When guilty is the only verdict
Anne Garvey salutes a grounded American feminist. Marina Gerner finds hope in a tale of a troubled hero
Unwanted Advances
Verso, £12.99
Reviewed by Anne Garvey
THE PLIGHT of US campus lads during their alcohol-fuelled frat gettogethers (gatherings that sound more like Sodom and Gomorrah on the eve of the Lord’s wrath than any student party) seem a long way down any list of deserving causes. As does the anguish of older academics accused of illicit entanglements with undergraduates.
Writer and academic Laura Kipnis has her work cut out in her championing of these hedonistic youths and rueful professors who find themselves arraigned by college proctors for forcing themselves on women students.
But Kipnis’s courageous defence of these men — the manic, libertine young and the old enough to know better
— is impressive. As a compelling writer and fearless truth-teller, Kipnis contends that the multi-million-dollar industry built upon the crisis of assaults in American universities has driven a culture of McCarthyesque vilification and Kafkaesque investigation.
In a bid to halt a welter of sexual misconduct, all manner of relative innocents have been brought to the end of their careers.
“I hear repeatedly about professors investigated for violations for dating a former student,” Kipnis reports, and she follows the appalling humiliation and defeat of one senior philosopher, Peter Ludlow, accused of inappropriate conduct with two young women students, who — although one of his accusers emailed him on the day she would accuse him of rape: “If I could I would teleport there right now… I love you… So in love… Dude I’m reading our old emails, we’re made for each other” — lost his job, his home and his reputation and now lives in exile in Mexico. Kipnis, a model of fairness, has herself fallen foul of what she calls the Torquemadas of college life. A college inquiry into her work had all the elements of a medieval heresy inquisition. This, for publishing an essay of dissent, questioning the need for such investigations.
More than once, she mentions Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, in which a clutch of hysterical New England girls accuse fellow-villagers of witchcraft and hound a noble, older man, John Proctor, to his death by hanging. The parallels are not fanciful.
But Kipnis is not bullied into silence. Undaunted, she goes into battle bringing her own solution to the problem. And it’s pretty simple: women must abandon the enfeebled-victim role assigned them and assert themselves.
“Women want to have sexual adventures and make mistakes but there’s a growing tendency to off-load responsibility, to make other people pay for those mistakes.
“This isn’t feminism”, she writes. And she identifies the origin of the epidemic as booze — knocked back in breathtaking quantity by both sexes. This, Kipnis claims, is the cause of much of the forbidden and disturbing behaviour displayed by young men. And drunken girls are unable to say yes — or no — to sexual advances or indeed recall whether they even happened.
Apparently, this is never mentioned in America. Too much money to be made out of endless codes, investigations and safe-space organisations, when a cool dose of self-preservation would, Kipnis argues, do a lot to put a stop to the madness.
Anne Garvey is a freelance journalist