"It sounds like I raped you!"

http://www.menweb.org/throop/falsereport/daterape/gutmann.html

   "It sounds like I raped you!"

   How date-rape "education" fosters confusion,
   undermines personal responsibility,
   and trivializes sexual violence.

   by Stephanie Gutmann
   from Reason magazine, p. 22-27, July 1990

Copyright by Reason Foundation, 3415 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Suite 400,
Los Angeles, CA 90034. Subscriptions are $19.95 a year (11 issues) in
the U.S.

Judging by the news and entertainment media, the problems of date and
acquaintance rape have reached crisis proportions in recent years. A
search in the database Nexus turns up 54 mentions of date or
acquaintance rape in the New York Times during the past two decades -
nearly half of them in the last year. Television shows such as "A
Different World," "21 Jump Street" and numerous made-for-TV movies
have featured date-rape themes. Oprah, Phil, Geraldo, and Sally have
each taken a crack at the subject.

But although the barrage of media coverage has driven date and
acquaintance rape into the public consciousness, the meaning of these
terms is not at all clear. Hearing the phrase date rape, the average
person probably imagines a scenario something like this: A man and a
woman who have recently met go to dinner and a movie. He takes her
back to her apartment afterward. She is tired and wants to get to
sleep, but he wants to come in for some coffee. She lets him in out of
politeness and sits next to him on the couch as he drinks his coffee.
He overpowers her, pins her to the couch, and rapes her.

The experts whose research and warnings feed the alarming publicity
have quite a different idea of date and acquaintance rape. Their
definition, which goes far beyond both the legal and popular
understandings of rape, would encompass a host of ambiguous situations
that involve neither the use nor threat of violence. Under some
versions of the new definition, a man who whined until his girlfriend
agreed to have sex with him would be guilty of rape.

"Any sexual intercourse without mutual desire is a form of rape,"
writes Dr. Andrea Parrot, a psychiatry professor at Cornell University
who specializes in studying date rape. "Anyone who is psychologically
or physically pressured into sexual contact is as much a victim of
rape as the person who is attacked on the streets."

The training manual for Swarthmore College's Acquaintance Rape
Prevention Workshop states: "Acquaintance rape...spans a spectrum of
incidents and behaviors ranging from crimes legally defined as rape to
verbal harassment and inappropriate innuendo." (Emphasis added.)

A former director of Columbia University's date-rape education program
says: "Every time you have an act of intercourse there must be
explicit consent, and if there 's no explicit consent, then it's rape.
Almost every woman I've ever talked to has had an experience where
she's been in a situation where she's had intercourse where she's not
really been a fully willing participant - I would call that rape.
People don't have the right to use other people's bodies assuming
anything. Stone silence throughout an entire physical encounter with
someone is not explicit consent."

Although largely driven by feminist ideology, this redefinition of
rape casts women as eternal victims undermines personal
responsibility, and trivializes the very idea of sexual violence.
Combined with misleading statistics from weak studies, it fosters
unrealistic fear and distrust. Nowhere are the effects of rape
revisionism more pronounced than on college campuses.

"Colleges work to solve - and stop - a shockingly frequent, often
hidden outrage," the subhead of a Newsweek story announces. "Fear
Makes Women Campus Prisoners," howls a Chicago Tribune article
describing students who, because of the "prevalence of date rape,"
stay in their rooms at night, cringe when classmates make "sexist"
remarks, and keep "themselves out of threatening situations at
parties."

Colleges throughout the country have announced large increases in
reports of rape, usually from female students under 20 and generally
involving friends or acquaintances. Meanwhile, date-rape education
programs run by administrators or students have proliferated like
amoebae in a jar.

Many schools have instituted Rape Awareness Weeks and appointed
special deans to deal with sexual assault. In annual marches to "Take
Back the Night," young women leap up, give frenzied testimony about
their experiences as victims, and entreat members of the audience to
testify as well, so that "others will have the courage to come
forward." Educational videos, pamphlets, training manuals, and posters
teach students about the dangers of date rape.

On a wall of Columbia University's student health service building is
a bright red poster resembling a warning about radioactive material
that announces: "Date Rape is Violence; Not a Difference of Opinion."
A university program trains students for 10 weeks as date-rape
educators and dispatches them to dorms to conduct seminars, video
screenings, and discussion groups. The program is mandatory for all
new fraternity and sorority pledges. At a recent gathering at Barnard
College, an employee of New York City's Task Force Against Sexual
Assault drew a group of young women into a circle and gravely informed
them that "one in five dates end up in assault."

Since last fall, when five female students at Syracuse University
reported being raped by acquaintances, the school has seen the
creation of a student-organized group called SCARE (Students Concerned
About Rape Education), a Rape Awareness Week, a Rape Task Force, plans
for a Rape Education Center, and Speak Out rallies attracting as many
as 200 members of the university community. "The epidemic of rape must
come to an end on this campus," thundered an editorial in the student
newspaper that fall. "This crime is running rampant at Syracuse
University...other [campus issues] pale in comparison to the apparent
crime wave of rape striking all parts of this university."

By at least one measure - reports to campus security and police - all
this alarm is puzzling. At Irvine, for example, campus security
received only one report of rape in 1989 - the year in which 60 rapes
and sexual assaults were reported to the campus women's center.
Columbia University's security department says it has received no
reports of rape in the last five years, although in 1986 Ellen
Doherty, a rape counselor at a hospital near Columbia, told Newsweek
that acquaintance rape is "the single largest problem on college
campuses today."

Those who perceive an acquaintance-rape crisis explain that women,
understandably afraid of callous treatment by campus security and the
police, are more willing to tell their stories to the sympathetic
people at the local women's center. This explanation raises another
issue, however. The people staffing these centers and similar
institutions tend to assume that most acquaintance rapes go unreported
and that, given skepticism in the past, believing the victim is of
utmost importance. Since reporting challenges the system, encourages
others to come forward, and empowers the individual, they consider it
a positive good that should be encouraged.

Hence Parrot, the Cornell date-rape specialist, writes in a 1987
paper: "If the prevention strategies presented in the program are
employed as suggested, participants should be at reduced risk for
acquaintance rape involvement, and the report rate of acquaintance
rape in your community should increase." Increasing the number of
reports is thus an end in itself.

"People respond to numbers," the aforementioned employee of New York's
Task Force Against Sexual Assault told her Barnard charges. The bigger
the numbers, she explained, the bigger the indictment of a society in
which sexual assault is rampant and condoned. Attempts to verify
reports through investigation or clarify them through in-depth
interviews would therefore be counterproductive.

The reliability of report figures is not the only source of doubt
about the alleged rape crisis. The broader statistical foundation for
acquaintance-rape alarm, including the survey data that college
administrators solemnly invoke, is also deeply flawed.

The University of Illinois provides a good example of how flimsy
studies and dubious research conclusions are embraced by the press and
become the basis for campus policy. Once again, the university was
primarily concerned with acquaintance rape. Although the Urbana campus
had been haunted twice in the previous five years by a nonstudent
serial rapist, the school's Rape Awareness and Prevention Committee
had concluded that "the greater risk to women students involv[es]
sexual assault by their male friends, boyfriends, and acquaintances."

Following reports of increases in date rape at other schools, the
University of Illinois created a Campus Task Force on Sexual Assault,
Abuse, and Violence in 1989. The task force attempted to measure the
school's date rape problem with a survey that was mailed to 1,460
women on the 35,000-student campus. It classified 16.4 percent of the
537 students who replied as victims of "criminal sexual assault,"
defined as intercourse with a clearly expressed lack of consent.

Last winter the task force issued a report offering recommendations
based on the survey's evidence that the university environment
"engenders sexual abuse." The report advocated abolishing the school's
intramural, all-female pom-pom squad, "instituting a mandatory human
relations program" for all undergraduates covering "the risk of and
responsibility for sexual misconduct," and adding provisions covering
sexual misconduct to the school's code of behavior. Punishable by
expulsion, sexual misconduct would be defined as intercourse without
the female's knowing consent.

"A person who is intoxicated is incapable of giving knowing
consent...a person who is under any form of coercion (including
physical, psychological, academic, or professional) is not free to
give consent," the report stated. Finally, the task force recommended
"investigating and seeking to eliminate the prevalent philosophies,
cultures and attitudes of fraternities and other organizations that
are built on sexism, lack of respect for women, and that lead to
violence against women."

The task force's recommendations and the results of its survey were
soon picked up by the local press and aired on National Public Radio's
"All Things Considered." The Chicago Tribune's story began with the
pithy factoid, "16.4 percent of female students who responded to a
questionnaire had been raped" - suggesting that this finding was
representative of the entire student population.

The reporter failed to address important shortcomings of the survey.
For example, the sample was self-selected, a significant problem since
the questionnaire was rather lengthy. "If people have never had any
experience with this, they're not going to even bother" with the
survey, says Kalman Kaplan, a psychologist at Wayne State University.

The bias was compounded by the title of the questionnaire, "Survey of
Sexually Stressful Events," which may have predisposed respondents to
view ambiguous situations in a particular light. Kalman adds that it's
not clear what meaning respondents attached to key terms used in the
survey. or example, the survey includes a question asking whether the
parties had been sexually intimate before, but it does not try to
determine what kind of signals would have constituted "resistance" in
the context of the relationship. Even Vice Chancellor Stanley Levy,
who defends the survey, admits that "you have difficulty in
extrapolation" from its findings.

The Chicago Tribune bolstered the University of Illinois study with
figures from another, highly influential poll. The story declared that
women at the university "apparently have good reason" to be scared
because "a nationwide survey...by Mary Koss, a psychiatry professor at
the University of Arizona, found that one in four women reported
having been the victims of rape or attempted rape, usually by
acquaintances."

Koss's numbers, especially the one-in-four figure, are widely cited.
They come from the Ms. Campus Project on Sexual Assault, considered
the most comprehensive study of campus sex crimes. In 1982, using a
$267,500 National Institute of Mental Health grant procured by the
magazine, Koss and a platoon of assistants fanned out across the
country to administer a "Sexual Experiences Survey" to college
students. After three years of data collection and tabulation, Koss
announced her findings: "25 percent of women in college have been the
victims of rape or attempted rape," and "84 percent of these victims
knew their assailants."

Koss went to great lengths to obtain a representative, sufficiently
large sample. Still, there are obvious problems with her study.

Koss obtained her data on the "incidence and prevalence of sexual
aggression" with a 10-item survey featuring questions such as, "Have
you given in to sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because you
were overwhelmed by a man's continual arguments and pressure?" (number
6) and "Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to
because a man threatened or used some degree of physical force
(twisting your arm, holding you down, etc.) to make you?" (number 9).
A positive answer to question 6 or question 7 (which asks whether the
subject has been pressured into sex by someone in a position of
authority) labeled the respondent a victim of sexual coercion. A
positive answer to any of questions 8 through 10 put a respondent in
the rape category.

Question 9 and question 10 (which also refers to the use of force or
threats of violence) seem to fit the conventional picture of rape, but
consider question 8: "Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't
want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?" In the terminology
of psychological testing, this question is considered
"double-barreled": Exactly what it's asking is not clear. For example,
it might be interpreted as asking if the respondent has exchanged sex
for alcohol or drugs. Koss was probably trying to identify respondents
who had been raped while incapacitated. Still, the question's wording
clearly invites respondents to put the blame for an unpleasant or
ambiguous event on alcohol or drugs, mysterious forces over which one
has no control. Another problem with the survey is its leading
quality. In a properly designed survey, important or more meaningful
questions should be interspersed with filler items, Kaplan says, not
grouped together in order of ascending seriousness as Koss did. "If a
person answers yes to the first question you're almost preparing them
to answer yes to a later one," he says "If they came at you with
questions 8, 9, 10 to begin with, you'd probably have fewer positive
responses to those questions."

In general, surveys such as Koss's encourage women to reinterpret
sexual experiences after the fact. University of Chicago psychologist
Catherine Nye notes that 43 percent of the women classified as rape
victims by the Koss study had not realized they'd been raped. "Well, I
think if you don't know you've been raped," Nye says, "then probably
you're talking about a situation which has to be redefined,
reconstructed."

Indeed, Parrot, the Cornell psychiatrist, has said that "only one
[rape] incident in 100 to 150 is reported to police, sometimes because
women don't recognize the sexual assaults as rape. Education is
necessary to sensitize both men and women to what constitutes rape."

And here is the crux of the matter: If you have to convince a woman
that she has been raped, how meaningful is that conclusion? Her
"education" requires her to adopt a different understanding of rape.
Consider how the new definition is applied.

Columbia University uses a scene from the movie She's Gotta Have It to
illustrate the dynamics of date rape: The female protagonist is at
home, depressed after having broken up with her boyfriend. She calls
him and begs him to come see her. Bitter over the fact that she has
been unable to be faithful to him (which he has taken as a rejection),
he at first refuses. She continues to plead, and eventually he relents
- obviously apprehensive about getting sucked into the vortex again
with this seductive but capricious woman.

When he arrives she throws her arms around him and pleads with him to
make love to her. They argue. She tries intermittently to embrace him;
he is furious, shaking her off, but perhaps enjoying the fact that the
role of the needy one in the relationship is now reversed. Finally,
still suffused with bitterness and fury, he pushes her coarsely onto
the bed, and-saying, "You want it; you've got it!" - takes her from
behind, violently and angrily. She whimpers, "What are you doing?" or
some such protestation a couple of times, but she submits - making no
effort to resist - in an exhausted, masochistic way.

It isn't pretty - but it isn't rape.

Not, at least, according to Richard Uviller and Vivian Berger, two
Columbia University law professors. "This is certainly not rape," says
Uviller, a criminal law specialist. "It just seems like seduction to
me." "It certainly doesn't seem like rape to me," agrees Berger, who
has studied rape law extensively. "Under the more technical definition
in New York, it seems to me that she doesn't fear any kind of injury."

In the effort to distinguish between rape and seduction, sex offense
and offensive sex, most rape laws have set the same basic criteria:
There must be an expressed lack of consent and/or coercion by force or
threat of force. In New York, "forcible compulsion" is defined as "to
compel by either the use of physical force or a threat express or
implied which places a person in fear of immediate death or physical
injury to himself, herself, or another person."

Intent is another important ingredient of criminal law. "A man cannot
be guilty of a crime he doesn't know he's committed," Uviller says.

Some legal scholars, however, are building a philosophical base for a
change in the law that would dramatically affect the way judges and
juries are obliged to think about sexual relations. In her 1987 book
Real Rape, Susan Estrich, a law professor at the University of
Southern California and former campaign manager for Michael Dukakis,
discusses the "reasonable woman" standard frequently invoked in
ambiguous rape cases. The judge's view "of a reasonable person is one
who does not scare easily, one who does not feel vulnerable, one who
is not passive, one who fights back, not cries," she writes. "The
reasonable woman...is a man."

Estrich would eliminate the defense that the man charged with rape
honestly believed there was consent. "Consent should be defined so
that no means no," she writes. Women should be "empower[ed] in
potentially consensual situations with the weapon of a rape charge."

But in many sexual encounters, things are not so clear-cut, especially
when the man and woman have deep feelings for each other or have
engaged in sex previously. The picture is further clouded by the
tradition that men should take the sexual initiative, the inclination
of some women to voice resistance in order to avoid appearing "easy,"
and the prevalent belief that saying no is a mere convention, part of
foreplay.

Other legal scholars see dangers in the direction that Estrich
recommends: "We don't want the law to patronize women," Berger wrote,
reviewing Estrich's book in Criminal Justice Ethics. To treat as
victims in a legal sense all of the female victims of life is at some
point to cheapen, not celebrate, the rights to self-determination,
sexual autonomy, and self and societal respect of women."

Legal definitions change as society changes and after sustained
pressure from interest groups. The law is not written in stone, and
sometimes it is wrong. But comparing the legal meaning of rape to the
new definition helps measure the gap between the thinking of the rape
revisionists and community standards, which have slowly shaped our
current laws. Moreover, the comparison demonstrates the difficulty of
estimating how many of the women who are classified as rape victims
based on the meager information provided by surveys would be
considered rape victims under the law.

Legal reform aside, many feminists see value in broader use of the
word rape, even if they don't seriously propose to prosecute anyone on
that basis. "In terms of making men nervous or worried that they might
be overstepping their bounds, I don't think that's a bad thing,"
Parrot says. "Our culture has given men permission to ignore womens'
wishes, to disregard appropriate responses to sexual interactions."

Leaving aside the question of whether such an approach is fair to men,
what effect does the redefinition of rape have on women? In addition
to generating inappropriate alarm, it encourages young women to
isolate troubling and ambivalent feelings in a cell called rape-far
away from honest examination. The story of "Jane," a student at a
prestigious Midwest em university, is illustrative.

Jane and a girlfriend have been pressuring their dean of students "to
do something about date rape on campus." Action is needed, Jane says,
because the "experience has affected people close in my life and I've
seen what it's done to them. All of it could be prevented if people
knew what they could do about it and really believed that it was
wrong." Jane eventually agreed to talk about what she described as her
own experience of date rape.

She had been living upstairs from a young man in a co-ed dorm for
about six months. They talked often, hung out in each other's rooms,
had pet names for each other, propped each other up during stressful
times, and occasionally necked. One night just before spring break,
the boy called Jane and asked if he could come up. Jane had just gone
to bed, but she reluctantly agreed because she knew her friend had
been feeling bad lately and wasn't looking forward to going home on
break.

When he came in she could tell that he was very drunk. Then, she says,
he "was all over" her. She squirmed in protest and said "c'mon...no,"
but he didn't seem to listen. She didn't scream or push him off, or,
as she puts it, "have this big fit."

She's not sure why. "Partly it didn't really seem necessary - I
thought, 'Well, he's my friend....I guess whatever happens, it's not
going to be that bad.' I was afraid of making him mad. I was just,
'Well, let's keep the situation under control.' ... I wasn't aware of
the problem then or really what was happening....After it had
happened, I thought, 'OK, I didn't want that, but it's not that bad
'cause he's a friend of mine' - you know, no big deal."

Jane went home for spring break and didn't think about the incident.
Then, two weeks into the next term, she saw a presentation on date
rape. She says she started realizing, "Oh my God, that's what happened
to me!"

Jane and the boy eventually talked about that evening (their
relationship had been awkward and strained ever since), but she didn't
use the word rape - instead telling him, "I didn't want that; that was
wrong." He filled in the blanks, she says. "God! It sounds like I
raped you," he eventually stammered.

"He was totally speechless," she recalls. "He stared straight ahead
for so long. He said, 'Oh my God, I can't believe I did this. I can't
believe I hurt you. Don't hate me.'" He said he'd misinterpreted her
squirming, thinking that she wanted to do it because that's what he
wanted to believe.

"Looking back on it now," she says, "that's such an interesting thing:
Date rape is such a real thing. It's not something made up because the
media tells you it happens; it's not something you create. It's
something that really is and really affects you without your knowing
it."

Catherine Nye says she and her colleagues at the University of
Chicago's student counseling service see many "Janes" - young women
who are essentially troubled about sex, unclear in their own minds
about what they want, and sometimes guilty about sexual desires - who
lately have begun to use the term date rape to describe their sexual
experiences. She laments the psychological effect of such evasion.

"It's so much more useful to deal with these things before they've
gotten put in this box of date rape, because then...it's not all stuck
over on this guy who did this bad thing to me," she says. "If they say
'date raped,' they don't have to think about their own behavior; they
don't have to think about their feelings. There's no complicity,
there's no responsibility, and that's the nonfeminist piece of it as
far as I am concerned."

An almost Victorian denial of complicity - of woman's emotional stake
in the sexual relationship - is a big feature of the date-rape oeuvre.
Man is entirely predatory; woman is entirely passive, a hapless
victim, there by accident. Nye, asked by students to conduct a
workshop on date rape, recently reviewed much of the training material
available from Cornell and Swarthmore. "There was stuff in there that
made my skin crawl," she says. "This training manual said things like,
'Don't let down your guard until you know a man really well-if at
all.' I mean, talk about The Other!"

Man as "The Other" makes an appearance on the cover of Parrot's 1988
book Coping with Date Rape and Acquaintance Rape. The illustration
portrays a couple on a date. The male figure is drawn as a devil, with
horns, a Van Dyke beard, and a pitchfork tail pointing upward
lasciviously. A leering, evil gleam in his eye, he stares slaveringly
at the woman. She is blonde, with eyes cast demurely downward, almost
closed.

The figures of the Machiavellian, predatory, demonic male and the
innocent, asexual, passive, vulnerable female appear again in Parrot's
description of a date:

"First, a rapist engages in intimate behaviors which make a female
feel uncomfortable (for instance, by putting his hand on her thigh, or
kissing her in a public place after knowing her for only a short
time). This is common in party and bar situations when the music is so
loud that the couple must be very close to each other to hear. In such
situations it is not possible to maintain a comfortable distance from
others.

"If the victim does not clearly object, the rapist proceeds to the
second stage, in which he desensitizes the victim to the intrusion by
escalating the behavior (moving his hand to her buttocks, for
example). She may feel increasingly uneasy as a result of this
behavior, and suggest going outside for fresh air" hoping that she can
create physical distance from him. Unless she actually tells him that
she is uncomfortable with his 'roaming hands,' he may misinterpret her
suggestion as meaning she wants to be alone with him. The third stage
occurs when they are in an isolated place (such as outside, in his
apartment, in his car, etc.) and the rapist insists on intercourse."

Clearly, this situation is one in which more assertiveness on the
woman's part could make a crucial difference. But date rape rhetoric
and literature, Nye says, is often implicitly about "defining yourself
as a victim and blaming the men, as opposed to saying we have a
responsibility to take control here and to improve communication."

As Nye's experience indicates, this message appeals strongly to many
young women. In the wake of the sexual revolution - in our brave new
world of co-ed living, dorm condom dispensers, and hip health -
service gynecologists who smile sunnily while asking their young
clients if they've had any rough sex or group sex recently -
college-age women may be trying to put some limits back on sexual
behavior.

In an earlier era, there were various socially supported ways to say
no, as well as all kinds of controls - segregated dorms, dorm mothers,
curfew laws, in loco parentis policies in general - to give women
greater room for delay and reflection. Women also had a perfectly
respectable pretext for avoiding the complications of sex - "I might
get pregnant" - that has been largely eliminated by readily available
birth control.

Perhaps young women are looking for an "out" acceptable in the new
campus environment, where sexual openness and enthusiasm are de
rigeur.

Given feminism's reigning orthodoxies, it's more acceptable to say
that men are monsters, or that sex is fraught with potential violence
to women, than to say, "I don't feel like it right now."

More fundamentally, the new definition of rape gives women a simple
way of thinking about sex that externalizes guilt, remorse, or
conflict. Bad or confused feelings after sex become someone else's
fault. A sexual encounter is transformed into a one-way event in which
the woman has no stake, no interest, and no active role. Assuming the
status of victim is in many ways an easy answer - but not one
befitting supposedly liberated women.

Stephanie Gutmann is a recent graduate of the Columbia School of
Journalism.

From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Derek Rose)