by James A. Bacon
Vigen Guroian, a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, ran a sexuality seminar a year ago in which students talked candidly about what he describes as the “deep, pervasive sexual chaos” that dominated the grounds. William Wilson, an academic dean, has met with “dozens” of young women so shaken from their sexual experiences that they had stopped attending classes.
Guroian and Wilson are well versed in the problem of rape and sexual assault on campus. And in an op-ed piece published yesterday in the Richmond Times-Dispatch as well as an essay in First Things, they argue that university and student leaders campaigning against the “culture of rape” are focusing on the symptom rather than the underlying cause — “a toxic sexual environment that damages all the young people touched by it.”
Their analysis of sexual violence at the University of Virginia, which erupted into a national issue with the now-discredited Rolling Stone article about a fraternity-house gang rape, dovetails precisely with the arguments I advanced in this blog at the time. One difference is that, while I opined from afar, Guroian and Wilson base their observations on testimony from dozens of students. Another is that they are even more strident in their portrayal of how campus sexual culture has degenerated.
During the sexual revolution of the 1960s, colleges and universities abolished the “rules, manners and conventions of courtship” that they had long encouraged, write the two religion profs. No more sexually segregated dormitories. No more adult supervision at frat houses. No more restrictions about visits to bedrooms. As the old restraints fell away, a new campus culture of sexuality arose.
Our students have told us what is wrong. In vivid detail they have recounted stories about “incestuous” dorm “hook-up” parties, young women spread out all but naked on fraternity house floors in the early morning hours, and the general rough and tumble of sex gone awry, a formless sex with no purpose other than momentary impulse or recreational titillation. …
We contend that young women were not empowered by the changes that followed. Rather, the hook-up culture and casual cohabitation in dormitories gravely disadvantaged young women. …
None of our students have objected that we exaggerate the sexual free-for-all that envelopes their lives. No one has argued that the demise of dating and courtship has brought about liberation from repressive sex roles. The laissez-faire sexual economy, which the university lets happen, puts young women at risk and threatens to turn young men into louts.
What is to be done? Defining the problem narrowly as rape and sexual assault is not helpful.
When for administrative purposes we categorize rape as one specimen among many of sexual misconduct, we lose a vital sense of the full scale of sexual disorder that afflicts college life. When we become incapable of responding to rape as what it is, an act just one step short of murder, then all else that has gone awry with sex in the university takes on the look of normality.
One way to start is to admit what is occurring: “For decades a destructive disordering of relations between the sexes has festered right under our eyes [and] a feckless institutionalization of the sexual revolution in our colleges has resulted in maiming countless young people,” write Guroian and Wilson. They go on:
Complete neutrality about sex leads to complete sexual exploitation, and sometimes violence. We must stop blaming fraternities, drinking or the heritage of an all-male university education for the sexual chaos beyond our classrooms. That chaos is of our own making.
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