“If rape culture in America is real, why does the case for it rest on so much fabulism?”
I n July, a case that had become a rallying cry for campus activism against sexual assault came to a conclusion of sorts—with a victory for the accused man. Columbia University settled a lawsuit brought by 2015 graduate Paul Nungesser. It stemmed from an accusation of rape hurled at Nungesser by fellow Columbia undergraduate Emma Sulkowicz, who famously carried a mattress around campus to protest the school’s alleged mishandling of her complaint.
The lawsuit charged that Sulkowicz’s activism amounted to gender-based harassment of Nungesser and was condoned by the university, which had allowed her to make a senior art thesis of her mattress-toting. The settlement included a public statement from Columbia that not only reaffirmed that Nungesser had been exonerated in an investigation conducted by the school, but also acknowledged that his final year on campus following his exposure as an accused rapist was “not what Columbia would want any of its students to experience.” He found himself shunned by most of his classmates, harassed by activists, and depicted naked in two revenge-porn drawings by Sulkowicz, exhibited in a campus gallery as another part of her art project.
The acknowledgment was as close as the university could bring itself to repudiating Sulkowicz’s crusade, which had been hailed on the cover of New York magazine three years ago as the harbinger of a new “sexual revolution on campus.”
While other activists have continued to support “Mattress Girl,” her revolutionary halo has been tarnished considerably in those three years. New information provided by Nungesser (first disclosed by this author in The Daily Beast in early 2015) showed that in the weeks following the alleged rape, the two had had banter-filled Facebook chats in which Sulkowicz discussed coming to his parties, talked about having a “Paul/Emma chill sesh,” and gushed, “I love you Paul!” in response to his birthday wishes.
Sulkowicz’s defenders have argued that victims of sexual violence often act in ways that seem irrational to outsiders, particularly when the assailant is someone close to them. (Sulkowicz and Nungesser had been close friends and had been sexually intimate on two prior occasions.) While this is no doubt true, the totality of the circumstances makes Sulkowicz’s account highly improbable—particularly since her rape claim did not involve an ambiguous incident that a victim could initially excuse as a misunderstanding, but a sudden physical assault in which she was choked, hit in the face, and anally raped so violently that she screamed in pain.
But even as Nungesser finally got a measure of satisfaction, progressive opinion was exploding in outrage on a related matter—the fact that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was suggesting that fairness to the accused should be a high priority in campus sexual-assault proceedings under Title IX, the federal gender-equity law. DeVos has invited advocates for accused students to her “listening meetings” on the issue, along with activists championing victims. In response, psychologist Peggy Drexler, a Web columnist for CNN, decried her initiative as “a huge step back for women’s safety, and equality in general.” Drexler had even harsher words for Acting Assistant Secretary Candice E. Jackson, who had spoken sympathetically of meeting with a mother who said her son had become suicidal after being falsely accused. “Jackson’s words,” Drexler wrote, “specifically serve to perpetuate rape culture.”
N ot long ago, the concept of “rape culture”—at least as applied to contemporary liberal societies in North America and Western Europe—existed only on the fringes of radical feminist activism and academic rhetoric. Yet in the past several years, this term has become ubiquitous in mainstream left-of-center discourse; indeed, in many bien-pensant quarters, the very denial of its existence is nothing less than heresy. When some musicians tried to organize a boycott of a Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra benefit concert because conservative author and radio host Dennis Prager was guest-conducting, the offenses imputed to Prager included the assertion that “there’s no culture of rape at our universities.”