A landmark judicial decision was handed last week that will have important implications for college men wrongly accused of sexual assault. In Doe v. Washington & Lee Univ., 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 102426 (W.D. Va. 2015), a federal judge appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton ruled that when a college promotes the idea that a woman’s post-intercourse regret is tantamount to rape, it manufactures a climate of gender discrimination against male students that can “railroad” (the court’s word, not mine) the innocent who are wrongly accused of sex offenses. Read the decision here–and I summarize it in the next section below. The Doe v. W&L decision is among the most important events for wrongly accused college men in a long time because it shines a light on the root cause of the so-called campus rape “epidemic”–something this blog has called the “regret asymmetry” that separates the sexes. Women, more than men, regret casual sex, and it is these unsatisfying sexual unions caused by regret–not rape–that is the real sex problem on campus. Read about it here.
What is chilling is the allegation in the case by the accused male student that a college administrator openly promotes the idea that regret is tantamount to rape–an idea that is absurd, unjust, and hateful all at the same time. Sadly, this thinking appears to be gaining ground among college women (see below), and it needs to be stopped. It is time for a national conversation about the single most important issue when it comes to campus sexual assault, the “regret asymmetry” that separates young men and women.
Doe v. W&L
In the Doe v. W&L case, a W&L student, pseudonymously called “John Doe,” sued W&L for,inter alia, violating Title IX (which forbids gender discrimination in colleges) in connection with his expulsion for alleged nonconsensual sexual intercourse with a W&L female student, pseudonymously called “Jane Doe.” W&L filed a motion to dismiss, which the court granted in part and denied in part. All of the facts in the case are taken from Doe’s complaint–whether they are accurate will need to be proven at trial. Doe’s complaint averred that John and Jane met at a party then proceeded back to his room where Jane initiated sexual intimacy, and the two proceeded to have consensual sex. The next morning, he drove her home, and they exchanged phone numbers. Jane later told a friend she “had a good time.” Thereafter, John and Jane became Facebook “friends,” and John texted her, “. . . I felt like we had a pretty good connection,” and she responded, “haha I thought we did as well.”
Approximately one month after their initial encounter, they again had consensual sex. But then, Jane saw John at a party kissing another female and left upset. That summer, Jane went to work at a women’s clinic that dealt with sexual assault issues. Seven months after the initial encounter, Jane visited a therapist, who said Jane’s had “an evolution” about how she felt about the initial encounter.
Thereafter, Jane attended a presentation by W&L’s Title IX Officer, Lauren Kozak, who introduced an Internet article the court would later label “gender biased” against males to alleged that “regret equals rape.” Kozak said that “everyone, herself included, is starting to agree with” that.
Almost nine months after the encounter in question, Jane initiated an internal disciplinary investigation of John. Ms. Kozak interviewed John and refused to allow him to involve an attorney. A hearing was held, and, among other irregularities, Jane was not asked about inconsistencies in her various statements about the encounter. After the hearing, Rolling Stone published an article about a later-debunked gang rape at UVA. The next day, W&L found John responsible for sexual assault. John maintained the decision was prompted to avoid a backlash similar to the one felt by UVA from the Rolling Stone article.
In the lawsuit he filed, John alleged all manner of bias in W&L’s handling of his case, including ignoring evidence that supported his position. The court held that John Doe alleged sufficient facts – including the Title IX coordinator’s suggestion that regret is tantamount to rape – to plead a Title IX violation, and the court denied W&L’s motion to dismiss that claim. “Plaintiff’s allegations, taken as true, suggest that W&L’s disciplinary procedures . . . amount to ‘a practice of railroading accused students,’ and, if true, it amounts to gender bias.
Regret = Rape: The Sexual Grievance Industry’s Latest Innovation
The loony purveyors of sexual grievances keep pushing the envelope to top their last inanity. Their latest and boldest effort is to equate regret with rape. The plaintiff in Doe v. W&L makes the chilling accusation that a college administrator openly equated regret with rape, and declared that this thinking is the wave of the future. Unfortunately for her, and her school, a federal judge has ruled that this sort of thinking can be gender discrimination against males.
Thankfully there are fair-minded jurists, because this sort of thinking already seems to be all the rage on campus. A college student recently wrote a jaw-dropping article about how she was“raped by rape culture.” What does that mean? It means she clearly manifested her assent to have sex, but later claimed she secretly didn’t want to have sex and only did so because the culture tells her she’s supposed to.
And it isn’t just isolated horror stories that suggest women think it’s acceptable to say “yes” and later cry “rape” because of regret. In fact, we have evidence our daughters are being taught that a woman’s “yes” can be transmogrified into a “no” after-the-fact if she regrets the encounter. A new Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation survey shows that almost half of all college women– full 44 percent–think that when a woman gives a guy a “nod in agreement,” that isn’t enough for consent. So if a guy proceeds to insert his penis in the woman’s vagina after she nods “yes,” he will be a rapist if she later decides she regretted the encounter. With all the tens of millions of dollars being spent on the “war on rape,” almost half of all college women mistake consent for rape–and is it any wonder? Because this is what the sexual grievance industry teaches in waging the “war on rape,” and too many of our daughters are buying it. We are raising a generation of nitwits.
But, you might protest, this wrong-headed thinking won’t translate into policy. You would be wrong: they’ve already made it a punishable offense. When young men nag their dates for sex, and young women agree to have sex just to make them happy even though they secretly don’t want to, they call it “sexual coercion,” and innumerable colleges all across America have made it a punishable offense. Read that again: we are not talking women who have no reasonable alternative but to submit to sex, we are talking about women who freely choose to have sex for any number of reasons but later decide the male student ought to be punished for asking for it in the wrong way.
The “regret asymmetry” is at the heart of the campus rape “epidemic.” But instead of working to reduce students’ unsatisfying sexual encounters by educating them about this asymmetry, the sexual grievance industry wants to outright punish young men–and young men alone–whenever males and females act out the gender roles assigned to them by biology and the culture and women later decide the encounter was unsatisfying. “Consent” no longer means what the dictionary says it means–it has been co-opted by the sexual grievance industry and twisted and pounded beyond all recognition. Colleges are flooded not with rape victims, but with women groping for victimhood because their moral superiors–angry radical feminists–tell them to. Rape is never okay, but we’re not talking about rape. Let us be blunt: we’re talking about feminists teaching women that they have no responsibility even to tell the truth about whether they want to have sex. We’re talking about a cry of “rape” being used to punish innocent young men simply because they can.
What To Do
We need to expose the inanity. We need to call them what they are–“hysterics, paranoids and boodlers”–and above all else, extremists. We need to explain to people that what they are promoting isn’t a public policy, it’s good old fashioned man-hating–a sort of gender get-evenism for millennials.
We need to divert all the resources being wasted on the “war on rape”–start with the the posters telling “men” as a class not to rape–and instead use them to teach our young people about the “regret asymmetry” that divides the sexes. We need to teach them that, alas, men and women are different, that young men have these things called “testicles” that give them an enhanced sex drive that (dare I say it?) makes men want to have sex more than women, and that men aren’t hard-wired to be cautious about having sex the way women are since they can’t pregnant. In short, we need to teach our young people all the things our parents taught us, and their parents taught them, because they’re true.
And we need to teach our college administrators that regret is not tantamount to rape, and we need to fire the ones who teach that it is.
Finally, we need to teach college men to stop being so damn timid, to fight back, and to understand that an angry political lobby has a bulls-eye on their scrota for reasons having nothing to do with them.
How did we reach the point where insanity has become the norm when it comes to campus sex? We’ve reached that point because we’ve allowed gender zealots who subsist off tuition and tax dollars but who lack critical thinking skills to dominate the public discourse on these issues.
It’s time to take back the night, for the wrongly accused, and to exile the extremists to the kids table where they belong.
[Ed. Note: this post originally appeared at Community of the Wrongly Accused and is reprinted here with permission.]
