I like Camille Paglia a lot in no small part because the world clearly has no idea what to do with her. I mean, just look at the intro she gets to this piece for Time: Paglia is the author of Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars. I mean, that’s true, she did write that book, but it has nothing to do with who she is, what she thinks, or why so many people find her fascinating (or infuriating). Anyway, here’s her take on sex crimes on collage campuses: “Young women today do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.”
She calls the warning cries about levels of sexual violence on college campuses “wildly overblown” and–in direct contradiction of conventional wisdom from all the experts–declares that it really is forcible rape by strangers that should be every woman’s concern. She writes:
Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.
I’d be inclined to write her off as being a bit over-confident in her own anecdotal experiences over hard facts if it were for the fact that I also recently read an NRO piece on the same topic: The Rape Epidemic Is a Fiction:
Much of the scholarly literature estimates that the actual rate is more like a tenth of that one-in-five rate, 2.16 percent, or 21.6 per 1,000 to use the conventional formulation. But that number is problematic, too, as are most of the numbers related to sexual assault, as the National Institute of Justice, the DoJ’s research arm, documents. For example, two surveys conducted practically in tandem produced victimization rates of 0.16 percent and 1.7 percent, respectively – i.e., the latter estimate was eleven times the former. The NIJ blames defective wording on survey questions.
So the numbers are really in dispute after all, and Paglia may have some legitimate backup. Setting that contention aside for a moment, however, I think there’s no real arguing with these paragraphs from her piece:
Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.
Too many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.
And that dark vision of human nature and the reality we inhabit really explains Paglia’s appeal to conservatives despite her radical left-wing politics. I can’t resist quoting just a bit more:
Current educational codes, tracking liberal-Left, are perpetuating illusions about sex and gender. The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind.
The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.
You should just read the whole post. It is, like so much of what she writes, well worth the time.
Speaking from my own experience as well as too many anecdotes other women have shared with me, I flatly don’t buy that we should only be concerned with forcible rape (with drugs or weapons) and the rest is about mixed signals. I’ve had two situations in my life where I gave quite clear signals and some asshole ignored them and blamed alcohol later, and I know a *lot* of women who’ve had the same, including situations where no alcohol (or drugs or weapons) were involved.
I also think there’s a lot of work we could to do help even when it comes to genuine mixed signals, and not just in the sense of blaming “young middleclass women” coming from “comfortable, overprotected homes.” (As an aside, poor and minority women and LGBT people are more likely to experience sexual assault than others, so not sure how that fits in with this dismissive, condescending nonsense.) I agree that there *are* situations that genuinely involve mixed signals, and I think efforts to teach people, particularly men, what a sexual situation can be like from the women’s POV can help to resolve at least some portion of that. I know many men I consider not total sociopathic assholes who have done what I would consider sexually questionable things and genuinely didn’t realize how intimidatingly they can come off without meaning to be. I’ve seen some such really change their outlook because of these conversations about consent and assault, and I am fine with campuses leading the way in discussing what consent constitutes.
The quotes I read from Paglia just sounded like the kind of dismissive victim-blaming crap that makes women like the younger version of me and the multiple friends and family members I know *not* want to tell anyone about our terrible experiences, lest you think we’re just naive middleclass idiots that expected the rest of the world to be as comfortable as our parents’ houses.
What a disappointing piece, Nathaniel.
Monica-
That’s not what Paglia said. There’s a very, very big difference between ” the majority of campus incidents” (what Paglia wrote) and all non-violent incidents, as you characterized it. In fact, a very important raised by Paglia and by the stats from the NRO piece come down to the incredible variance in trying to figure the prevalence of rape out. We’re talking multiple orders of magnitude difference in various studies. I don’t think anyone can reasonably express confidence that they know the real numbers in the result of such contradictory information. Because of this uncertainty, I think arguing about exactly the right numbers largely misses the point (both of Paglia’s piece and of the real issue.)
I find this especially surprising, given the absolutely awful track record that colleges have in dealing with very serious sexual crimes. So right off the bat there’s a huge practical issue that we all know about: they’d rather sweep crimes under the rug vs. take a hit to their reputation or (worse still) mire their sports stars in scandal. If anything, I expected a positive reaction to this comment from Paglia, since I’ve seen similar calls that campuses go straight to the police instead of trying to handle the matter in some kind of quasi-bureaucratic procedure. To do so is a tacit admission on the part of college campuses that sexual assaults aren’t a real crimes, because real crimes get reported to real police officers. Not administrators.
There are so many problems with this assertion.
First, Paglia isn’t being nearly as judgmental as you accuse her of being. It might seem insulting to have someone talk in condescending ways about girls who are unprepared because of lives spent in a middle-class bubble, but that’s not an assignment of blame. Unless you think that people should be held responsible for they way their parents raised them? In any other context, we would understand that blame is ruled out in this discussion. So where is the judgmentalism coming from? Not from Paglia, who certainly has not earned the adjective “dismissive” that you ascribe to her.
Furthermore, responsibility is always connected–at least potentially–to blame. There is a risk that in putting our victim-blaming sensors on a hair-trigger we’re infantalizing the people we’re supposed to be assisting. To completely, proactively, and universally absolve from blame is in a real sense a kind of dehumanizing act. At a minimum, there’s a real risk of fear of victim blaming leading to more victims.
It’s also worth pointing out that Paglia talks about “imprudence on both sides.” It’s clear that the model she has in mind is to empower men and women to each take responsibility for their actions. The kind of education you talk about is perfectly compatible with this motivation. There’s no reason not to teach men more about how their actions can come across and to educate women with a much more realistic view of human nature.
I think the fundamental problem in this–as in many reactions to the kind of logic Paglia is asserting–is that the critics fail to fully appreciate the different paradigm they are confronting. Even if you disagree with Paglia (I do, on lots of things), to dismiss her sincere, thoughtful, and feminist perspective as “crap” of any kind is a huge mistake.
If one of Paglia’s major points is that we can’t really know the numbers, then I’m not sure on what authority she can say the majority of campus assaults are about mixed signals.
“Too many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.”
What I actually read here is “Too many women who experience assault experienced it because they don’t take responsibility for being vigilant and self-defensive. Maybe if they weren’t raised in such overprotected homes they’d understand the world and be safer.”
You call it matter-of-fact observation, I call it victim-blaming, and I’m telling you how it comes off to me and, I can almost guarantee, to many other women who have experienced sexual assault.
And it’s not just that the quote sounds like victim-blaming. It’s also that the quote misses the mark in *so many* cases of non-drug/weapon sexual assault. It doesn’t account for the many non-middleclass women who experience a higher rate of sexual assault than the women Paglia describes. It doesn’t account for women like me, who were not raised in overprotective homes by any stretch. It doesn’t account for women who were plenty self-defensive and it didn’t matter. And why is she even talking about “urban streets”? We’re talking about campus assaults, correct? If we’re specifically not discussing stranger-with-drugs-or-weapons-rape and instead focusing on drunken clubs or parties, do you really think that’s that different from bored students in rural and suburban high school environments?
“I find this especially surprising, given the absolutely awful track record that colleges have in dealing with very serious sexual crimes.”
I said I’m fine with campuses leading the way in discussing what consent constitutes. I didn’t say I want them to lead the way in deciding whether a crime has been committed
“real crimes get reported to real police officers. Not administrators.”
Yes, ideally. But notice your use of passive voice here? Who is reporting the crime? What should a campus person do if someone comes to them with a crime but that person is afraid to go to the police?
I’ve seen that happen just in the last year or so, and ultimately the victim only agreed to inform an administrator just so he could “be aware” of the problem with this particular student, but the victim refused to take it any further and insisted the administrator tell no one as well. The asshole who assaulted her was pretty popular in her program and she was new, and she was afraid if she made it official (that is, if she reported it to authorities) it would both go nowhere *and* people in the program would despise her for it. Obviously this is a crap situation, and I’d much rather she had gone to the police (I tried to get her to but to no avail). But I think telling the administrator was still better than nothing at all, and I expect that kind of situation comes up a lot.
The reality is that many victims don’t go to *anyone at all* and those who do speak up are often much more hesitant to talk to a police officer than to some other person. I expect there are a lot of people who would be more willing to first talk to someone on campus before they’d consider talking to the police, lest they seem “dramatic.” Of course, if they think they’ll just be seen as overprotected, naive women who don’t take personal responsibility for themselves, they probably won’t talk to anyone. But assuming they don’t read Paglia columns, if they are willing to talk to a campus person first, I’m fine with pushing campuses to take that role seriously and at least try to facilitate getting students to the authorities.
Besides that, the campus-related efforts I’ve seen aren’t just about dealing with assaults after they happen, but are also about promoting the education on consent that you and I seem to agree would be helpful either way. Frankly I think it’d be better to have that kind of education earlier, like in high school sex ed classes, but any increased efforts to talk about it are good by my book.
The Internet ate my first reply (yesterday) because she is a cruel and harsh mistress. I will try again. Maybe it will even be shorter this time. (There’s always hope.)
I don’t know that that was one of Paglia’s main points. It was one of my main points in posting what I posted. There’s enough variance in the data–and with a lot of it skewed towards numbers that are very, very low relative to what we often hear–that I thought it was reasonable to hear her perspective.
I am uncomfortable with the way many arguments tend to be dismissed these days not because of any defect they possess, but because of how they might be perceived. There is, of course, some room for this consideration. When you’re thinking about the most effective way to get your argument, you should consider how it will be perceived. And you shouldn’t be totally immune to the feelings you might hurt if your argument will open old wounds.
That being said, however, I think that we’ve already gone much to far (as a society) in that direction, to the point where it’s almost second-nature to entirely skip over any interaction with an argument and jump straight to dismissing it based on how it might make people feel. That’s an ominous pattern.
I didn’t quote the entire paragraph, but the reply really goes to all of it: Paglia doesn’t talk about a lot of issues because her post wasn’t written as a definitive argument about all sex assault that happens everywhere. She was writing about the majority of non-violent sexual assault (not all sexual assault, and not even all non-violent sexual assault) that occurs on college campuses (not anywhere else). Everyone has to pick a scope for an argument. That’s the scope she picked for hers.
The problem you cite is very real, very important, and very complex. But your conclusion–that it’s definitely good to involve administration–doesn’t follow. Your basic argument (stop me if I got this wrong) is that since some women won’t go to the cops, it’s better to have an alternative that is better than just doing nothing at all. There’s a definite upside there, yes. But what about the downside? What about the women who might have gone to the cops but who, with this new opportunity, choose not to do so? To the extent that this results in a lack of prosecution (and therefore an ongoing threat to more women), this isn’t an improvement.
And there’s also a colossal conflict of interest issue. The more these kinds of systems are formalized, the more they risk becoming a method of protecting the institution rather than protecting the victims. If a cop was accused of sexually assaulting someone, would you be satisfied to have their partner head up the investigation? No, you’d want an independent inquiry, at least some kind of internal affairs unit and hopefully a completely separate institution (like the state police or the FBI). Same basic issue here: when the institution’s reputation is at risk (or a star football player, lets say) there’s a huge opportunity for victim advocacy to turn into institutional self-preservation.
In short: I’m absolutely not willing to accept the notion that just because some women are unwilling to go to the cops (which is true, and which is a problem) that the solution of handing over jurisdiction for sex crimes to the university is necessarily an improvement.
The ironic thing is that, when you get right down to it, Paglia’s entire argument is essentially an argument for better education. The difference between you and her appears to be primarily about what should be on the curriculum.
Paglia–writing here and also elsewhere–consistently attacks the liberal view that if something is wrong in society the answer is a top-down implementation of a new policy to erase the aberration leading to the social ill. This might seem abstract, but it’s got concrete, real-world implications. I won’t go into all of them, but some of the most relevant are the fact that this view of why things go wrong admits only a very narrow range of solutions. It emphasizes structural programs and education, and only structural programs and education. I’m not saying they never work. I’m saying that when we confront social evils, we shouldn’t limit our possible reactions for ideological reasons before we even begin. Which, in a nutshell, is why Paglia’s voice is so important.
It’s really the last paragraphs of her piece that are the most vital. And the rest of what she wrote only makes sense in that context. Those are also the most ideological, not coincidentally, and so the least likely to provoke really productive conversation.
All this surface-level debate about the right policy to enact or how to interpret her policy recommendations or the data in question are just expressions of deeply conflicting world-views. That’s where the real conflict lies.
I think we have two different focuses here. If I’m reading this right, your main interest is in the liberal vs conservative views, not just with sexual assault but in general, and you agree with Paglia speaking up about that. My main interest is in her tone and general approach both toward people who care about rape culture and campus assault and toward rape victims. Those two interests intersect somewhat but they are different focuses.
I agree that generally liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different views, and liberals tend to be idealistic to the point of nonsensical. (Recall the “War is not the answer” poem I wrote in response to that exact knee-jerk mentality.)
I also agree that assault is better handled by law enforcement than college campuses, as far as investigating and persecuting (or not persecuting) anyone. But I think it’s important for college campuses to have resources available to people who reach out to them, and I think it’s also important for college campuses to have student codes of conduct and conversations about what consent means. I see those efforts happening and I approve of them, and I reject the idea that in order to support college campus efforts in those areas, I somehow have to agree that law enforcement should be right out. I doubt there are many people who think that way. It’s a false dichotomy.
The other false dichotomy – and I think this is much more ridiculous – is Paglia’s suggestion that focusing on campus assault somehow means people aren’t worried about or don’t care about felonious rape and abduction. Where on *earth* does she get that assertion? If anything, the majority of the time I try to have conversations about sexual assault, people react skeptically if the assault *isn’t* felonious rape (drugs/weapons); they’re not sure if it really “counts” as assault.
I really see no evidence that society isn’t taking felonious rape seriously, and quite the opposite – that we still contrast all other discussions of sexual coercion with felonious rape, holding felonious rape as the most serious form of sexual assault. Paglia seems to be trying to pit concern about campus assault against concern about felonious rape and abduction, and I find her really grasping. It’s like she needs to make up a reason to tell people to stop making such a big deal about campus assault.
And this gets back to my focus: I thought perhaps reading only the excerpts from Paglia in your blog post was giving me the wrong impression of her overall article. But reading the whole article actually just made me angrier. I’m reading a post where the author dismisses discussions of rape culture as “hysterical propaganda” and concerns about campus sexual assault as “wildly overblown,” where she blames most campus sexual assault on “mixed signals” and focuses on women not taking personal responsibility, and then I’m supposed to think I’m reading from someone who takes sexual assault seriously? To me, the piece reads more about being eager to deride liberals (and to a lesser extent conservatives) for not taking evil seriously than it reads as true interest or concern about sexual assault in general. It reads as if Paglia herself thinks that if it’s not felonious rape, it’s just a bunch of hysteria and people should stop freaking out.
And no, she doesn’t say the majority of non-violent assaults are about mixed signals. She says the majority of sexual assaults on campus are about mixed signals. She doesn’t break down non-violent assaults into subsets; she only talks about felonious rape versus her mixed signals version. You suggest I’m too harsh in my reading of her, but I think you’re way too generous.
She talks about the overprotected, middleclass, not-taking-responsibility women in between paragraphs about colleges sticking to academics and current educational codes. Her placement of that paragraph, as I read it, means she’s not talking about the women who get abducted and raped at weapon’s end. She’s talking about the women who are assaulted because of “mixed signals.” Those are the women she says should take more personal responsibility—the ones dealing with “mixed signals” and “imprudence on both ends.”
If it’s imprudence on *both* ends, why does she only talk about overprotected, ignorant women and not careless, eager-to-get-laid men? Can you see how this comes off as the same old trope? It’s not that “mixed signals” and “imprudence on both ends” = we should teach men that only enthusiastic affirmation is enough to have sex with someone. “Mixed signals” and “imprudence on both ends” = women should take more personal responsibility. Her post reads like men are divided into either the sociopathic sexual stalker or…*crickets*. Zero discussion of the non-socioopathic men participating in the mixed signals and imprudence, but she doesn’t miss her matter-of-fact observations about how women should do better to not get assaulted—and probably shouldn’t use the word “assaulted” since it’s wildly overblown. God.
Paglia also totally strawmans. I don’t know many liberals (do you?) that think assault shouldn’t be reported to police. I don’t know many liberals that think literally “all men” can be altered to not assault. The idea, as I understand it, is that many men (and women) can be better educated, not that all people everywhere will be good.
And I completely disagree with you when you say her piece reads as a call for more education, unless we define “education” as only discussing the savage nature of humanity and why women should dress more modestly. I can’t buy that the same author who readily dismisses rape culture and the seriousness of non-felonious-rape assault really cares about making sure people understand that it’s possible to assault someone without drugs or weapons and that, when that happens, it’s the fault of the attacker and not the overprotected chick who didn’t take personal responsibility.
Finally:
“I am uncomfortable with the way many arguments tend to be dismissed these days not because of any defect they possess, but because of how they might be perceived.”
Well first of all, I think there are plenty of defects in her arguments, as I’ve tried to explain here and in previous comments. But secondly, your observation isn’t a “these days” thing – it’s human nature to be more likely to dismiss or accept an argument based on how it makes the listener feel. It’s not rational, but it’s true. Rather than complain that people are irrational, I think it’s more helpful to figure out how to present an argument the way people are most likely to receive it. And Paglia clearly isn’t even trying, and you quoting her and then telling me or others how to hear her doesn’t work either. If Paglia (or you) want people who didn’t already agree with you to consider the viewpoint, it might help to not start with a piece that makes (at least me) feel as if I’m being called hysterical for caring about rape culture or careless for using the phrase “sexual assault” to describe situations on college campuses.
But it’s more than that. I think it’s especially important to think about how an argument will be perceived specifically when talking about rape and sexual assault. Apparently you run in circles where you have the impression that society has gone much too far in not saying things because of how it will sound, but, if so, then we are living in different worlds. I talk about sexual assault with people often, and the reactions I frequently see show little understanding or concern for how people will hear them, to the point of being downright asinine.
Every time I have a conversation about sexual assault, I imagine how it would sound to a survivor. And I think we *should* imagine it that way, because it’s very likely that survivors are listening to any given public conversation about sexual assault. I don’t think that means we should censor what we think; I think it means we should care about conveying our same ideas with particular sensitivity, both out of kindness and to try to fight what I see as an incredibly deep problem of survivors refusing to discuss or admit their experiences.
So I agree that it’s important to empower people to be aware of the risks around them and what they can do to minimize risk. But, particularly in cases of sexual assault, I think how we convey those ideas requires sensitivity. If you wouldn’t convey your idea a certain way to a survivor’s face, then don’t write it that way for a Times article either. Find a better way to say it. And, frankly, I would never talk to a woman who was sexually assaulted on campus the way Paglia talks about them in her article.
I’m not dismissing Paglia because I can’t handle the harsh truths she’s dishing out. I’m dismissing her because I think she’s *wrong* about campus sexual assault, and then, as a bonus, because I think she comes off as a real jerk.