no reason other than owning a penis. Misbehavior or even missed communications on a date will result in unpardonable ejection. That is, the answer to the title question is "no".

NOW, Emma Sulkowicz, And Modern Feminism

I have said elsewhere that combating the smaller voices in the culture war amounts to a losing proposition. So what are we to make of the National Organization of Women handing the vile narcissist Emma Sulkowicz its "Woman of Courage" award? This, apparently, was the same organization that wailed on Dean Nicole Eramo earlier this year for having the temerity to question the anonymous "Jackie's" hyperbolic story of gang rape that later unraveled under, you know, actual investigation. The politics of modern feminism, or at least in the dungheap that it has become, are about symbolism, perpetual victimhood, and a studied refusal to grapple with inconvenient yet glaringly obvious facts. In Sulkowicz' case, those facts would include damning (and seductive) texts after the alleged "rape" that make it clear she wanted a relationship with him (which he later rejected). What possible "courage" could attach to this award? Sticking to her idiotic and risibly false story despite having been found a fraud?

NOW's problems with the real world may stem from its age. Having lately turned 50, NOW opened shop in the age of sit-ins and complaint:

Betty Friedan, the Feminine Mystique author famous for leading the group, called for every woman to focus her work on what made her angry, recalls Muriel Fox, now 88, one of the group’s founders and its publicist.

“Everyone there knew that she wanted to work on what made her mad,” says Fox, now 88. “That’s the reason the movement was so successful. We had wonderful leaders, but we had thousands of people who all were leaders working on what made them angry about the situation at that time.”

Apparently, irrational rage is the only thing that matters anymore. NOW's irrelevance is, it seems likely, one genesis of the declining number of people willing to adopt the label "feminist". Whatever that label stands for, surely justice isn't part of it.

Susan Brownmiller's Refreshing Views On Rape Prevention

Susan Brownmiller long ago wrote Against Our Will, a largely fact-free jeremiad that has since informed modern feminism's belief in rape as a political tool. That this is true only in distant lands populated principally by itinerant goat herders has not much changed the canon; if anything, it's gotten shriller and even more untethered from reality. Yet, despite her book's foundational status, Brownmiller seems to have views on rape that diverge wildly from modern feminist orthodoxy. Uncovered in a recent interview in New York magazine, they come as an utter shock to anyone aware of her earlier work. She recoils from developments in the theory she originated (emboldening in Brownmiller's responses are due to me):

I was wondering if you have been following the discussions of rape activism on college campuses.
Yes, very closely. In the 1970s we had an extraordinary movement against sexual assault in this country and changed the laws. They [the campus activists] don't seem to know that. They think they are the first people to discover rape, and the problem of consent, and they are not.

They have been tremendously influenced by the idea that "You can drink as much as you want because you are the equal of a guy," and it is not true. They don't accept the fact there are predators out there, and that all women have to take special precautions. They think they can drink as much as men, which is crazy because they can't drink as much as men. I find the position "Don't blame us, we're survivors" to be appalling.

Also, they [college women] are not the chief targets of rapists. Young women and all women in housing projects and ghettos are still in far greater danger than college girls.

Holy smoke, did you hear that? Men and women are different! Yikes! And the last, at least,  comports with empirical Bureau of Justice Statistics data showing young women off campus are much more likely to be raped than college students. And then, this:

And my feeling about young women trapped in sex situations that they don’t want is: "Didn’t you see the warning signs? Who do you expect to do your fighting for you?" It is a little late, after you are both undressed, to say "I don’t want this."

Interviewer Katie Van Syckle makes a weak attempt at a late save:

I guess the hope is that young men would respect [a naked woman in bed telling them "no"].
That would be nice. There is not much attention on them is there?

Predictably, Amanda Marcotte tars her with the epithet "former feminist hero". Break out the popcorn:

There's a real irony here, because our cultural allergy to focusing on men who actually rape also prevents us from having a productive conversation: one that should be had with both men and women—ideally starting when they are boys and girls—about why rapists rape. We would talk about how our culture valorizes male domination. How some men learn to feel big by putting women down. How both men and women often stand aside and let some men express toxic views about women without being challenged.

 This is, of course, the purest bullshit, because she's been one of the principle drivers pushing for an expansion of rape away from coercive sex. That is to say, while she presumably cares about men who actually rape, she's also eager to inflate the charge to include regetted and even imaginary sexual encounters, despite her own denials. Whether it's the Rolling Stone hoax set at the University of Virginia or Emma Sulkowicz's sordid lies ("rape apologists", LOL), she's only ever prepared to believe the "victim", even if the accuser has but a fleeting grasp of reality. To force everyone else to adopt the correct, guilt-stricken pose, she plans on "having a productive conversation", which we assume starts young and is indistinguishable from harangue.

She goes on to discuss the Steubenville rape case, which is rather atypical for her because it has actual perpetrators, clear evidence (along with video confessions), and a real victim.

If you want to see the cause, you have to look at the culture around the assault: the guys who made a video laughing about it, the spreading of the images, the unwillingness of anyone to interfere, the congratulations for domineering, abusive behavior. That is why assault happens, not because some girls drink too much. We need to help young people, both men and women, spot predatory behavior for what it is, and to push against it instead of laughing it off.

But having that conversation requires talking with and about men. As the Brownmiller interview shows, even for feminists, policing women and talking about their choices is just a lot easier to do. It's comfortable, like an old nightgown (one that hopefully doesn't show off too much thigh!). We've tried the woman-policing route for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years now. It's time to switch it up and start focusing on male choices instead.

 A number points worth mentioning here:

1. The sort of "culture" she describes derives from a number of poor choices by men. This is an ancient problem, and one that appears to have no ready solution, despite it being of obvious import. No OECD country has a per-capita rape rate of zero, though they vary quite a bit. This suggests the "just teach men not to rape" silver bullet beloved of modern feminists has been tried everywhere and found wanting. While she doesn't come out and say it, that's the only solution she appears to know.
2. I suppose we should be grateful she wants to talk to men at all.
3. The large majority of men do not, in fact rape. So her "don't rape" message there will do no good. In fact, it is liable to result in the opposite: contempt. This will likely have negative consequences in the jury box.
4. For the minority that does commit rape due to some combination of hormones, alcohol, drugs, poor impulse control, and misplaced or nonexistent empathy, this message will fall on deaf ears.

Because she does not understand male behavior and its underlying driving factors, she cannot reasonably prescribe preventative courses of action. (Indeed, it's unclear that there is much that can be done, outside of women taking defensive measures.) It has nothing to do with idiotic "men are taught to" nonsense, and everything to do with male nature. This is, of course, no excuse for rape, but modern feminists seem utterly incapable of distinguishing advice to minimize exposure to potential rapists from victim-blaming. That Marcotte savages the iconic Brownmiller for suggesting otherwise signals just how unhinged from reality she and her fellow third-wave sisters have become.

The Star Chamber Jurist Resigns

I've seen this Inside Higher Ed piece by Lee Burdette Williams a couple places on Twitter (via @Instapundit, for one), and people seem to be mostly focusing on Williams' turn away from Title IX and its perversion into a sort of all-purpose stockade with which to shame and expel young men from college. Her concluding graf contains the words

When I realized I didn’t want to be Dean of Sexual Assault, I decided to step away from a profession and identity I had treasured. When it became clear to me that being Dean of All Students was no longer possible without the constant threat of litigation, media coverage and Internet trolls, I thought it best to be dean of none.

Good for her, I guess; but a few paragraphs above, she writes

...[O]ur work is the subject of bloggers and activists who are so driven by agendas that they cannot consider an alternative viewpoint. Our efforts to serve our campuses are being pushed aside by the cottage industry of “consultants” and lawyers who prey on the fear of presidents and boards, worried that their institution will be the next one featured in The New York Times.

Did we need to be challenged about sexual assault response? Yes, and we were, and we worked hard to improve.

There's several important points here that need emphasis.

1. It is not possible to use the bludgeon of the state to equitably resolve dating disputes. There used to be a principle in law, decreasingly adhered to nowadays, called de minimis non curat lex, i.e. the law does not concern itself with trifles. Yet feminist advocates consistently attempt to do so through inflation of all such matters into rape, particularly retroactively. (Emma Sulkowicz is a prime example, filing her report with the university months after the incident in which she claims she was raped.)
2. The author does not realize she has been inserted into a no-win situation. That is to say, confronted with a Hobson's choice scenario, she fails to recognize it as such and ultimately leaves the game. That's certainly a positive step, but it's also the reaction of a dull-witted bureaucrat. By defending her own role in "sexual assault response", she lays a trap for herself from which she cannot escape.
3. She objects to even the idea of public scrutiny. Read, for example, her remarks about what she conceives her job to be:

   Our work goes on behind closed doors where the hearts of students are laid bare and need to be repaired, or in campus forums where our students get to question our decisions and we can defend them, or change them. These things happen in the context of community, and that is what provides meaning and validity. That is how change, and improvement, occur.

   In other words, she and her cohorts should be able to do whatever they think their jobs are in total secrecy, or in settings in which she is shielded from consequences! (How much ability to change policy do students actually have, the "community" of which she speaks?) In this administrator-as-mommy view, is there any accountability? What value does she actually bring to the students, male and female, she supposedly works for?

State bureaucracies encourage timorousness, empire building, and, above all, secrecy. I appreciate her leaving her post because she felt demonized by the feminist mob needing a target for their pitchforks, but the reality is that same secrecy she lauds also delivered unto us the "Dear Colleague" letter. Process matters. It's clear she doesn't understand why.

Thanks, @Nero: A Review Of Emma Sulkowicz's Sex Tape

Twitter firebrand @Nero (aka Milo Yiannopoulos) does us all the favor of reviewing Emma Sulkowicz's strange porn video:

It’s telling, I think, that in Sulkowicz’s purported college dorm room there are no books. She has the same lack of interest in aesthetics as she does in intellectual enrichment: both in her choice of sexual partner (apparently satisfactory member notwithstanding) and the grim, bare walls with which she surrounds herself. Though I expect the austerity of her room reflects her barren emotional interior really rather well.

You can tell “dad bods” are in fashion because both of the people in this video have one. But you do at least have to give an actress credit for doing nude scenes with a man who has larger breasts than she does. Sulkowicz’s size queendom apparently extends to love handles and leave the viewer sympathetic to the travails of her infamous mattress.

It’s revealing of her vanity that she insists on being filmed from four angles. Every crevasse of her unappealing naked body must be considered. Her congressional interlocutor is a gruesome sight in three dimensions, chosen, probably, to make young Emma look thinner. Which doesn’t work, I’m sorry to say.

All in all, it’s a tawdry, miserable encounter that tells us nothing about sexual assault or sex itself but quite a bit about the quasi-demonic inner workings of one Emma Sulkowicz.

Ouch. Hilarious, but ouch.

Emma Sulkowicz' Sex Tape

Word came out yesterday that Emma Sulkowicz, in what can only be described as an insane monomanical disregard of Paul Nungesser's lawsuit against her (oops, see below), has issued a sex video in which she is raped, with this introductory text:

Trigger Warning: The following text contains allusions to rape. Everything that takes place in the following video is consensual but may resemble rape. It is not a reenactment but may seem like one. If at any point you are triggered or upset, please proceed with caution and/or exit this website. However, I do not mean to be prescriptive, for many people find pleasure in feeling upset.

Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol is not about one night in August, 2012. It’s about your decisions, starting now. It’s only a reenactment if you disregard my words. It’s about you, not him.

Do not watch this video if your motives would upset me, my desires are unclear to you, or my nuances are indecipherable.

You might be wondering why I’ve made myself this vulnerable. Look—I want to change the world, and that begins with you, seeing yourself. If you watch this video without my consent, then I hope you reflect on your reasons for objectifying me and participating in my rape, for, in that case, you were the one who couldn’t resist the urge to make Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol about what you wanted to make it about: rape.

Please, don’t participate in my rape. Watch kindly.

A special thank you to everyone who made Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol possible, especially my actor (*********), my director (Ted Lawson), and those I love who have guided and supported me.

Her repeated tapdancing around what she is or isn't saying would be despicable enough; perhaps she wishes to be named in Nungesser's lawsuit against Columbia (PDF). Robby Soave at Reason points us at Megan McArdle's depressing piece in Bloomberg View, wherein she writes that she doesn't find Nungesser's complaints against the university compelling:

Columbia didn't railroad him because he's a man; the university actually found him not guilty. Nor does Columbia have the power to force Sulkowicz to stop telling the world that he's a rapist. Perhaps the university shouldn't be giving her course credit for doing so, but this seems a pretty thin reed upon which to hang a lawsuit. The rest of the complaints are even thinner, for example, that President Bollinger issued some mealy-mouthed platitudes about how distressing this all is and that the university covered some of the cleanup costs for an anti-rape rally in which his case was prominently featured.

Nungesser is not the first man to sue his college over unequal treatment of men in the campus system of adjudicating sexual offenses. I've read some of the complaints, and they are wounded, outraged litanies of arbitrary treatment by a system that is opaque and far from accountable. But the cases I've looked at generally end up getting dismissed (including a recent one against Columbia), because even if all the facts were true as stated, they didn't add up to proof that these men were treated differently specifically because of their gender. Due process complaints like this one against Michigan are probably a more fruitful avenue, but that's not available against private schools.

Which is why I think his whole strategy is flawed to start with; the real meat here is the due-process-free Title IX procedure, not the relative treatment of men vs. women in its maw.

Emma Sulkowicz, BA, Mattress Studies

Despite initial reports that Columbia University would deny Emma "Mattress Girl" Sulkowicz use of her iconic art project at commencement ceremonies, they let her anyway (or at least made no effort to stop her). This appears to have been a terrible move for Columbia, who is under lawsuit by Paul Nungesser, and this strengthens his hand. Meanwhile, president Lee Bollinger snubbed her during the ceremonies.

Cathy Young in Reason documents the collapse of yet another set of charges against Nungesser, this of a male student. She characterizes the charges thusly:

If Nungesser is innocent, it is entirely plausible that Sulkowicz and Natalie, who met at a party and discussed their history with him shortly before they filed charges, may have genuinely goaded each other into the conviction that he abused them (or, as Sulkowicz put it to Jezebel, "Together, we [came] to a better understanding of our shared trauma"). It is also entirely plausible that Josie and Adam either reinterpreted their past encounters with him, or even fabricated stories in the sincere belief that they were helping eject a rapist from the house and supporting his victims. The problem is not female "wickedness"; it is a campus culture that fetishizes trauma and turns "survivorship" into a cult.

Nungesser's family issued a statement in the wake of this circus:

At graduation, Columbia University again broke its own rules and afforded Emma Sulkowicz a special exception. It was the second devastating experience in just a few days: Last week, Columbia exhibited Emma Sulkowicz's highly disturbing and extremely graphic drawings of our son publicly on campus.

We have come to realize that at Columbia, not all are equal before its policy. What is the point of internal investigations if their outcome is not accepted? Instead those with better connections and more influence promoted a false narrative. While they failed at their goal of bullying our son into leaving this university, they have turned his life into a nightmare.

Responsible for this nightmare is not just the woman, who received an academic degree for the attempt to shame Paul away from campus, but even more at fault is the University that conferred this degree. A university that bows to a public witch-hunt no longer deserves to be called a place of enlightenment, of intellectual and academic freedom. By failing to intervene in this injustice, Columbia ceases to be a place where critical thinking, courage and democratic practice are taught, learned and lived.

Here's hoping they receive something like satisfaction in the courts.

Columbia "Scramble" Band Waylays Emma Sulkowicz, Title IX

This. Is. Genius (h/t @DestinTrueheart):

The band also made light of a recent protest by a Columbia anti-sexual assault group, No Red Tape, during which the words “Columbia Protects Rapists” was projected onto the university’s Low Library when prospective students were visiting the school.

“An army of high school creepers is now thinking, ‘Yes, I will go to Columbia after all,’” the band’s “poet laureate,” Mikhail Klimentov, a junior, said.

Ms. Matlow noted that No Red Tape itself had mocked artwork as an inadequate option for fulfilling the sexual respect requirement.

“Unless it involves a mattress,” she added, a reference to Emma Sulkowicz, a Columbia senior who, as part of her visual arts thesis, has carried a mattress with her everywhere she has gone on campus to protest the university’s handling of her claim that a fellow student raped her in her dorm room. The line drew a few boos, and then some cheers.

One art critic was not so amused!

Ms. Sulkowicz, who figured in several other jokes about her status as a poster child for sexual assault on campus, did not attend Orgo Night. But she said in an interview that she was hurt and disappointed in the band.

“I guess they don’t really know anything about how a survivor would feel, to get totally made fun of in front of the entire school,” she said.

Seriously.

Friday Link Dump

• Paul Nungesser Sues Columbia: It had to happen eventually. Good luck, Paul.
• Emma Sulkowicz thinks it's unfair to demand scientific proof of rape. This series of tweets is astonishing:

  So "Mattress Girl" held a talk at Brown University that was live tweeted, I will let her quotes speak for themselves pic.twitter.com/sLVWeQcVts
  — Yeyo (@facerealitynow) April 24, 2015

• Joe Biden thinks sexual assault should be punished like a crime, so why isn't it? Another retreat into the motte.
• Is there a feminist version of the Turing Test? Because I bet Everyday Feminism would pass it.
• Frat boy, go home: Actual aid in reducing rape apparently unwanted if it comes from fraternities, in the North Carolinian hellscape where it is presumably rife. (Per DOE statistics, 17 cases of forcible rape at Appalachian State University in the years 2011-2013 over a female student population of 9,788, for a victimization rate of .2%, and an annual victimization rate of .08%. Other campuses bearing that name appear to be satellites and all report zero.)
• Students in North Dakota now have the right to an attorney during Title IX proceedings. "North Carolina and Arkansas are the only two other states with laws that allow some kind of legal representation during campus hearings."
• Funeral strippers: on their way to being banned in China.

Know Your IX And Their Orwellian "Fair Process"

Know Your IX, an activist website dedicated to the elimination of due process in campus rape cases, on Wednesday published an open letter to university presidents on their Orwellian "fair process". This requires not a little deconstructing.

April 15, 2015

To University Presidents:

We, advocacy groups run by and fighting for student survivors of gender-based violence, write to you about the importance of fair process in university disciplinary systems.

By starting with the loaded word "survivors", they have already established their victimhood cred. No one needs to investigate this, no one needs to consider the prospect whether such charges are true; they just are, axiomatically.

That this is the opposite of "fair" should be immediately transparent.

We come to this issue out of concern for all student victims who have been betrayed and overlooked by their universities,

Like "Jackie"? Like Emma Sulkowicz?

deprived of the chance to learn and thrive by administrative inaction in the face of assault, harassment, and abuse. Our movement has made great strides in the last few years, but there is much more work to be done. Across the country, colleges and universities still fail to support survivors and take meaningful action against students who harm their classmates and communities.

I.e., have not been expelled from universities even despite rigged and secret mediations. How else do they explain Paul Nungesser?

We recognize that, now that schools have finally turned their attention to violence on campus, we are collectively tasked with answering the hard questions about how disciplinary procedures should work, given the particular challenges and opportunities of the campus context. And, we know first hand, the success of these procedures will depend on their fairness to all parties involved.

Their understanding of "fair" is, shall we say, slightly compromised? Because, how does one reconcile "fair" with the actions of their signatories, No Red Tape and Carry That Weight, who recently engaged in the puerile stunt of projecting the words "Columbia Protects Rapists" on a campus building, long after Sulkowicz had been exposed as a fraud? Which "rapists", particularly, were being "protected" by Columbia?

We are dedicated to ensuring fair process for four primary reasons:

First, many of the same procedures criticized by accused students hurt victims as well.

I would love to hear examples of this. That they may be criticized for exactly the opposite reasons as sexual assault advocates — i.e. a total lack of transparency, inability to retain legal counsel during proceedings, and lowered standards of proof for what is in fact a criminal felony— tells me the lack of examples here are rather noteworthy for their delusional failure to grapple with the situation as a whole.

Second, the authorities to which student victims turn for support in the wake of violence will only be effective if they are perceived as even-handed and legitimate by all.

And as Ms. Sulkowicz has already demonstrated, if the authorities reject those claims upon investigation, then what?  "Perceived" apparently isn't even enough; the only person for whom those perceptions matter, in this telling, is the accuser. Moreover, the secret nature of the proceedings means two things, both inimical to actual justice:

1. Actual injustices will remain hidden from the light of day. Imagine a world in which Emma Sulkowicz's claims were true, and Columbia had ignored her. We have no way to establish specific failures of law or evidence because the cases are sealed from public inspection.
2. Fraudulent charges cannot be aired to clear the name of the accused for exactly the same reason.

So "even-handed and legitimate" cannot apply to secret tribunals.

Third, we understand our fight as part of a broader struggle for equality in education, and worry that barebones procedural protections leave room for discrimination, including on the basis of race and class, in investigation and sanctioning.

I would think more of these claims if they, you know, were actually willing to expose the results of these procedures to the light of day. Throwing a spurious "because, racism!" charge in the middle of this makes me think this letter is more about sounding the right, politically correct notes than actually engaging in any meaningful search for justice — especially when making it easier to convict will inevitably result in more minorities getting convicted, because that's just the way it works. At best, this graf is naïve; at worst, it is hypocritical, delusional, and even monstrous.

Fourth, as students whose educational opportunities have been imperiled and limited by violence, we understand too well the harm of unjust deprivations of the right to learn.

You mean like the law school whiners who can't handle learning rape law?  Just wondering how expansive their definition of "imperiled and limited by violence" really was.

There is no conflict between, on the one hand, our recognition that student victims of violence continue to face unconscionable barriers and administrative indifference, and, on the other, our conviction that schools must provide procedural protections for all students.

The insistence upon the soundly rebutted "one in four" figure on their "Basics" page establishes the authors as serial liars. (When even Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a liberal senator in a liberal state, is obliged to remove such calumny from her own website, it's a Sign.) It's a tipoff that an inflated sense of what constitutes "rape" and "violence" informed by hysterical moral panic that has only a tenuous connection to reality.

Some who advocate for accused students’ rights have done so at the cost of truth and justice, confusing student discipline for criminal law and perpetuating a myth that universities now favor alleged victims over respondents — a myth we affirmatively reject.

Does it really bear repeating that Title IX tribunals punish too much the innocent man wrongly convicted, while leaving the guilty one free to engage in predations elsewhere? What kind of perverse sense of justice countenances that? And why is it a "myth" that secret tribunals favor complainants over the rights of the accused? As the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management wrote last year,

We hate even more that in a lot of these cases, the campus is holding the male accountable in spite of the evidence – or the lack thereof – because they think they are supposed to, and that doing so is what [the Office of Civil Rights] wants.

This is entirely consistent with the approach KYIX favors, namely, that every person complaining is a "victim" and a "survivor". Moreover, "Jackie" and Sulkowicz are not rare; NCHERM mentions "complainants who genuinely believe they have been assaulted, despite overwhelming proof that it did not happen."

We can and must value procedural protections for both parties without losing sight of the mistreatment of campus survivors, and the very long way we have to go to achieve equity on campus.

The use of the loaded word "survivors" implies accusers are in fact victims before any investigation whatsoever. This betrays exactly the kind of biased, brainless approach used by the Red Queen: sentence first. The "procedural protections" here represent their total absence, pretty words that mean nothing.

Unlike some critics, we recognize that replicating criminal procedures and unequal evidentiary burdens on campus is not only unnecessary but dangerously counterproductive and contrary to Title IX’s commitment to equality in education.

I.e. there's no point in having actual trials if we already know the outcome.

And we want to be clear: We do not espouse an ideology of mandatory forgiveness, in which victims, most often women, are expected to “move on” and sacrifice their own healing for their abusers’ convenience and comfort.

Right, so someone like Emma Sulkowicz can indefinitely go on and slander a man who has not, in fact, raped her? Because she's a "victim", a priori? So organizations like No Red Tape and Carry That Weight can persist in slandering a university president (and all their Title IX administrators involved in sexual assault adjudication) with no apparent basis?

For the four reasons stated above, we call for colleges and universities to ensure procedural rights for both parties, the accused and the accusing student. Many of these rights are already afforded by the Department of Education. Procedural rights should include:

• The right to timely and clear notice of the allegations, parties’ rights and responsibilities (under both school policy and law), procedural updates, and the final determination
• The right to review all materials used in the investigation and hearing with adequate time to consider and respond
• The right to guidance from a trained advocate
• The right to submit evidence and recommend witnesses and questions for the other party to decision-makers
• The right to be heard by neutral decision-makers with professional expertise
• The right to a safe and sensitive investigation and hearing
• The right not to self-incriminate if criminal charges are possible or pending
• The right to an explanation for the final decision
• The right to fair and proportionate sanctions
• The right to internal administrative appeal

I notice here that there is no procedural right to discovery by the accused, nor a right to confrontation of the accuser, nor a right to public proceedings, nor a right to representation by the accused. But more importantly than any of this is the fact that under Title IX the university is policeman, judge and jury. We separate these functions in criminal law for the good reason that allowing one entity to determine guilt is to concede a host of evils and abuse. This is of no interest to KYIX because they insist that "Title IX is about civil rights, not criminal justice" on the grounds that, among other things, "they may fear skepticism and abuse from police, prosecutors, or juries". Which is to say, to achieve their ends, they simply must dispense with rules of evidence that interfere with their witch hunts, and the shortest path thenceward is declaring the matter a civil matter, rather than a criminal case.

Student survivors of gender-based violence still face unconscionable barriers to safe educations.

I.e. they can't yet just expel arbitrary male students upon the vexatious and unsubstantiated accusation of any woman.

Those who assault, abuse, and harass deserve to face sanctions.

What does Ms. Sulkowicz deserve by this standard? What about all the signatories to this letter, many of whom have abetted her behavior?

(Hyperlinks in the text below added by myself for reference and convenience. They did not appear in the original letter.)

For the integrity and well-being of our communities, including those harmed, our systems of investigation, deliberation, and sanctioning must proceed with meaningful protections for all involved.

Sincerely,

Know Your IX
Carry That Weight
No Red Tape
Our Harvard Can Do Better
CalArts Sexual Respect Task Force
7,000 in Solidarity: A Campaign Against Sexual Assault
Phoenix Survivors Alliance at the University of Chicago

---

As of the time of writing, 57 lawsuits now pend over the risible "student discipline" which is supposed to stand in place of actual rape criminal proceedings. One of those appears to have been dismissed Wednesday, but the John Doe plaintiff will appeal.  Here, I am uncharacteristically an optimist. Not all of these suits will fail. More, one gets the sense that KYIX's open letter takes place upon a background of increasing awareness of the actual dangers of Title IX to innocent men. As the NCHERM letter (PDF) attests (emboldening mine),

We fear for the mental health issues impacting many students, but in particular for those whose reality contact issues manifest in sexual situations they can’t handle and campuses can’t remedy. We hate even more that another victim-blaming trope – victim mental health – continues to have legs, but how do you not question the reality contact where case-after-case involves sincere victims who believe something has happened to them that evidence shows absolutely did not? How do campus and community mental health resources help someone who is suffering from real trauma resulting from an unreal episode?

What Camille Paglia rightly called the "tyrannical surveillance of students' social lives" cannot continue. These policies harm too many, amid utter indifference to evidence and facts on the part of those advancing them. It is the hallmark of totalitarians.

Update: FIRE, who really should be on the legal section of my sidebar, also has a long-form response.

Saturday Link Dump, Mostly Sexual Assault/Due Process Edition

More links for your Saturday enjoyment:

• Added to the sidebar in a new section on legal matters: Community Of The Wrongly Accused, opening with a piece on the University of Illinois' remarkable discovery that it's much easier on the accuser if no hearing at all takes place:
  

  The University of Illinois is taking college sex hearings to the next level in order to protect rape victims. The school is "moving toward an investigation process that may not require a hearing so an assault victim doesn't have to testify in front of a large committee."
  
  Finally! A school with the courage to cut through the bullshit! This ingenious plan will spare rape victims the indignity of having impartial adjudicators consider their accusations with an open mind. It will also spare schools the bother of introducing evidence to actually prove the young rapists are guilty. And it will spare the young rapists the bother of putting on a defense to avoid a life-altering expulsion.

  I'm sure that this won't result in more lawsuits against the University...
• A bit of good news from Scott Greenfield's Simple Justice blog comes in the news that Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has taken down a sentence repeating the false-but-frequently-cited 1-in-5 rape victimization statistic. You may recall that Gillibrand was pleased to have the liar Emma Sulkowicz as her guest at the presidential State of the Union address in January. Sit down, Emma, you've had your fifteen minutes.
• Leslie Loftis at The Federalist makes the case that Phi Kappa Psi has a good case for libel against Rolling Stone. There's a lot there, but the big takeaway seem to be that Phi Psi is suing mainly for honor, not monetary damages, which are capped at a very low $350,000 under Virginia law. I really hope they open a suit in New York, which does not offer such protections.
• Here's another roundup of campus rapes that were less than they seemed, including several I've previously written about in this space, if only in passing (h/t @Anneeliz1).
• And finally, another piece of good news from Mr. Greenfield: a woman refuses to act like a victim when discussing a (female!) law professor inadvertently pasting a porn site link into a mass email to her students.
  

  It may be that Tabo is still being a bit overly forgiving, in that it might not matter whether “he meant to do it,” as intent is a courtesy no longer in favor.  As I recently quipped on the twitters, “there’s a reason why they call it ‘mens’ rea.”  This was immediately misunderstood and seized upon as demonstrable proof of the patriarchy, rather than a joke.
  
  And that’s where Tabo’s refusal to condemn others, even though she has long enough blond hair to justify it, betrays her failure to appreciate her victimhood.  Does she not get it?  Is she a disgrace to her gender, a traitor to the cause?
  
  Or does Tamara Tabo just have a sense of humor, an appreciation of irony, an ability to laugh off a theoretical harm done by mistake, by dumb chance, rather than leap up to the podium and demand that we burn the witch?

What Investigative Reporting Of Rape Looks Like

This isn't perfect — Rasheed Sulaimon's refusal to go on record is pretty damning against him, as is the anonymous nature of the accusers for their case (although in the circumstances, understandable) — but it's a big step forward compared to the hysterical and airy Rolling Stone story, or Emma Sulkowicz's empty slander.

Jessica Valenti's Wall Of Delusion

It's true that lunatics seek power, and power tends to draw in lunatics, so I found myself not too surprised that Jessica Valenti chirpily dismisses any damage her preferred due-process-lite proceedings might do to men.

No one wants to see innocent people accused of horrible crimes, but there is a distinct lack of evidence that young men on college campuses – even the ones who have raped women – are suffering any harm due to the increased focus on ending rape.

When I first read this sentence, I turned about fifteen shades of purple; hasn't she heard of the Phi Kappa Psi house vandalized in the wake of Sabrina Rubin Erdely's journalistic malpractice? Or of Paul Nungesser (whom, conveniently, she does not name at all)? Why, of course, but Emma Sulkowicz (whose name she misspells) is the real "victim". "How did the system fail him, exactly?" she asks, coyly. Meanwhile, Sulkowicz continued to lug that mattress around after he was found not responsible, publicly slandering Nungesser, and more ominously, even getting face time with a United States Senator because of her supposed victimhood. I presume Valenti has never been in trouble with the law, and yet it's pretty clear she never attempted to hear Nungesser's side of things. Indeed, she calls anyone with an interest in determining the verity of charges a rape "truther", as though false charges could never occur.

But after I got over my initial fury, it occurred to me that in one sense, she is right, because of a peculiarity in Title IX law: the proceedings are secret, not public, which means even if she wanted to find such falsely accused men, she would have a terrible hard time of it. The public courts are another matter, of course, and there she could have found 58 cases against universities filed by men (many of them John Does) claiming injury under the system. Valenti's refusal to do any research whatsoever is a testament to her utter lack of concern for men; they simply don't matter in her universe. False accusations can't and don't happen, and if they do, they are consequence-free for the accuser.

This veil will come off shortly, I expect; such a flood of lawsuits will eventually yield one against Title IX itself and its expansive, unconstitutional overreach. Valenti's delusion that there are no men injured by her secret tribunals bereft of due process proceedings can last only as long as they stay secret.

Rape Charges, Now With Secret Evidence

Jezebel has its heart on the "always believe rape victims" bandwagon, of course, which is to say, actual investigation of charges is right out. Anyone paying attention during the University of Virginia/Rolling Stone fracas got to watch in slow motion as the Washington Post wiped the smirk off their faces upon digging through Sabrina Rubin Erdely's hyperbolic and false tale. So it's no surprise to read that same snark in their piece today willfully refusing to accept any contradicting evidence in the Emma Sulkowicz rape charges introduced by Cathy Young's fine article appearing in The Daily Beast. Author Erin Gloria Ryan's claim that "There is not, by these students' accounts, much ambiguity in their experiences with Nungesser" couldn't be more wrong; the evidence Cathy Young uncovered of friendly Facebook interactions days afterwards and the length of time between the purported rape and its report to authorities make for a pretty open-and-shut case against Sulkowicz's version of events. Ryan also goes so far as to purposefully misquote Christina Hoff Sommers as saying "rape isn't real"; whether intended as a summary or not, it's the sort of red-meat hyperbole that exposes the author as endorsing kangaroo courts and conviction upon mere charges, i.e. lynch mob justice.

There it would have stayed, except for the "context" she provided Jezebel:

So, Paul's comment that "this room is a mess, I mean there is no chance I'll be moving tonight. but would have been nice to see you" she reads as "Paul guilt-trips me for not helping him".

What?

So, here he asks her to bring "some peepz" to a party, which she reads as "girls" — and agrees to do so! What kind of deranged lunatic would expose other women to someone she personally knew to be a rapist? The answer is pretty obvious: she didn't consider him a threat.

And so, back to the final insult I want to discuss here, the exchange between Young and Sulkowicz, in which Young tried to get Sulkowicz to verify the conversations as authentic. Sulkowicz responded:

If I gave you the post 8/27 screenshots plus annotations, would you still publish snippets of the earlier conversations in your article? If you publish even a snippet of the earlier conversations without context, it will be out of context, and thus misleading.

I just want to understand one thing. You wrote, "unless of course they contain material that violates the privacy of a third party, which would have to be redacted." Do you just mean that you would have to redact their names? You are unwilling to violate the privacy of a third party, yet you are willing to violate mine? If you are only publishing conversations that you have both parties' consent to publish, I do not give you my consent to publish any of what he has sent you.

Lastly, about your deadline. If I don't get this to you by tonight, you are just going to go ahead and publish what you have? I may need more than a day to complete this. This is not easy work for me. How dare you put a deadline on the moment at which you violate my privacy and carve out my private life in order to gain publicity for your website. I think that is despicable.

What in fact is despicable — the most despicable thing — is the idea that any exculpatory evidence whatsoever constitutes a violation of privacy on the part of someone who is making very public accusations of a felony. Sorry, but you don't get that. What Sulkowicz is really demanding here is the right to do exactly what Brett Bellmore claimed in discussions of proposed rape criminal law changes: reduce the standard for conviction to mere allegation.

Update 2/7/2015: Cathy Young has a Twitlonger update on the only question I have heard raised by the Jezebel piece that makes even the slightest bit of sense, and that is, why is it that Nungesser now has three accusers?

Sulkowicz comes to feel that she was coerced into anal sex by Nungesser. When she talks to his ex, "Natalie," and concludes that Natalie's experiences with Paul were abusive, this conversation reinforces them both in the belief that their sexual experiences with Nungesser were non-consensual. (Perhaps not coincidentally, this was all happening in spring 2013, just around the time of the Steubenville trial, when there was a huge upsurge of "rape culture" rhetoric, especially on college campuses.) However, Sulkowicz decides to embellish her account with violent details (choking and hitting) because she has heard that rape survivors often have a hard time securing a conviction unless they report a violent attack.

She goes on to speculate (because university proceedings are under seal) that both "Josie" and the anonymous male student file complaints on the grounds of arriving at a warped sort of justice. 

Followups On The Emma Sulkowicz Rape Story

A pair of stories today that follow up on the Emma Sulkowicz rape story at Columbia university. Sulkowicz, you may recall, was allegedly raped by one Paul Nungesser; in protest of the university's response, she started hauling a mattress around the school with her. Cathy Young, who continues to do yeoman's work (or is that yeowoman's work?) on this topic, wrote of the ensuing coverage that

The tone was set by a piece in the online publication Mic by feminist blogger Julie Zeilinger deploring “the narrative of the ‘perfect victim,’ in which female survivors’ stories are evaluated in terms of gender stereotypes such as those related to idealized virginal purity and simplified fallacies about uniquely felt and lived experiences, like the identity of a rapist and the nature of the relationship survivors have with them.”

Actually, the only fallacies here are Zeilinger’s, since her critique has nothing to do with the questions raised by the Daily Beast article. As far as I know, no one has ever suggested that Sulkowicz’s lack of “purity,” or the fact that she had previously slept with Nungesser twice without being in a romantic relationship, makes her a “bad victim.” It’s what happened after, not before, the alleged rape that matters.

Sulkowicz "exchange[d] chatty, flirty messages with" Nungesser after the alleged incident, which is hardly in keeping with someone brutally, anally raped only a few days before. If anything, Young is entirely too kind to Sulkowicz, of whom she says "there is certainly not enough evidence to brand her a false accuser". Charlotte Allen's take is much more aligned to my own thinking:

Now, I actually feel sorry for UVA’s Jackie. She was a delusional young girl who got herself in over her head and was exploited by an ideologically driven writer who had her own agenda. I don’t feel sorry at all for Emma Sulkowicz. She got her reward hobnobbing with Gillibrand and Obama. I hope she’ll have a good time with that memory.

It will, of course, make no difference to those whose first cry is "believe", e.g. this exchange, but what such advocates miss is they are poisoning the well for others.

Restoring Rational Rape Law Won't Be Easy: Sen. Gillibrand's Disturbing Guest

In case anyone thought it might be easy to restore rationality to rape law — or as it is more broadly defined, sexual assault law — on campus and elsewhere, the events of the last 24 hours have shown exactly the kind of fight we're up against. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) invited Emma Sulkowicz to the State of the Union address yesterday. Sulkowicz carried a mattress around Columbia University as an "art installation" in protest of the university's inaction following her accusations of rape by Paul Nungesser. That Nungesser was subsequently cleared of all wrongdoing by the university (and the police apparently found nothing worthy of investigation) makes no nevermind:

Nungesser maintains that he is innocent and says that is why he has never been disciplined or charged. "Sulkowicz’s accusation is untrue and unfounded: I have never sexually assaulted anyone. This is why Columbia University after seven months of detailed investigation in November 2013 found me to be not responsible." He claims that the NYPD decided not to bring charges after Sulkowicz filed a police report in May 2014. "I voluntarily let myself be interviewed by DA chief of Sex Crimes at SVU in New York City, in August 2014," he said. "Shortly after this interview, the DA’s office informed me that they decided not to pursue the case further."

That someone with as much clout as a United States Senator should be not only willing to be seen in public with such an individual, but invite that person to a significant formal political event is very telling, and deeply troubling. Many such individuals undoubtedly litter the various bureaucracies that run the college-industrial complex. The itch to water down due process is similarly strong (see how badly eroded Fourth Amendment protections are, to name just one decision, by Smith v. Maryland). The "message" is more important than what Sulkowicz has actually done, i.e. smear a man's reputation. We deal here with religious zealots.