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A deep dive into nuances of campus sexual assault
The 2015 documentary “The Hunting Ground” made campus sexual assault seem like a pandemic. That same year, Rolling Stone magazine’s retraction of a discredited tale about a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity made it seem like a hoax.
Vanessa Grigoriadis’ “Blurred Lines,” based on significant reporting on college campuses, adopts neither view, seeking out instead the nuances and complexities of the issue. Grigoriadis, a contributing editor at The New York Times Magazine and Vanity Fair, admires the new generation of activists who are drawing attention to nonconsensual sex and the culture of “toxic masculinity” that supports it. But she also expresses compassion for a subset of the young men accused by these women, seeing them as a second set of victims.
Grigoriadis strings together scenes and interviews from about 20 campuses, notably her own radically inclined alma mater, Wesleyan University, and fraternity-dominated Syracuse University. The book has a discursive quality and seems bloated, in need of a tighter edit.
But Grigoriadis does succeed in depicting the ambiguities that exist around changing gender norms, the attempts of colleges to adjudicate them and the ways she’d like to see both evolve. She points out perceptively that the bedroom is one place where today’s otherwise strong, self-confident young women still too often feel pressured and unable to advocate for their own interests.
The title is borrowed from a 2013 Robin Thicke song that inspired controversy, in part, because of the sentiments expressed by its chorus: “I know you want it, but you’re a good girl.” Grigoriadis not only condemns the implied notion that “no means yes,” she also supports the new campus standard of affirmative consent and only an explicit “yes means yes.”
It seems obvious that such clear, unambiguous communication about what is acceptable and desired in sexual encounters can be challenging for young men and women still on the cusp of adulthood and often less than sober. Without it, though, Grigoriadis suggests, the question of consent, central to most campus sexual assault charges, can be murky. Hookups can lead to painful misunderstandings, and intoxication only adds to the confusion.
Sexual assault or rape accusations can be particularly thorny when the parties involved have had a prior consensual sexual relationship. One example is the case of former Columbia University students Emma Sulkowicz and Paul Nungesser, which Grigoriadisreturns to periodically in “Blurred Lines.”
In 2013, Sulkowicz accused Nungesser, a German architecture student who had been her lover, of anal rape. The university found him “not responsible,” and, in protest, Sulkowicz began carrying a mattress on her back, a performance art project that sparked a national wave of campus activism. Nungesser, like a growing number of accused men, sued the university for allegedly supporting his defamation and in August received an undisclosed financial settlement.
Grigoriadis (mostly) believes the women, like Sulkowicz, who say they have been assaulted. But she argues, too, that the vast majority of those accused are not serial rapists or hardened predators but rather young men guilty of some mix of bad judgment, caddishness and cluelessness.
Defying some feminist shibboleths, Grigoriadis advocates that young women exhibit a degree of wariness, avoiding drunkenness and “guys who exhibit toxic masculinity,” and learning the rudiments of self-defense. She wants schools to discourage fraternity parties, a key locus of sexual assault, early in the school year, before freshmen have found their footing.
In a fluid cultural environment, where today’s certainties are tomorrow’s taboos, it’s difficult to produce a definitive book on the subject of campus sexual assault. But credit Grigoriadis with a fair-minded and informative try.