Kearneysville, WV. Recently at the University of New Hampshire, Vice President Joe Biden announced new federal guidelines for fighting sexual assault on college campuses. Biden’s speech included such truisms as “no means no” and “rape is rape is rape.” He continued:
Look guys – all you guys in the audience – no matter what a girl does, no matter how she’s dressed, no matter how much she’s had to drink – it’s never, never, never, never, never okay to touch her without her consent….This doesn’t make you a man – it makes you a coward. A flat-out coward.
True enough. However, that the Vice President of the United States believed it necessary to make such emphatic proclamations is suggestive. After all, who would question such things? Apparently plenty of young men, at least if we take Biden’s passionate speech (and new federal guidelines) as indicative of a problem.
In a recent broadcast of NPR’s On Point titled “Are College Campuses a Hostile Environment for Women?” guest Dorothy Edwards stated that one in five women are raped as undergraduates. The number, if true, is staggering. She admitted that, despite this high incidence, a relatively small number of men are perpetrators, for serial rapists account for many of these attacks. Nevertheless, if she is anywhere near correct, it doesn’t appear as if the typical college campus is as safe for women as one would hope.
Of course, the issue of rape on college campuses gets fuzzy when the subject of “date rape” enters the picture. This is made all the more confusing when alcohol is added to the mix. Does regretting a sexual encounter the morning after a drunken binge qualify as rape? Clearly not, but the haze of alcohol or other substances surely impairs judgment, memory, and communication.
Nevertheless, the advent of the so-called hook-up culture has fostered expectations among young men that encounters with co-eds naturally lead to no-strings-attached sex. Sex is not preceded by an altar, commitment, “I love you”, or even a decent conversation. In a hook-up culture anonymous sex is not a scandal but, it would seem, the ideal, for when sex is depersonalized, it cannot lead to the complications associated with affection, vulnerability, and the desire to sacrifice for the good of the other person.
Yet appearances are deceptive, at least according to Gail Dines, author of Porn Land: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality. In the same NPR program, Dines argues that women who participate in the hook-up culture experience higher rates of depression, higher incidence of alcohol abuse, and significant decreases in self-esteem. In short, “the hook-up culture is not working well for women.” It’s hard to imagine how participating in an activity where one is merely an object to be stripped and used would not lead to bad results. That the woman can tell herself that she is using the man in the same way he is using her seems to offer little effective consolation.
According to Dines, the hook-up culture is a natural outgrowth of the culture of pornography, which in recent years has gone mainstream. Dines argues that pornography fundamentally changes the way men think of sexuality, and if this is the case, there is good reason for concern. The average age of a boy’s first exposure to porn is eleven, and according to Dines, pornography is the leading form of sex education in our society today.
Pornography teaches young men to view women as depersonalized sex objects, and because pornography seems to create an insatiable desire for increasingly extreme forms of objectification, the hard-core pornography common today and readily accessible to anyone with access to the internet is shocking for its level of violence and degradation. According to Dines, hard-core porn is a staple on many college campuses and there is little stigma attached to consuming it.
Indeed, my wife and I once visited friends who took us to the campus of the respectable private university where the husband teaches. Our friends thought the kids might enjoy the billiards and foosball in the student union building. Our plans quickly changed when we realized a young man was watching porn on the big screen television in the public area. Where once consumers of porn parked in alleys and scurried through dark doorways in seedy parts of town, today pornography is merely another consumer choice in the litany of available choices. I’m not sure if I was more surprised by the fact that pornography was so publicly visible or that this young man apparently felt no shame.
That porn culture changes the way men think is obvious, but it also affects the way women think of themselves. In a hyper-sexualized society, women will naturally tend to think of themselves primarily as sexual creatures. Women too often come to act, talk, and dress as if sex is completely separate from love, as if the biological mechanics of sex have nothing to do with reproduction, and as if a different partner every night leads to a satisfying life. The lies compound, deceive, and deaden.
In a pornographically saturated culture, the sexual imaginations of boys and girls will be shaped in ways that lead to a variety of unhealthy attitudes toward sex including, not surprisingly, a coarsening of the relations between men and women and the temptation to look upon members of the opposite sex as merely objects of sexual gratification. That these habits of mind would lead to a culture of hook-ups and rape is quite unsurprising.
Wendell Berry in his essay “Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community” writes that
in sex, as in other things, we have liberated fantasy but killed imagination, and so have sealed ourselves in selfishness and loneliness. Fantasy is of the solitary self, and it cannot lead us away from ourselves. It is by imagination that we cross over the differences between ourselves and other beings and thus learn compassion, forbearance, mercy, forgiveness, sympathy, and love—the virtues without which neither we nor the world can live.
Which leads me to Jane Austen. I recently read Pride and Prejudice with a group of bright and engaged students. The experience was, in some ways, rather jarring, and in no way are the differences between Austen’s world and ours more manifest than in the area of sex. Pride and Prejudice is in many ways a comedy of manners, especially manners governing the relationships between men and women. And the cultural whiplash one feels when moving from the world of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy to our world of hook-ups and porn is disconcerting. Try, for instance, to imagine Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy (Lizzy and Fitz no doubt) hooking up. It is impossible. Given who they are and the value they place on propriety, constancy, amiability, and marriage, to imagine them participating in the hook-up culture is to debase them. It is to seriously damage their integrity as persons. How could it do anything less?
We must, at the same time, acknowledge that sexual rogues were not invented in our day. Mr. Wickham lurks in the pages of the novel, yet social conventions weigh heavily upon him and while he seems quite willing to accept the sexual favors of the foolish Lydia, forces are quickly arrayed to compel them to marry. Mr. Collins, himself, is convinced that when a woman says no, she really means yes and therefore continues to ply is modest charms on Elizabeth who refuses him in the most strenuous terms. Yet Mr. Collins, to his credit, is appealing for Elizabeth’s hand and not attempting to intimidate her with the threat of sexual brutality as was clearly the case recently at Yale University where a group of frat boys gathered near the dorm where most of the freshmen women live and chanted “no means yes” and added an obscenity that would make the vilest of Austen’s characters look like choirboys by comparison.
Yale University (and the U.S. government) is attempting to deal with this climate of misogyny by clarifying the legal constraints laid out in Title IX; however, the problem is clearly not one that the law is suited to address. When community standards become so fragmented that pornography is protected as free speech and the consequent frat boy intimidation of young ladies is seen by the boys as acceptable, no amount of legal clarification is going to make much of a difference. That these boys were not immediately expelled from Yale is indicative of the moral dimness that prevails. That a contingent of gentlemen did not beat them beyond sense is a palpable loss.
Austen’s sexual vision is deeply rooted in two complementary ideals: respect and self-restraint. These twin ideals are no better illustrated than in Darcy’s question to Elizabeth near the end of the book. Elizabeth has previously refused Darcy’s offer of marriage, but circumstances have led him to imagine that perhaps her opinion has changed:
You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from you will silence me on this subject forever.
Darcy loves Elizabeth, yet his respect is such that he will not pester her with entreaties if she tells him no. He does not want to make her uncomfortable and he surely does not want to win her hand by pressuring her to be his bride. His self-restraint will make good his promise never to mention the matter again if she but says the word.
Because Elizabeth has spent nearly a year getting to know Darcy, she has become quite familiar with his virtues as well as his faults. As she has come to know him, her respect for him has steadily grown, yet her restraint is depicted as proper and even lovely, especially when seen in light of Lydia’s crass and obnoxious attempts to garner the attention of men.
Admittedly, Austen’s world is idealized, yet consider this: who would you prefer your daughter to bring home? 1) a young man whose sexual imagination has been formed by Jane Austen along with Homer, Virgil, The Song of Solomon, Dante, and Shakespeare or 2) a young man who has spent the last ten years of his life fantasizing about women whose images he has objectified and consumed through pornography? Who will make a better husband? A better lover? A better father? That so many of our young men are being shaped by pornography does not bode well for our young ladies or for our society as a whole. If we are witnessing the passing of the gentlemen, there is much to lament. Although the path is difficult and the outcome uncertain, perhaps it’s time for the gentleman to stage a comeback.
http://gothamist.com/2010/10/15/video_yale_frat_boys_chant_no_means.php
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2065849,00.html
Pornography does contribute to certain problems but I wouldn’t blame hook-up culture on it, since it is not all college men who are having sex, but mostly the select few (with respect to casual sex) along with those who are in “relationships”– feminism has had a bigger impact on women’s choices.
I have been in the classrooms of both public and private schools talking about relationships, the meaning of marriage, and the meaning of sex for many years. I admit I was shocked to understand that young women, as young as 12, thought that to go out on a date meant that one would be having sex. From there understanding of popular culture, there was no option, except with or without a condom.
You can imagine my dismay to discover that I was the FIRST person in their lives to talk about relationships bound by love, respect and real intimacy. They were absolutely hungry for this information and consistently wanted more such support for another way of living.
Although many of the modern parents thought that a jar of condoms fulfilled their parental responsibility, many others wanted support and information to keep their children, particularly their daughters, away from modern men and to shape them to be real women.
I’m afraid what you say is true. But what on earth can be done about it? If in those early days of the internet, measures had been taken to make pornography on the web illegal we might have avoided our present state, but now Pandora’s box has been opened. It’s not just frat boys that look at pornography. The internet has made it so anonymous and easily accesible that all men are vulnerable to its evil. Even men that would never have been tempted to go into some disgusting porn theater or back alley shop now find themselves confronted with sexual temptation when they log onto their computer for work. Our modern age has made such a science of exploiting human weakness, it is hard to imagine how we will ever be able to recover our dignity.
@corey
Even in “better times” when society, or at least the bulk of it was more tuned to the interest of virtue rather than vice, this was merely an assistance. We do the same thing that has always been done, we pursue virtue in cooperation with God and ask our brothers to do likewise by our example.
I think what we need is a serious discussion among Christians about hot to teach their children sex ed. In general we don’t want the world to, but we refuse to ourselves. I have heard one sermon on the subject, and parents tend to shy away from it since it is a “taboo” subject. Kids will learn about this topic, and if it isn’t from the church and family, it will be from media, movies, locker rooms, etc. By refusing to teach kids ourselves, we as Christians are implicitly telling our children to go to the world for education on this subject.
Where are the proper male role models in society anymore? It’s difficult to tell youngsters to do good without giving them examples. Call this a generalization, but I doubt many male teenagers and twenty-somethings are going to pick up an Austen novel on their own.
Women will eventually rebel. Not eventually. Soon.
I’d like to say that I’m a frat boy, though not one at Yale, and we would never have allowed our pledges to behave in such a disgusting manner. Fraternities often get singled out for the disgusting behavior of the greek community’s more boorish members. My fraternity prides ourselves on behaving as Southern gentlemen. We draw on a long tradition of Christian chivalry, and because membership in our organization is voluntary, we can enforce community standards much better than the campus adminstration.
At their best fraternities can embody everything that FPR represents. Our strong communities can be built on shared values and traditions that the modern world thinks of as archaic, or they can be bult on moral dissolution and substance abuse. I’d hope that college professors and administrators can recognize the wonderful potential offered by Greek communities. I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment that: “Although the path is difficult and the outcome uncertain, perhaps it’s time for the gentleman to stage a comeback.” Hopefully, the comeback can begin in his old training ground, the fraternity house.
@SRR: This is great to hear. I wish you and your fraternity all the best in taking this older and better course.
@sdf
They already have. This is why no adult male should ever be alone with anyone in a protected class (children, women, elderly, disabled). We are assumed to be predators by the law and the court of public opinion has already pronounced judgment.
One of the other consequences of a culture where the hookup, if not the ‘norm’, nevertheless looms large in the range of outcomes, is the demise of dating as something that 20 somethings do. As a parent and friend of a number of 20 somethings in our community, I see this. Thus another result is the atrophying of social skills that could, if practiced, become a means of overcoming the impulses of a fallen culture – not to mention the lost opportunities to get to know others under circumstances of focused attention upon them (something that loose gatherings and parties, for all their fun and social benefits, do not provide). It’s an interesting time, and in my office and while riding public transit, the words of “Eleanor Rigby” come frequently to mind. I see so many lonely people.
Porn is certainly part of the problem, but I believe it is only another expression of a hedonistic culture of absolute sexual liberation which has divorced sex, marriage, child-rearing, love and commitment.
We have been told for decades that personal fulfillment will be found in following sexual desire wherever it leads, and that to restrain or control sexual desire is impossible and/or psychologically damaging. The results have been broken homes, abortion, rampant STDs, same-sex marriage, and on and on. We’re not through this by a long shot, but there are hopeful signs that wise young people are seeing they’ve been lied to and hurt in the process.
You failed to mention porn for women is more widely accpeted and more visible than other porn. For decades otherwise polite women openly read trashy paperbacks and magazines in situations with no since of shame. Perhaps these forms are more acceptable since they are more literal and less visual than “men’s magazines” but the women have corrupted themselves too.
I dont think you could have stated it any better than:
“Admittedly, Austen’s world is idealized, yet consider this: who would you prefer your daughter to bring home? 1) a young man whose sexual imagination has been formed by Jane Austen along with Homer, Virgil, The Song of Solomon, Dante, and Shakespeare or 2) a young man who has spent the last ten years of his life fantasizing about women whose images he has objectified and consumed through pornography? Who will make a better husband? A better lover? A better father?”
Well done.
I call shenanigans. Austin’s stories are all about a class divided society where marriage involves money. Wickham and Lydia are a scandal mostly because Wickham is out of class and broke. Otherwise their relationship would have brought back the honor Her mother thinks it has. Promiscuity is common across time, and this seems to be the center of your gripe.
No consequentialist argument can hold onthis count. Things are not better or worse due to porn or romance novels. They are more open. But is that good or bad? Only in whether you want to see or hear about it. Are we better people when we don’t hear about other’s vices? I don’t know.
What I do know is that chastity for it’s own sake is empty prudery. Chastity must be understood as a testimony of Christ’s relationship to us for it to have real meaning. Focusing on this peculiarity won’t inoculate your kids from promiscuity. But it will instill the true meaning of marriage and bear testimony of the gospel. If you are worried about their promiscuity for any other reason it is just as selfishly as Lydia’s mother, and just as foolishly. Your reputation before men is a point of pride, and no more.
While I applaud your call for the return of the gentleman, I can’t help but think ‘blame it on the porn’ is a lazy and, ultimately, damaging argument. The cause and effect is inverted: men (and boys) aren’t seeing degradation in porn and learning that it’s acceptable; they’re learning that it’s acceptable and looking for it in porn. Perhaps if we worried less about policing content and more about raising our children to believe that people are deserving of respect in all contexts, including sex, we might have fewer men turned on by objectification, and fewer women willing to accept it.
To bemoan objectification in a materialist age is to run straight up against the great abiding shibboleth governing this tottering civilization. Eros, Desire, Want, they are frequently shaded in fear. Increased sexual activity is often seen in populations experiencing heightened fear and stress.
When security is used as a salve to distract those who one is engaged in fear mongering with, you can be sure that the resulting insecurity will emerge from the groin with fevered flow.
The great ongoing leveling of our caricatured and ballyhooed “Equal Rights” , though frequently touted in terms of love is as far from true and abiding love as anything can get. It is a technocratic and mechanistic love and pornography is just one of the gears.
“chastity for it’s own sake is empty prudery”
This is making the perfect an enemy of good.
That one is not within the essential Tao does not mean that one is in hell. Well, ultimately one might be, but I believe the religious traditions do recognize distance metric in Tao space.
While promiscuity is common across time,
it is not constant and it was never before publicly celebrated as now. That counts for something. Society is not merely sum of individuals.
Pornography is certainly a significant part of the problem but there are many other components such as no fault divorce and contraception.
Since Ronald Regan, as the Governor of California, signed legislation allowing no fault divorce the foundation of marriage has been severely eroded. Even the United States Roman Catholic Church has failed to resist this moral erosion and by liberalizing annulments; our small percentage of world wide Roman Catholics account for a high percentage of world wide annulments?
http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-evolution-of-divorce
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/What+God+has+Joined+Together%3a+The+Annulment+Crisis+in+American…-a021013153
There is also the problem with contraception and its consequences of reducing sexuality to a convenience by divorcing sexuality from bearing children. Once our society believed they had a right to control conception artificially, it didn’t take long for abortion to be considered an acceptable plan for failure of chemical contraception.
This coupling of no fault divorce and contraception has profoundly altered our culture and now individual selfishness is the norm and spouses, children and the unborn are all expendable if it interferes with ones desire for happiness.
We now we have a culture that encourages excessive alcohol consumption, promiscuous sex and fear of any meaningful commitment. Isn’t it absurd that the difference between alcohol fueled fornication and rape is two letters.
As a young woman who dresses modestly and holds a fairly conservative position on sex, I will never forget my shock while sitting with two very respectable, older women in their 70s and 80s and listening to their discussion of women on TV. They agreed young women today bring rape upon themselves because of their immodest clothing and dancing. What else do you expect from men when a woman wears a skirt that short or a dress that low cut?, they asked.
It occurred to me, perhaps the problem was the expectations of men, or lack of them, from past generations. Perhaps it’s a cliche to say that people enable rape when they blame the woman for her actions. Of course women act stupidly getting drunk, putting themselves in some bad situations. But we don’t blame the person whose property is stolen by a burglar from an unlocked car or house. Why do people still blame rape victims?
CC, you have a point, but it needs to be seen from the other side. If a woman dresses like a prostitute and acts like a prostitute there are any number of predatory males out there who will not hesitate to treat her like one. The “what do you expect?” of the old women you mention may possibly reflect this observation more than it does blame in the strict sense.
CC I applaud you dressing modestly and having conservative values regarding sex, you are likely also moderate in drinking alcohol. I suspect that you likewise value meaningful commitments rather that superficial behavior that we see in many young people.
Unfortunately when women dress seductively, act seductively, drink to excess and push the envelope regarding modest behavior they are doing this to attract attention. Many don’t understand, some do understand, that they are attracting men who have interest that are often selfish and destructive. It seems appalling that a politician will tell these women, or actually believe it himself, that a woman can push the envelope of seductive sexuality and then turn off what they have initiated like turning on a light switch. Rather they should be saying that there are many opportunities to say no before finding oneself naked and drunk in the room of a man who they don’t really know. I think you understand that dressing modestly is saying no, your modest behavior is saying no, not binge drinking is saying no and not putting yourself in a situation where you are alone with a man who has not proven that he can be trusted is saying “no I have too much self respect than to be used”.
Your point is well taken and you are absolutely correct that this is placing the blame on the woman, and this is very disturbing, but there are many sexual predators in our culture and they are becoming bolder. Often justice does not serve these unfortunate women and when it does it is after the violation. For example who can honestly have any respect or sympathy for an accomplished athlete who is married but has placed himself in the indefensible situation of being alone in a hotel room with another woman who accused him of rape; how many cases like this even go to trial.
Unfortunately many women seem to find predatory men attractive, when they should be seeking .men who are respectful and seeking a mutual commitment. A respectful man should avoid scantily clad women seeking attention and seek a young woman who dresses modestly, have conservative values and drink only occasionally and moderately. A respectable man should never allow himself to be in a situation where his integrity is in question.
I think the author is grasping at straws trying to blame young women’s behavior on men. Men behave like gentlemen only when women reject them otherwise. I think you have to be blind not to see that.
@Dave Parsons There may be flaws in the author’s theories regarding Jane Austen’s times and if pornography is what has changed society to the “extremes” we find ourselves living in today. HOWEVER, rape is and has never been about one’s sexuality. Women are never “asking” for it. Men never have the right to press a physical advantage sexually. Women who are completely covered and gathering firewood in Africa are raped. Women walking through a parking ramp in a conservative business suit are raped.
Men behave like gentlemen not because they have been rejected by women for “behaving badly”, but because they have been taught that all humans have value and must be treated as if they do. They are also taught that rape is not acceptable. Joe Biden stated it because there still seem to men who don’t know. (ie Dave Parsons) Like it or not, rape is not simply a female problem. Males are raped daily, elderly are raped, children are raped and not because they drank too much or were being sexually explicit. Male behavior is not determined by what others do but what they themselves choose to do. Give men a little credit….at least for their own actions.
I love Jane Austen. Her society and her characters charm and entice my imagination. She depicts the good, the bad and the ugly of her society. Jane Austen never had to find a way to feed her children when her husband left or died. Which happened often during Austen’s day. Women were raped during her times either within her station or below her station. There was porn during her times and women reading bootlegged racy novels then as well.
Do I know whether the acceptance of pornography has made the world worse? I tend to think it has more to do with what you teach your son about women than how much of a woman’s anatomy they see. I read the article, I read the comments and I have been and seen many of the situations depicted as the female in those roles. I’m now 43 with two adult daughters and one teenage son and I teach them they same thing no matter their gender. I teach them that they must safeguard themselves against predators for they are out there. I teach them not to drink alcohol unless someone they trust is with them to ensure their safety. I teach them that sex is a physical act but love takes care of you when you’re sick. They can be separate but it’s best when you have both.
These were interesting theories and thought provoking ideas. I don’t have the answers but the ideas I’ve been working with have been working for my family. I know one thing to be false : “I think the author is grasping at straws trying to blame young women’s behavior on men. Men behave like gentlemen only when women reject them otherwise. I think you have to be blind not to see that.”
Sorry Dave!
@Amy Alexander-Beckstrand: I thought the point of the article was to lament the changes in young women’s behavior (enabling the so-called hook-up culture), and to excuse their behavior by blaming it all on men’s demand for pornography. To quickly change the subject with mindless lectures on rape is intellectually lazy and unhelpful. The hook-up culture has nothing to do with rape. It’s about women giving men what men have always wanted: easy sex. Men’s timeless desire for easy sex hasn’t changed. But women’s willingness to provide it has. Women, especially so-called “feminists”, need to look inside themselves for the explanation.
P.S. I won’t share my credentials, except to say that mine beat yours. 🙂
@Dave Parsons: Your credentials beating mine isn’t saying a whole lot for yourself, but if it helps your ego, have fun basking in mediocrity, because my credentials are nil. I will concede that I may have misunderstood your intention. I have been accused of being intellectually lazy before and I do not deny it. Sometimes when you’re good at something you stick with it. As a woman, especially a so-called “feminist” I do look inside myself for the explanation of both my current and past behavior. My question, as I believe yours may also be (please correct me if I am wrong) is why are women always the controlling issue. Are men not as responsible for the “hook-up” culture? Maybe women have a timeless desire for easy sex and the fact that they are willing to admit it is the real change. I think we pass through a phase of wanting easy, mindless, purely physical sexual encounters as men and women to a point where we want more from life than just sexual gratification. Is your point that men are content with easy sex? I do take umbrage as to my mindless lecture on rape as I don’t believe I was the first to connect “women’s behavior”, pornography and it’s connection with blaming a victim of rape.
P.S. Hand down you’re the smart one and I’m just another of the uneducated masses.
Gian: “…but I believe the religious traditions do recognize distance metric in Tao space. ”
Hee hee! T-ao spaces are *so* metrizable! 🙂
Perhaps we can model the extremes of prudishness and promiscuity as discrete and indiscrete topologies.
It seems there is a weakness for false dichotomies in the comments. Isn’t it obvious from 15 seconds of looking at how we actually live in the world that actions are products of both what I choose and what others do? Blame is not a zero-sum game.
I would blame the robber for stealing and the homeowner for being a self-absorbed fool. And if the homeowner was actually flaunting his goods…
In some jurisdictions you can get a ticket if you leave your car unlocked. You also shouldn’t flaunt alcohol in front of an alcoholic. This isn’t to let thieves and alcoholics off the hook but rather to recognize that we all have a responsibility to each other.
An award-winning documentary, “Risky Business: A Look Inside America’s Adult Film Industry,” examines many of the current issues surrounding the adult film industry, including many of the items addressed in this article. The film’s website is RiskyBusinessTheMovie.com
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