Sexual Citizens Read online

  SEXUAL

  CITIZENS

  A LANDMARK STUDY OF SEX,

  POWER, AND ASSAULT ON CAMPUS

  JENNIFER S. HIRSCH

  &

  SHAMUS KHAN

  FOR THE STUDENTS WHO SHARED THEIR STORIES AND THEIR LIVES WITH US

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION:A NEW APPROACH

  1SEXUAL ASSAULTS

  2UNDER ONE ROOF

  3THE TOXIC CAMPUS BREW

  4WHAT IS SEX FOR?

  5CONSENT

  6ACTS OF ENTITLEMENT, SELF-ABSORPTION, AND VIOLENCE

  7THE POWER OF THE GROUP

  8THE AFTERMATH

  9GENDER AND BEYOND

  CONCLUSIONS:FORMING SEXUAL CITIZENS

  APPENDIX A: METHODOLOGY

  APPENDIX B: TABLES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  A NEW APPROACH

  Why do campus sexual assaults happen? And what should be done to prevent them? Sexual Citizens offers parents, students, school administrators, policy makers, and the public a new way to understand sexual assault and an approach to prevention that extends far beyond the campus gates. Our perspective is based upon a landmark research project: the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation, or SHIFT. Along with nearly thirty other researchers, we’ve spent the last five years undertaking one of the most comprehensive studies of campus sex and sexual assault. Sexual Citizens draws upon that research, providing detailed portraits of a wide range of undergraduates’ sexual experiences—from consensual sex to sexual assault—at Columbia University. We’ll hear about men like Austin, whose attentiveness to his girlfriend’s pleasure contrasts starkly with the night he assaulted a woman he barely knew, when both were drunk in her room. We’ll discuss why Adam never talked to his boyfriend about how pushy and forceful he was about sex, even after his boyfriend came home one evening after a long night of drinking and “basically raped” him. We’ll write about Michaela, a queer Black woman, who refused to accept as normal being touched, brushed up against, and grabbed on a dance floor—experiences that heterosexual women (and some heterosexual men) see as an inevitable part of being in those spaces. And we’ll meet women like Luci, who was raped by Scott, a senior, when she was a freshman, and a virgin. As Scott took off Luci’s pants, she exclaimed, “No! Don’t!” His response was, “It’s okay.”

  We spoke with many students whose pre-college sex education consisted primarily of instruction about the perils of sex. Once on campus, they had all learned about “affirmative consent”; they dutifully told us that in order for sex to be consensual, both parties have to say “yes,” and be sober enough to know what they’re saying yes to. But over the course of our research we found that the moment of consent frequently looks more like this, often drunken, text exchange:

  We have to do better. Sexual Citizens shows how.

  Since the fall of 2014, we have been part of SHIFT’s research on campus sexual assault. Jennifer codirected SHIFT with her friend and colleague clinical psychologist Claude Ann Mellins, an expert in adolescent and young adult development, mental health, substance use, and trauma.1 Sexual Citizens primarily draws on the ethnographic component of the SHIFT research, which Jennifer and Shamus led together. Our ethnographic research, conducted between the late summer of 2015 and January of 2017, consisted of over 150 interviews, about two hours each, eliciting young people’s broad accounts of their lives and how sex fit into them. We combined these interviews with talking to students in groups, and having SHIFT research team members spend time with students in dorms, the bus to the athletic fields, fraternity basements, and spaces of worship. SHIFT also included a large survey of over 1,600 undergraduates’ histories, relationships, and experiences with sex and assault, and another that surveyed nearly 500 students daily for 60 days, asking them about stress, sleep, socializing, sex, sexual assault, and substance use in the prior twenty-four hours. (Throughout the book, the term “substance use” includes alcohol, illegal drugs, or legal drugs used outside the supervision of a physician; the primary substance on which we focus is alcohol.) Sexual Citizens builds on the work of others who have conducted research on campus sexual assault using interviews and observations.2 But the design—deep ethnographic engagement, nested within the work of a large research team—has allowed us to contextualize and enrich our findings, yielding fresh insights.

  It isn’t just the amount or type of data that makes us different. It’s how we think about the problem. Our focus is on the social roots of sexual assault. This is a starkly different starting point than the two major themes of public discussion. The first directs attention to predators, or toxic masculinity, as the problem. The second is the focus on what to do after assaults occur—how to adjudicate those “he said/she said” moments. Instead of thinking in terms of predators or post-assault procedures, SHIFT examined the social drivers of assault, in order to develop new approaches to making assault a less common feature of college life. We deployed what public health scholars call an “ecological model.”3 This approach situates individuals, along with their problem behaviors, in the broader context of their relationships, their pre-college histories, the organizations they are a part of, and the cultures that influence them.

  Thinking about sexual assault as a public health problem expands the focus from individuals and how they interact, to systems. If we know that people are drinking water that is polluted, one solution is to try and educate every person about how to use that water in safe ways. Another is to go upstream and remove the toxins from the water, reducing the need to change individual behavior one person at a time. Effectively, this book asks, “What would the ‘clean water’ approach to sexual assault look like?” The creation of a context that nudges people toward making decisions that are good for themselves and others, or “choice architecture,” a theory for which Richard Thaler won the Nobel Prize in economics, calls attention to how much impact can come from working at the system and community level.4 In her prior work on HIV, Jennifer has argued for prevention approaches that go beyond working “one penis at a time.”5 In the case of sexual assault, in addition to instructing students, “Don’t rape anyone; don’t get raped; don’t let your friends get raped,” what if prevention work did more to address the social context that makes rape and other forms of sexual assault such a predictable element of campus life?

  This perspective yields a new language for sexual assault, based on analyzing the ecosystems in which it occurs: the forces that influence young adults’ sexual lives; the relationships people share; the power dynamics between them; how sex fits into students’ lives, and how physical spaces, alcohol, and peers produce opportunities for sex and influence the ways in which sex is subsequently interpreted and defined by those having it. Our approach mines everything from sexual literacy (or more precisely, illiteracy), to underage drinking, social cliques, stress, shame, and the spaces where they sleep. It incorporates earlier feminist writing on sexual assault, emphasizing gender inequality, sexuality, and power. But it expands upon that approach by exploring how race, socioeconomic status, and age, to name just a few intersecting forms of social inequality, are also essential to understanding assault. These factors deeply affect people’s sexual lives. This points to another way in which our approach is unique. While many insist that rape and sex are fundamentally different things, we maintain that understanding what young people are trying to accomplish with sex, why, and the contexts within which sex happens are all essential for a comprehensive analysis of sexual assault.

  Better prevention is urgently needed. An analysis of SHIFT survey data led by Claude Mellins found that over one in four women, one in eight men, and more than one out of three gender-nonconforming students said that they’d been assaulted.6 Columbia is like other schools; similar rates of assault have been confirmed time and again by surveys in many different higher education contexts.7 The risk of assault is highest freshman year, but it accumulates over time; among seniors who completed the SHIFT survey, one in three women and almost one in six men had experienced an assault.8 And for many, it’s not just one assault; students who had been assaulted were assaulted, on average, three times. It’s not that college is particularly dangerous, compared to other settings. While the evidence is mixed, some studies suggest that young women in higher education settings are less likely to be assaulted than those of the same age who are not in school; and no study that we know of finds that women in college are more likely to be assaulted.9

  The stories that students—and not just women—shared with us made clear the harms of sexual assault, and how parts of that suffering ripple through the whole campus community. If preventing sexual assault’s emotional and social harms is insufficient to justify more attention to prevention, we can also point to sexual assault’s vast economic impact. In 2017 researchers from the Centers for Disease Control estimated that across the population of the United States, the economic cost of rape was over $3 trillion.10

  We seek to move readers beyond simply being shocked by these statistics, or saddened by the stories that follow. Our goal is to impel action, but from a position of empathy and understanding, rather than fear.

  SEXUAL PROJECTS, SEXUAL CITIZENSHIP, SEXUAL GEOGRAPHIES

  We explain students’ experiences—with pleasurable sex, sex that is consensual but not so pleasurable, and sexual assault—through three concepts: sexual projects, sexual citizenship, and sexual geographies. Together, these
help us understand why sexual assault is a predictable consequence of how our society is organized, rather than solely a problem of individual bad actors. This sad reality has a hopeful implication: in working to better articulate sexual projects for young people, to cultivate their sexual citizenship, and to rearrange campus sexual geographies, we can make sexual assault far less likely. The conceptual framework that animates our analysis charts the path forward.

  A sexual project encompasses the reasons why anyone might seek a particular sexual interaction or experience.11 Pleasure is an obvious project; but a sexual project can also be to develop and maintain a relationship; or it can be a project to not have sex; or to have sex for comfort; or to try to have children; or because sex can advance our position or status within a group, or increase the status of groups to which we belong. A sexual project can also be to have a particular kind of experience, like sex in the library stacks; sex can be the goal rather than a strategy toward another goal. People don’t just have one sexual project. They can have many. Wanting intimacy doesn’t mean not wanting other things, like to hook up from time to time.

  Plenty of young people, driven by sexual anxieties, described college as a time to acquire sexual experience. In the words of one young man, he wanted to learn to “give good dick.” Other students’ projects were about their own gender or sexual identity. For those who might be exploring their trans, or queer, or gay identities, sex wasn’t just about who to have sex with. It was a project of coming to understand the person they were, or wanted to be. Still other projects were about status and building relationships with peers, sometimes with an edge of competition. Men and women would ask each other “What’s your number?” meaning, “How many people have you had sex with?” In that question, to be sure, “sex” is a purposefully vague umbrella term, encompassing a range of practices.12 For some students it meant penetrative intercourse, whereas others, particularly LGBTQ students, counted oral or manual stimulation as sex. But regardless of what they count, students strive for numbers high enough to convey expertise, but low enough to dodge being labeled a “fuckboy” or “whore.” Some students are far more interested in finding a relationship within which sex can happen. Others want intimacy but imagine that a partner can take up too much time, and so they satisfy their desire for a sexually intimate connection—or rather, as we show, partially satisfy it—outside of relationships, finding warmth and pleasure that feels otherwise missing in their achievement-oriented lives.

  The young people in whose world we were immersed were frequently figuring out their sexual projects through trial and error, to no small degree because no one had spent much time talking to them about what a sexual project might be. Some, ashamed of their desires or their bodies, drink heavily to escape their rational, deliberate, considered state in order to feel comfortable having sex. For others, alcohol silences confusion rather than shame; they’re totally unclear on their projects, unable to answer, for themselves, the question “What is sex for?” Getting drunk is a good way to avoid thinking about it.

  As we map the range of students’ sexual projects, we shy away from judgment about the morality of different projects, about what sex should be for. Our goal is to encourage families and institutions to initiate conversations about what kinds of sexual projects fit with their values. We heard about so many missed opportunities to shape and clarify young people’s values about sex. Many students told us that all their parents did was to hand them a book; at best, children were told, with some degree of discomfort, that they could ask questions later if they had them. The message was that sex was something uncomfortable, something not to be spoken about. Learning that it was best not to talk about sex played out, sometimes with disastrous consequences, in their future sexual experiences. Almost no one related an experience where an adult sat them down and conveyed that sex would be an important and potentially joyful part of their life, and so they should think about what they wanted from sex, and how to realize those desires with other people in a respectful way.

  Time and again, we thought of how disappointed we were, not in young people, but in the communities that had raised them. And failed them. Students we spoke with had been bombarded with messages about college and career, but had generally received little guidance for how to think about sexually intimate relationships. Hungry for guidance, young people gleaned lessons from elsewhere: from their peers who are similarly in the dark, or from pornography.13

  Crucially, sexual projects are embedded within other projects—like college projects—which together make up people’s life projects.14 A college project can be to learn, to fall in love, to get a job, to get drunk and do drugs, to discover what’s meaningful in life, or to figure out how to live on one’s own, away from one’s family, and in ways one desires. We adopt a “lifecourse perspective,” which acknowledges people’s multiple, emergent aims over the course of their lives, and examines how future aims and past experiences impact their present and future.15

  Though forged in communities, sexual projects are intensely personal. And yet how partners fit within one’s sexual project is a critical moral question. Sadly, sexual partners often fit in as objects, rather than fully imagined, self-determining humans. We found that students whose sexual goal is connecting with another person are much more attentive to whether or not their partner wants to have sex than those whose goal is pleasure or status accrual. Treating people like objects doesn’t necessarily mean a student will inadvertently assault someone, but not treating people like objects is a good way to make sure not to.

  Our second grounding concept, sexual citizenship, denotes the acknowledgment of one’s own right to sexual self-determination and, importantly, recognizes the equivalent right in others. Sexual citizenship isn’t something some are born with and others are born without. Rather, sexual citizenship is fostered, and institutionally and culturally supported. We do not use the term sexual citizenship as it is sometimes used, to call attention to the state’s designation of people as citizens or noncitizens, allocating rights and benefits dependent on sexual identity. Rather, we mean a socially produced sense of enfranchisement and right to sexual agency.16

  Sexual citizenship focuses attention on how some people feel entitled to others’ bodies, and others do not feel entitled to their own bodies. As a social goal, promoting sexual citizenship entails creating conditions that promote the capacity for sexual self-determination in all people, enabling them to feel secure, capable, and entitled to enact their sexual projects; and simultaneously insisting that all recognize others’ right to self-determination. Sexual citizenship is a community project that requires developing individual capacities, social relationships founded in respect for others’ dignity, organizational environments that seek to educate and affirm the citizenship of all people, and a culture of respect. In contrast to sexual projects, where out of respect for diversity and the freedom of self-expression the role of public institutions should be limited, promoting sexual citizenship is a project in which the state has a fundamental role.

  All but the most progressive American sex education consistently denies young people’s sexual citizenship—communicating, in the words of one of our mentors, the notion that “sex is a dirty rotten nasty thing that you should only do to someone you love after you are married.” Plenty of young people told us that they had had sex education, but that it was taught by a teacher who was mortified to be teaching it, or whose message was one of fear: of pregnancy, of sexually transmitted infections, of all the terrible things that sex could bring into their lives. Whether from school-based sex education, from their families, or from their religious upbringing, many students we spoke with had absorbed the lesson that sex was potentially terrible and most certainly dangerous. But in the United States today there’s likely more than a full decade between a young person’s first sexual experience and marriage. And that’s if they ever marry, which is decreasingly likely.17 It’s not that people are having sex younger; the average age at first sex, around 17 in the United States, hasn’t changed much for over four decades.18 If anything, young people today are having less sex, overall.19 What has changed significantly, however, is the age at which young people are getting married.20 In 1960 the average age at first marriage was twenty-three for men and twenty for women. Today, men first marry, on average, when they’re thirty, and women when they’re twenty-eight.21