Some part of most rape stories is at least a little bit of titillation: you're invited to think about the victim in some sanitized, porny scenario of your own imagining.
For real? I don't have a visual imagination and I do have a higher-than-average level of experience talking to people about their rape stories, and I've never had a response anywhere near that at all.
My first response to this was along the lines of "what a desperate and broken person." Thinking about it a bit and reading the responses of thoughtful people made me more sympathetic to her but I still have twinges of thinking this was an exceptionally bad idea.
I was trying to decode that URL without recognizing the French. Cecine St. Pasu?
And I agree I have no idea what OP.3 is talking about. You're supposed to imagine the rape but some sanitized version? Or you're supposed to imagine the victim in another situation not being raped?
Did you buy her statement that if you watched the video in an unkind way or for unkind reasons, you were participating in her rape? Guess it depends on the meaning of "participate".
What throws me off about 3) is the word 'invited', in that it implies an intentional invitation: that is, that someone might a rape narrative might be told in a way that invites pornographic fantasy or that doesn't invite that fantasy, but according to 3) 'most rape stories' are told by someone that is inviting that fantasy. Reading it like that, it seems just wrong to me.
Taking the intentionality out of 'invites', though -- if what Ogged meant by it was that given the way a lot of perfectly ordinary people's fantasy lives play around with consent and the lack thereof, there's a risk for anyone with that kind of fantasy life that they'll listen to a rape narrative, and hear it as not that different from the kinds of things they fantasize about, and that that's an error that has to be consciously avoided, I can see it as a good point.
5.2 doesn't overlap with my experience either, since apparently today's my day to keep talking about this.
When you say it doesn't overlap with your experience, you mean you don't react that way yourself at all, or you've never heard of anyone reacting that way? Because I think everything that people loosely talk about as 'rape culture' (say, think "Blurred Lines", for a fairly recent flurry of talk about it), would indicate that there are plenty of people out there at risk for that kind of reaction.
Shit, sloppy writing. Rape news stories. Sorry.
I'm still not quite getting where you're placing the intent with 'invites'. You think news coverage of rapes is being written deliberately to titillate? Because I can't say I've thought that about specific coverage I've read.
I mean it's not my personal experience, nor do I know anyone who's talked about that experience to me, though why would they when I'm going after ogged like this? I'm cool with fantasies about playing around with or not having consent but I've really never thought about average people with that common interest drawing inspiration from friends' rape narratives nor have I heard of such a thing in many conversations about related topics.
"Friends" is probably the key word there -- there's a difference between reactions to friends and strangers. But while I thought I understood Ogged's point, 8 lost me again completely, so I don't know what he's thinking at all.
I took 8 to mean "stories about people not known to you personally."
I get what Ogged means. It's like Urple's story about the guy who couldn't look at pregnant women without thinking about how they got in that state. There are a lot of people for whom the big hazy topic of sex just invites them to picture everyone naked.
4: No. I intensely dislike the extension of the word 'rape' to include things like clicking on a link without the right mindset.
I think her preamble has to be read with the understanding that she knew her wishes would be ignored by thousands of people and that there would be horrible attacks on her from MRAs and their fellow travelers. I don't like her framing, but it's obvious she was aware that there would be attacks on her. Given that, I'm a still figuring out what her preamble and questions really mean - I think the plain meaning of the text is undermined by the context. The more I engage with the piece the more I'm swayed away from my initial impression that she's lost the thread.
9: You're not an awful person in the same way the ogged or a TV news producer is.
14.last: For some of us picturing everyone we interact with naked is pretty much the only way we can get through the day.
You think news coverage of rapes is being written deliberately to titillate?
I wouldn't go this far (though I suspect that some coverage is intentionally more titillating than it needs to be). I do suspect that rapes get covered at a higher rate than comparably brutal non-sexual crimes due to the titillation factor. I have no data or even anecdata to back this up, just a generally low opinion of news producers.
17: As long as you're airbrushing.
I react to the video (or, rather, I react to descriptions of the video and her artist's statement, since I haven't watched it) similarly to what I imagine Ogged is getting at in #3. Sulkowicz is confronting straight on the (sad) fact that, as a public rape victim, she is sexualized by (some of the) people who hear/read/think about her and what happened to her and her response.
I react to the video (or, rather, I react to descriptions of the video and her artist's statement, since I haven't watched it) similarly to what I imagine Ogged is getting at in #3. Sulkowicz is confronting straight on the (sad) fact that, as a public rape victim, she is sexualized by (some of the) people who hear/read/think about her and what happened to her and her response.
And I double-post, because I'm a monster.
14, 18, 20, yeah. I'm so tired I'll just muddle things if I try to explain, but that's about the shape of things, I think.
I have nothing insightful to say about Sulkowicz, but I will point out that the 3 most recent posts here are following a seriously depressing trend.
Someone needs to put up a post about unicorns or rainbows or something.
Like, about how unicorns rape rainbows in prison?
It's funny, my reaction to ES completely changed after reading alleged rapist's complaint against Columbia. I was super sympathetic and now she seems like an unbearable overprivileged bullshit artist and the fact that she's doing more "art" on the subject just seems egregious and self-promoting. To be clear, that's an unfair response, it is ridiculous to have that strong a reaction to an unverified complaint and of course I have no actual idea what happened to her, so it's reasonable to assume that some part of my reaction is just misogyny. Still, she's the one who chose to base her art around this incident and so it feels legitimate to question the art if the incident didn't happen.
That sounds like a post from a new, grimmer, grittier Buzzfeed. "These ain't your mama's Twilight-based personality tests!"
Agreed with 26. I was sympathetic when it seemed to be a publicity stunt aimed at destroying the alleged rapist's life. Now it's more like a publicity stunt aimed at making herself famous.
She was so much more relatable when she was the model minority rape victim.
No! She was the rebellious rape victim.
They try to document their private suffering and fob it off as art.
More seriously, she majored in art. I'm not sure why her life experiences shouldn't inform/be the subject of her work. That said, I won't watch the video, so I should shut up.
33 -- sure, but there's a for real substantial question as to whether or not the rape actually happened. And, thus whether the life experience was manufactured or is a (possibly self-delusional) performance about something that didn't actually happen. That surely legitimately informs a reasonable response to the work just purely as artwork, since her artwork is so grounded in demanding that people accept her version of an actual event as factually true.
Sulkowicz agrees with 33.1: "I have only one body and one history to work with."
29: All artists have to self promote, and performance art is especially easy to attack as self promotion. She really can't make performance art about her experiences without opening herself to accusations that she's engaging in crude exploitation of rape to make herself famous.
Surely it's possible to make art about a traumatic experience one has suffered in a way that is waterproof non-exploitative? I don't think anyone said that "If This Is A Man" was an attempt by Primo Levi to make himself famous via crude exploitation of the Holocaust.
Someone would if he published it now.
"If This Is A Man" is a terrible title for a sex tape, Primo Levi.
37: The sex factor with rape makes it particularly difficult, I think. There will always be some people who anchor on the sex and can't get past that. Also the performance aspect involves the artist in a way that writing does not. You really can't ignore the artist and focus on the art if the artist is right there in the middle of it.
37: My mom always thought that about Elie Wiesel. Not that she begrudged him writing a book or two about it, but that he made a whole life-long career out of being a Holocaust survivor.
37 is a textbook case of an analogy that needs banned.
If 37 were banned, 39 wouldn't have existed.
So, from her statement, "Do not watch this video if your motives would upset me, my desires are unclear to you, or my nuances are indecipherable." That pretty much means, "Do not watch this video", right? Because I don't know how, given her artist statement and the title of the work, even the most well-intentioned ally in the world can decipher what her desires and nuances are, beyond that she's making some connection between (a) the modernist tradition of art works as liar paradoxes (viz., the Magritte reference) and (b) how we are implicated in rape culture.
44: That strikes me as a smart reading of her work, which I haven't seen because 1.) I'm not a rapist and 2.) The link didn't work when I tried it.
So, she's making a performance art career out of having been raped (assuming one agrees with her view of what happened).
Amanda Palmer, eat your heart out.
Oy vey. I was very upset when I saw the video, and overwhelmed with sorrow for Sulkowicz, but then when TRO pointed out the (news to me) that the accused was heavily, publicly contesting the accusation, and I just read his side of the story in the Daily Beast, I really don't know what to think. It's all very goddamn depressing.
I was trying to decode that URL without recognizing the French. Cecine St. Pasu?
Meanwhile, I was thinking of an early-music Magritte parody of Man Ray's Le Violon d'Ingres.
Now I'm home so I watched part of it. Is she claiming that this is a precise reenactment or just an example of how consensual sex can become rape? Specifically did he claim they started with a condom and he removed it without her consent? That seems like something for which there's reasonable physical evidence.
This would be a really inappropriate thread for a "that's why she said" joke, wouldn't it?
14.last: For some of us picturing everyone we interact with naked is pretty much the only way we can get through the day.
Alternatively, picture everyone you interact with as muppets. It's fantastic.
Oh, sure. It's not a sex thing, it's a boredom thing. Great way to get through meetings.
But on topic: I'm sympathetic to the initial perspective 26, but agree with the it's-just-mysogyny view you come to. This can give us almost no information about the truth of what happened, and so we're just being led astray by our biases. Even if a rape victim does something distasteful with their history, that doesn't change how we should treat them as a rape victim--but it might change how we should treat them as, in this case, an artist.
"[if] my nuances are indecipherable" is asinine, so I'm inclined to agree with 44.
45: "Your search - site:unfogged.com eteocretan - did not match any documents." Sometimes, this place disappoints me.
That's a question for the philosophers.
50: She didn't tell anyone, or make her complaint to Columbia (let alone actual professional criminal investigators, i.e. the police) until months after the fact. And in the Daily Beast article, the accused produced FB chat logs from over the course of the months in between where she seems to be friendly and chummy.
It still pisses me off that colleges try to play detective when they get complaints like this. The person is not being accused of violating the dress code or copying their homework. They are being accused of a felony crime. Why don't colleges just go straight to the police? (Yes, yes, I know, the police in reality have shown much to dissuade one from calling them. But even in a jurisdiction where the local police are fairly upstanding, colleges do this.) I mean, if they found a body in a kid's dorm closet, would they try to convene a disciplinary committee to find out what happened?
54, dalriata: thank you for managing to cheer me up. I wish I had more meetings these days to try that out on.
I haven't followed the case closely and don't plan on watching the video, so I'll refrain from commenting on this art project.
However, this: You think news coverage of rapes is being written deliberately to titillate?
Resounding yes. I have honestly thought more than once of just making a list of inappropriate words used in news stories (and I'm talking about Philadelphia Inquirer, Wash Post, NY Times - big outlets). Words like "clad." Superficially a descriptive term, but in reality, as it is used in English, often paired with terms like "barely" or "scantily."
But the list I'm *actually* making is the one that has me ragey every time I think about it. And that's news stories that describe teacher-student assaults as "sex." NO, the 13-year-old boy cannot consent to sex with his 26-year-old teacher, and it's disgusting of you to imply so, newspapers.
Apparently it makes me so ragey I have to type my name in ALL CAPS.
Have you tried the calming power of Muppets?
"Do not watch this video if your motives would upset me, my desires are unclear to you, or my nuances are indecipherable."
I like it. I like her.
I go back and forth between choosing not to take a moral or ethical stance in reference to (the whole damn thing) and just kinda "pass the popcorn" or "not pass jusgement" or "not care" but that is exactly exactly what she is demanding I not do.
The aestheticization of rape, rape culture, and our reactions to rape narratives is exactly what she is interrogating.
I would contend that questions like "what really happened" or "whose story makes the most sense" etc, the application of disinterested reason is another, the easiest aestheticization. The lawyers and scientists here won't like that.
Maybe "liking her" or "taking her side" is another aesthetic response. Maybe fear or anxiety are.
The ethical response is in no way determined by her/the story, but pre-determined yet still ethical. Or unethical.
Is she claiming that this is a precise reenactment
Pretty sure she explicitly says it isn't supposed to be that.
If you don't read the links you're a rapist.
60: Absolutely yes to everything Witt said.
To 59, recall the point that I believe LB has made in the past. College campuses are communities in which it can be quite difficult to avoid having to see or interact with any given person in that community. If a student has been raped, or is being stalked by another student, for example, it seems reasonable to expect that the college can and should take steps to protect or otherwise accommodate the victim, and discourage future predation, even in cases that can't or won't be pursued by police and the courts. Trying to do this in practice is frequently a disaster, but I think the underlying impulse is valid.
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I'm sure it's just a combination of major life stressors and hormones, but I have been in such a sensationally crappy mood today that not even the Muppets could help. Bah!
I don't think anyone said that "If This Is A Man" was an attempt by Primo Levi to make himself famous via crude exploitation of the Holocaust.
I don't know about Levi specifically, but didn't someone write a book about what he called the "Holocaust industry"?
Yes, but then Dershowitz stopped him from getting tenure.
it must be said that Emma Sulkowicz is one hell of a performance artist
I'd say not so much a hell of an artist as one who is just totally and utterly suited for this particular performance at this particular time and place. She's not even interesting, the only reason to talk about her at all is to point out how Columbia decided to just give the fuck up and cater to a crazy person and her legion of idiot supporters despite knowing she's totally full of shit.
I agree with WITT that news reporting of rapes does "invite" sexualization of the victims. consider that nightmare austrian case where the father locked his daughter in a basement. media consistently said he "had sex" with his imprisioned daughter and that he "fathered" seven children with her. Nononono. he "repeatedly raped her" and "his continuing series of constant rapes lead to her becoming pregnant."
Having now watched the video, I have a couple thoughts:
1. She says explicitly up front that this is not intended as a reenactment. I think one way to interpret that would be to see this as a shift from the intensely personal focus of the mattress thing to a more general comment on rape, especially rape on college campuses, which is an important issue that deserves attention regardless of whether Sulkowicz's allegations about the one incident are true.
2. It's obvious from the tone of her written intro and the questions that the comments are an integral part of the piece of art, and that she knew exactly what sorts of reactions she was going to get. (I didn't read the comments themselves, of course, but ogged's reaction to them suggests that she achieved her purpose.)
On the titillation thing, ogged may well be right that foregrounding the nudity and sex addresses that up front and either focuses or defuses it, but one thing that struck me is that the video itself is very un-porny and not very titillating. It doesn't use any of the standard cinematic tropes of porn, or even of movies or TV. The format is security camera footage, the setting looks like a dorm room but is undecorated and lacking many of the things that an actual lived-in dorm room would have, and the lighting is bright and sterile. There is no music, and the only sounds are from the actions of the people themselves. It's like she's distilling the story to its bare elements, without any of the factors that complicate the interpretation of these incidents in real life, and without trying to fit the events into any sort of conventionalized script or genre.
(Also, Witt and alameida are totally right about the way sex crimes tend to be reported.)
she knew exactly what sorts of reactions she was going to get
She's getting exactly what she wants. A mix of unwavering support and "look, I'm the target of oppression". She's going to troll for those things and thinks people will oblige her. She's not wrong.
73: Well, yes, exactly. All I'm saying is that this is a good thing from a societal perspective, regardless of whether her own rape story is true. Lots and lots of women are constantly being raped under circumstances like this and have been for years and years, and that's an important issue that needs to be talked about whether or not Emma Sulkowicz is actually one of them.
All I'm saying is that this is a good thing from a societal perspective, regardless of whether her own rape story is true
I'm very wary of trying to build momentum on an issue, especially this one, around a lie.
Eh, politics ain't beanbag, and we don't know that Sulkowicz is lying; this seems to be pretty much a "he said/she said" case, unlike the UVA one from that Rolling Stone article. If you know of another campus rape case with 100% airtight undisputable proof and a victim who is willing to endure the constant pressure of national media attention, feel free to point it out.
26 / 48 / 59 / 69:
Didn't we have a whole thread about whether or not the Daily beast article was a hit-piece?
Sulkolwicz's explanation of the transcripts sounds plausible to me - and I'm an oblivious white dude. Oh, and plus the whole "no smoke without fire" thing of multiple others accusing the same person of very similar actions.
(Apparently I'm oblivious enough to misspell her name)
66.2: Sure, I can see why one might want to have a campus investigation in _parallel_ with a police investigation, operating with a _weaker_ burden of proof. But that doesn't explain the whole let's-handle-this-in-house-and-then-if-she-doesn't-like-it-she-can-go-to-the-police.
I mean, maybe in this case there was no physical evidence b/c of the delay, but there still may have been evidence, and it's the kind of evidence which seems more useful if gathered, without warning, by police, rather than in a drawn out, leaky, administrative process of "come in some time between your classes next week, we need to talk to you". Did anyone see the man coming of her room, into the hall, naked, holding his clothes? It's the kind of thing where, if you ask around carefully before anyone knows why you're asking, you might get a candid answer just b/c it's kind of an odd thing to see, the sort of thing that sticks in your mind. Most people put on their clothes before doing the walk of shame, at least their boxers. If he was seen, at what time? He claimed to have spent the night in her room and leave in the morning, while she was asleep---does Columbia's intranet have any evidence that he logged in from his laptop before that? Or his phone? The latter is consistent with his staying the night while the former is more consistent with his sneaking off to his room. Did he make any phone calls early that morning, or did he just text? Can any third party--especially one who does not yet know why they're being asked---corroborate his story that she was perfectly friendly to him, aside from FB chatting, in the months between the incident and the accusation? Again, without knowing exactly why they're being asked. Does he claim to never have had unprotected sex with her? Is there any trace semen on the mattress, underneath the fitted sheets? You know, *before* she's carried it all around town. Asking her a bunch of questions about the physics of the rape seems totally irrelevant if you're not going to actually *use that* information to look for evidence to corroborate her story. So many months after the fact, the accusations that he hit her, kept going when she told him to stop, took off the condom, and switched to anal even when she said "stop" don't require any physics to be philosophically understood as rape (and sexual assault and regular assault too).
The lackadaisical pretend court with pretend judges and pretend grad student lawyer could still do their thing after the police and DA had a real shot. And in the mean time Columbia could have
a) paid to put him up in a nearby hotel for both of their safeties and allowed him to tell everyone it was b/c of an "allergy issue"---in fact, demanded he say that and nothing else. This would have allowed him to preserve his reputation should the accusation turn out to be demonstrably false and also made the witness interviewing, etc., more clean. "You want us to protect your confidentiality and privacy, while we assume you are innocent? Well then, you have to cooperate with us. "
b) paid off his campus employer for a few days, again, with some excuse about mysterious allergies he's having, and how they need to desire to minimize his contact with different buildings for a few days.
c) paid to let him attend classes virtually, hand in papers late or remotely late, etc., just to get him maximally off campus and away from the evidence for a few days.
But to me the real issue is--why, in 2012, would any Ivy league student, a Dalton graduate, the child of two Manhattan MDs, not want to report such an experience and collect the at-first plentiful physical evidence *immediately*? If we believe her, then it's b/c she's afraid she'll be mistreated by the police. So it seems the really useful thing Columbia could do is maintain--and publicize!--an ongoing retainer with local rape crisis staff. They could maintain access to a 24-7local counselor hotline to get warm and supportive counselor to the victim before the police, to walk a victim through the enitre reporting process and advocate for them and stay with them. They could demand a dedicated roster, with backups, for 24/7 liaison at the local precincts to do intake on any sort of assault, and pay for those officers to get special training about how to sensitively listen to rape victims. They could have a retainer to pay for specially trained physicians or RNs to be available 24/7 at St. Lukes, to do *respectful* rape kit collection, document bruises, etc., and offer (paid for) medical and psychiatric treatment immediately. They could maintain a fund to expedite the kits. It's not like Columbia doesn't have the resources or the medical/scientific expertise to field this kind of operation and keep it ready. If they're going to maintain that kind of density of bodies in those kind of close quarters, it seems like this is just paying its dues for the required upkeep in law and order. And sure, this may not be a realistic set of resources for every university to have. But if universities like Columbia can't even try, no one will. And if the Ivies start doing it, the others will have to start playing ball to have any hope of competing for rich graduates from schools like Dalton. It would be great, if, in 20 years, it's a legitimately *weird and incredible* choice not to immediately report such a horrible assault, and not an awfully understandable one.
77: I read the Jezebel piece and it did not leave me with any more clarity. Like I said, I still don't know what to think, and it's goddamn depressing, but it certainly doesn't feel like the most credible story I've heard. And the fact that she's an art student, and was an art student, does, honestly, make me wonder if she's really representative of the vast majority of raped women who would really rather not get hounded by horrible reporters implying horrible things.
The reporter's process and biases are clearly terrible, but so was that of the boy who called wolf. The case she makes boils down to things: the supposed friendliness of the accusers between the incidents and before the accusations combined with the long gaps in all cases and the clustering of the accusations, as supposedly evidenced by the chat logs and the email, the lack of any corroborating evidence, the fact that the accusers did in fact know each other, and _could_ have either consciously colluded or been unconsciously influenced by the closeknit discussions of each others friends; the fact that Columbia's initial handling of Sulkowicz's accusation may have leaked the nature of the accusations and tainted the witness statements from the other residents.
Regarding the first: The chat logs, even annotated, are still confusing. The Jezebel piece mentions the dildo list-serve email over and over again, but fails to mention that it was sent *in reply* to an email sent by the accused. A college student making a joke about a dildo vs. a college student making a joke about a dildo, in front of all thier friends/dormmates, *in reply* to someone she feels has assaulted her reads prety differently. IT would have been really nice to know what the bulk of the students saw of these interactions (i.e. not just on chat but in person) before they knew about the accusation.
2) It's unfortunate that victims' fears of the reporting season seems to discourage them from reporting assaults immediately, but that doesn't change the fact that crimes with physical evidence are easier to corroborate than crimes without them.
3) The credibility of multiple accusations does require that they be at least somewhat independent---and their clustering in one burst, being made by people in the same frat house, all being made on such a big delay such that any physical evidence seems to statistically imply they are **not** necessarily independent. Compare, for instance the accusations towards Cosby---multiple women across multiple locations from multiple social circles across---and an initial group of accusations _logged_ across multiple years. The chances of conscious colluison or unconscious,network-mediated influence are much lower.
4) It seems pretty clear that Columbia is good at fucking up, so really, that's just not surprising.
Does this negate Sulkowicz' accusation? Not at all. But it does make Nunguesser seem potentially much more credible than he seemed previously. That's confusing.
I must have said this before but: isn't it clearly time to disband all "campus police" and hand the job to somebody competent rather than a cocktail of proverbially craven university administrators and either ineffectual mall ninjas or taser-happy demonstrator-stomping goons? And then do the same with funny little Ferguson-esque small town PDs?
There are college campuses with actual police officers as the campus public safety office who are able to be involved with criminal investigations as well as campus disciplinary hearings. There are amputees with trained Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners and victim support advocates reachable 24/7 for on-campus forensic exams. That still doesn't mean either will be utilized.
I feel like I need a long full-disclosure segment here because, like a lot of you, this particular case doesn't seem clear-cut. But most/all of you are probably willing to believe I was raped and I didn't report until many months later, after both he and I had dropped out and I'd attempted suicide, so none of it mattered anyway but I still wanted it on the record. My roommate could have testified I stayed in bed for a few days shaking and crying. His did say her remembered the night but "nothing unusual," which has stuck with me because I think he really needed to preserve that belief to feel okay about himself, which I've seen happen a lot from all parties in cases like this. But I threw away the balled-up clothes from the back of my closet when I left school and there was no real evidence of that sort left, certainly. And then once I didn't feel catatonic and wasn't trying to kill myself anymore and tried to write, I wrote about rape and trying to put a narrative on my feelings and about fear of pregnancy and disease. It was probably three years later when there was a performance with music is written and a video I'd made. I didn't worry that any of our first- year hall mates were going to be among the 12 people in the audience and able to guess who he was from gossip or from timing, since I never described him or mentioned he was an international student. I'm grateful several women from the support group I was leading were there to watch because I think they understood that what I was writing wasn't about him any more than it needed to be and that the focus was me. I could say and have said I was raped in the relationship I was in at the time, which makes the ex/perpetrator relatively easy to find. (That he maintained a blog making threats against me and detailing his stalking activities made getting a restraining order easy enough I didn't bother trying to find out how a rural jury would feel about marital rape, which I now regret. But I didn't want to be known as the advocate for sexual assault survivors who got raped again doing it.) Even knowing every resource available to me was not enough to get me to try.
This stuff is really complicated even in the age before ubiquitous Facebook messages. It doesn't lend itself to easy narratives, which is why what I've written is clunky and inadequate. I think it's part of the reason she wanted her Mattress Project to be simple and found it wasn't, that that wasn't sufficient. Now she's playing with ambiguity in a way in surprised hasn't been put on hold by lawyers. It's fascinating and maybe terrifying to watch, but still understandable if we're willing to believe her side of the story, I think.
80: Well, I don't want to get mired too deeply in this for a number of reasons (I should be doing other things; neither you nor T"R"O are saying more than "It's not as clearcut as it seemed when the accused was still anonymous", which is both reasonable and uncontroversial; it's a case that speaks to people's personal experiences here and I don't want to rake stuff up for the sake of what's to me a fairly academic discussion).
That said, I don't think the summary in 80 is fair, particularly the first two points.
This rather long presentation is really helpful in understanding survivor behavior in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. Long story short: trauma fucks you up and people do bizarre things when they are in a state of shock, and first responders generally have no clue about this.
Wait, I meant your points 1 (suprisingly light-hearted communications - I hope 82 and 84 help to convince that "she took ages to report it and meanwhile she still made jokes with me" aren't useful indicators of innocence) and 3 (clustering - aside from anything else, what about Adam?). Not the first two points. Sorry!
84 is a good link I've seen before. Training people (academic support staff, professors, health services, campus safety) on that sort of thing would be a very good idea.
And since I have been sort of all over the place, I want to say as an aside that I'm not emotional about any of this and nobody needs to change how they talk about any of it because of me.
It's fascinating and maybe terrifying to watch, but still understandable if we're willing to believe her side of the story, I think.
My first and still strongest reaction is to hope that she knows what she's doing. Because it is terrifying to watch (the whole thing, not the video, which I didn't view) if you, as is my wont, tend to thing about all the ways it could go wrong.
It's really hard for me to believe she made up the rape. This scale of performance art would require some wholesale lunacy. Not that the occasional woman scorned doesn't, but it's so much more likely that there just wasn't any evidence and Columbia shrugged it off.
Without getting too far into the weeds, I'll note that Sulkowicz says that the version of communication released by Nungesser isn't complete, and is misleading. She released all of them, I think, but I'm not reading all that again.
Sorry if it's already been linked, but I find the account by the woman whose complaint was upheld by Columbia completely credible. And if we can conclude (I think we can!) that Nungesser can go from friendly to pushy/rapey like that, I think it looks very bad for him. (And I think Nungesser also released an email from this woman containing a reference to a dildo, which he says is evidence that she was joking around with him sexually after the assault, but if I recall, she says he was merely one recipient on a dorm-wide reply-all; which, again, makes him look bad, if true).
Finally, although Sulkowicz says the video isn't intended to depict her rape specifically, the original version of the video was timestamped with the date on which she claims Nungesser raped her, so "this isn't my rape" should maybe be taken in the same spirit as "this isn't a rape/pipe."
And look, performance artists are weird and wacky people, but they can still be raped.
Two more comments, since I'm sort of feeling bad. First, I didn't mean to stifle discussion in any way and I am not going to have my feelings hurt by anything anyone says. I am actually probably less emotionally rocked by this sort of thing and a lot of the child abuse stuff that gets discussed than others here seem to be.
That said, I'm a little hazy on the details by now, but I think that either deliberately to streamline the story or maybe preserve some anonymity or just using sort of casual shorthand, Sulkowicz early on made some generalizations that turned out not to be entirely accurate or the best way of explaining what happened. That's normal for humans and for trauma survivors. While it's really sordid but also fascinating to see the facebook chats and the rest of it, I don't think that's the outcome she expected.
ISTM that along with reducing (if not eliminating) sexual assault on college campuses (and everywhere else) we ought to be heading towards a world where victims of this crime feel comfortable reporting asap to the police for a proper investigation. Obviously lots of things have to change for that to happen -- I kind of think we're on the right road with that here, given everything that's happened (and is still ongoing) -- and there's an element of 'you know if you don't report right away, you're really crippling your ability to get "justice" at some future point, if you decide later that's what you want' that's always going to be there.
(At the central committee mtg last night, our leg delegation was reporting on the session: I'd known that there was a study committee on sexual assault to make comprehensive suggestions for statewide improvement, but didn't know that my rep had wangled herself a co-chair position on some sort of interstate task force working on best practices for state institutions, including universities. ES gets some real credit for this, regardless of the facts of her case.)
81: Hear, hear!
At the U of Mn, the campus cops are somehow deputized to work as Mpls and StPaul cops, even though they have their own hierarchy and stuff. Most of the time, they tend to err more on the "ineffectual-for-everything-but-busting-dumb-freshmen-from-Wisconsin-on-paraphenelia-charges" but they don't commit a lot of violence either.
88: I'm leaning towards that view. In the aftermath of trauma people do weird things, often trying to normalize their experience somehow, which would explain the texts. OTOH, given the totality of the circumstances I think it's nuts to say Columbia should have expelled Nungesser. It was he-said-she-said with plenty of doubt. To find him guilty at the level of proof required for expulsion would require a laughably low standard of evidence.
(And the senator for the next district over is working on a comprehensive review of corrections policy which is going to include the kind of stuff I mentioned yesterday. Lesson: send under-40 female lawyers with small kids to your legislature and get shit done.)
As I said to some friends a while back, the obvious answer to this and many other issues is to put cameras in all dorm rooms, sell subscriptions to the feeds, and you'd be able to cut tuition and resolve most rape complaints. I'm told that kids these days don't even know what privacy is.
This scale of performance art would require some wholesale lunacy.
This scale and type of performance art is an extraordinarily unusual choice regardless. She is certainly a self-promoter. Is it hard to imagine a self-promoter who fictionalizes?
I saw a quote from her not too long ago in which (I hope I'm remembering this correctly) she responded to Nunguesser by insisting that the mattress project ought to be viewed as art. I think she's right about that. I think I'm willing to endorse that project - and this one - as art.
With the disclaimer that I haven't actually watched the video, I think she's made a provocative artistic choice that is paying off on its own terms. Among other things, she's asking people to think hard about the meaning of consent.
Whether it's fair to Nunguesser or healthy for her - well, those are different questions.
Is it hard to imagine a self-promoter who fictionalizes?
Where she's doing it out of malice? Where she, deep down, knows he didn't rape her? Not impossible, but not the most parsimonious explanation.
97: People have extrapolated various potential narratives from the available evidence, and I don't think any of them is affirmed or rebutted by her choice to embark on performance art of this type/scale.
If you think she's a politicized nut who has invented a narrative to support her hurt feelings and has a strong desire to self-promote and to elicit pity/support from others, well, her art is consistent with that narrative.
If you think she's an activist who has willingly subjected herself to public scorn because she's committed to the truth, that narrative works, too.
Oh dear. I loaded up these comments but then got distracted and never looked at them. Thorn/82: I am so so so sorry if my regurgitation of the DB case sounded like dismissal or contempt, in general, but especially if it resonated with your experience and perspective in a painful or frustrating way. I hadn't really been following this closely, and had sort of been under the impression until last night (and through my viewing of the video) that there was very little "defense" mounted in public in any sort of public way---which sort of left me with, well, if he has nothing to say for himself, I definitely believe her 100% these many moons. So really I was just reeling from a case of "well, if his friends and relatives want to believe him, it certainly seems like they have some reason to, and I for one, don't think I can look them in the eye and say "I am 100% positive this woman's art is definitely not hurting your friend/son disporportionate to what he did."" and that is what's so depressing to me. Intellectually I have always had a hard time transitioning from "a) most women don't accuse falsely b) I tend to believe my female friends and c) society/misogyny is rigged to let male rapists get away with it and d) I think rape is a big problem" to "I am going to shift my devotion to "innocent until proven guilty" for cases where just a generic third party member of the public (vs. supportive friend of an accuser/victim) to "he probably did it" when it comes to accusations of rape." I am really sorry if my thinking out loud in the comments was insensitive. Intellectually this is an issue I generally grapple with. Honestly, I haven't slept properly in days and I have to run now, and have been irresponsible in my commenting, but I am truly sorry.
I've been much more stewing about the lack of professional outside investigation, especially as a Columbia graduate alum. (Maybe that was obvious, 91 seems to get what I was trying to say.) When I was there, I got a series of anonymous rape-murder-cannibalize-threatening phone calls to my landline, and I called the NYPD. It wasn't even totally clear if they knew who I was or where I lived, but the NYPD's speed, solicitiousness, diligence, etc, really surprised me--and struck me as much more professional and skilled than any ad-hoc campus panel could have been. My closest female friend who has been raped, to my knowledge, was raped by a very powerful man's son (whom, the police told her, had almost definitely gotten away with it at least twice before) and has often expressed *extreme* regret about showering and waiting a few days before she went to the police. She didn't have the strongest science education in the world, up to that point, and when she learned later what might have been collected, she was --and is, holy shit, it's been 17 years, damn we're old--really upset. The police begged her to press charges anyway, but when she did her research with her family (including her brother, who was a cop elsewhere) she was too sure the case was too thin and he'd get away with it and then use his resources against her. A much closer friend of mine found out her 9-year-old was being molested by the older brother of a playmate, and went straight the police---and they commended her on her speediness and efficacy in both getting the evidence in and getting her daughter treatment-- and he recently pled to 15 years. So these cases case may have overly colored my perceptions of what's possible if one has decent law enforcement around.
I've also been on *a* different side, if not the other end, though. As an adult I once unwittingly provided investigators a significant portion of the exonerating physical evidence in a sexual harrassment case. Most of my long-term bullies in school were girls, and framing people was one of their favorite techniques. And when I was a young child, young enough that people who didn't know me well might think that I was not observant or self-aware or articulate or good at remembering things or easily confused--a malicious woman in my family's circle falsely accused an older child friend of mine of molesting me (principally, I believe, to drive my mother apart from "that" side of the circle). I am still not sure which makes me angrier--the idea that this malicious lady thought I wouldn't be able to coherently contradict her, the damage she was willing to inflict on my friend, or the years which my mother aged until she finally believed me that it wasn't true. I am thinking, in my highly underslept state, that this is all also coloring my perceptions.
So the point is, I was mostly thinking out loud and not arguing for much, except that wealthy, state of the art schools provide state-of-art services for student victims, and that this might, one day, actually help get justice for the few wrongfully accused as well. And I now totally get that may not solve everything b/c there are now levels of trauma I have not begun to comprehend.
So again, many sorries, gotta go!!!
No worries, Ile! You were completely fine and not upsetting at all!
As I've said before, I've had to deal with the fallout from a false accusation and it was possibly the hardest thing I've ever dealt with in terms of the emotional toll it took on me. I'm sorry you went through that.
Oh Ile. I cannot imagine ever thinking that you, at any age, were not powerfully observant, self-aware, articulate and good at remembering things.
... the idea that this malicious lady thought I wouldn't be able to coherently contradict her, the damage she was willing to inflict on my friend . . .
There was a story last year in which a teenage babysitter conspired with two of her friends. They broke into the house where she was working, stole a bunch of electronics, and she blamed it on the black neighbor.
It ended up falling apart because the 4 year old she was babysitting was able to clearly identify that the men who had broken in were white.
Looking up the story now I see it ended up getting national coverage (see link above), and mostly getting played for laughs. But reading the local coverage it's disturbing just how badly it could have gone:
The woman had been watching three kids aged 1 to 4 at the apartment in the 5400 block of Northwest Drive when she reported two black men in the 20s or 30s -- one with a gun, one with a knife -- had barged in through a back door around 4:20 p.m. and told her she should leave if she didn't want to get hurt. None of the children were hurt as they fled from the apartment with her.
A SWAT team, a U.S. border helicopter and dozens of law enforcement personnel -- many of them on-call, working overtime -- responded to the scene looking for two armed men with backpacks. A manhunt blocked off Northwest Drive. But the story started to crack when detectives interviewed the children: The robbers were white, they said.
In the meantime the babysitter pointed out a young black man who lives in the neighborhood as a possible suspect. SWAT ordered him out of his apartment. He cooperated but wasn't free to go until later in the evening.
Eventually, the woman admitted she'd made up the story to cover for how she'd let two young, white men into the apartment to steal electronics, said Sheriff Bill Elfo. They got away with a gaming system and two backpacks full of stolen goods. Those were later recovered.
104 to the comments on the video in the OP. Dear god, those were worse than I expected.
Holy smokes, 99 was a particularly incoherent and badly written comment even by my standards. Sorry about that. Thorn, Megan and NickS get a special Ile-virtual-medal for still trying to read it.
100:Thorn, thanks for being understanding. Your willingness to share and communicate your experiences for my benefit, anyway, never ceases to win my admiration. But I'm still sorry, b/c I can see how someone with a similar history might be very justifiably hurt. This, unfortunately, is often how I learn and grapple with things. Sort of like how unfogged persuaded me to become pro-choice-socially/emotionally-and-not-just-politically/legally-for-everyone-else. (I haven't completely gotten to being pro-choice for myself.) I am far too reliant on learning from people, often at their expense, when it's not really their job to teach me. Thank you for your graciousness
And my apologies to anyone else I've bruised in this thread. :-(
Megan/Thorn:101/102, aww thanks. Obviously I was an unformed brain as an infant like everyone else. :-) But, regarding me and NickS's 103 (which is one of my favorite stories, actually, except for the awful part---how many people get to have a legitimate act of brave righteousness on their record starting at age _4_?! It's hard not to have high-hopes that she'll grow up to be some kind of social-justice-superheroine) and my story, I have a couple of observations.
A) I do think many adults often have a tendency of underestimating young children. Now that I have a bunch of might-as-well-be godchildren who are fully mobile and conversational, I get terribly uncomfortable when people, especially their parents or relatives, talk about them to me in front of them as if they weren't there, and more then a few times kids who seem to not be paying attention while this is say something to me, alone, later that indicates they were listening and understood.*
B) I probably got particularly underestimated b/c of my premature birth and the doctors' extremely and unhelpfully* vague warnings about hard-to-immediately-detect brain damage coupled with the fact that my older sibling is literally a genius prodigy. In comparison, my perfectly often above-average pace of hitting various benchmarks seemed _horribly_ slow to my family and their non-parent friends. I think it let me get away with a lot of great shit, and I love teasing them about this. Pulling out tid-bits of information that they never realized I heard and understood let alone remembered gave me _years_ of parlor tricks.
*I often wonder if this is an involuntary but necessary coping mechanism on the part of parents/caretakers, to just get past the lack of privacy and/or avoid the much more dangerous problem of overestimating a kid's current capabilities. If so, I think my late mother was slightly deficient in it, but it was okay given her hyper-vigilance and attentiveness. One of my fears about having children is that *I* might be deficient in it, but lack the hyper-vigilance and attentiveness. Overestimaging a kid's abilities and then accidentally neglecting them feels like a potentially classic Ile fuck up. :-(
** what would have been helpful would have been educating my mother about ADHD-in-girls-and-women, it's comorbidity with premature birth, and the large difference between ADHD and more general intellectual disabilities. Then I might have gotten diagnosed as a child, or at least not have spent 18 years internally and externally fighting her pre-conceptions & antipathy about the diagnosis after I tentatively self-diagnosed at 16. She really only completely understood and accepted it and was thus able to apply the full range of her enormous skills as a supporter in the last few months of her life. :-( Then again, I'm not sure it was that well understood in the 80s.
105: I was tempted to break my usual opposition to reading comments on such things b/c a) I was so upset for her and wanted to leave a comment of support and b) as per the OP, the open comments do seem like an important part of the piece. I then thought about what my "expecations" of the comments were, and realized I could always imagine something even worse than that, and decided that the evil-commenting version of Internet Rule 34 applies in greater force than usual. So I quickly closed the window before I could accidentally start reading them. :-(
103: The "local coverage" link led to a 404 for me. I think the cited story was probably one of these:
http://www.bellinghamherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/article22233357.html
http://www.bellinghamherald.com/news/hot-topics/article22233564.html
http://www.bellinghamherald.com/news/hot-topics/article22242549.html