Many years ago, as a young, tenure-track professor, I offered an upper-level class called “Dating & Friendship.” One day in the faculty lounge, a tenured professor introduced himself. When I told him my name, he snickered.
“Oh, you’re that woman teaching the dating class,” he said. “What do you do in there every day — talk about boys?”
I tried to laugh. “No, we don’t!” I said, with a smile plastered on my face. I walked away with my cheeks burning, wishing I’d made a better comeback. His derision has rung in my ears ever since.
Nor have I forgotten the time, about a decade ago, when I was the sole woman on a conference panel of four scholars. My talk was based on my research about sex, spirituality, and young adults on campus. When the session ended and I was leaving, one of the men on the panel — who also happened to be the editor of the most important journal in my field — stopped me. “Your presentation was really cute, Donna,” he said.
These kinds of incidents will sound familiar to anyone in the humanities or social sciences who studies relationships, children, young adults, sexual violence, gender identity, or the body. It is “women’s work” and carries with it all the biases that go along with such a label.
Now sexual assault on campus has become an urgent, high-profile issue. In the midst of the larger #MeToo movement, and a campus climate characterized by hookup culture, it seems universities have figured out that educating about consent — what it is, how to talk about it, how to instill it as a value and practice — is essential.
But we’re going about it all wrong. We teach the hows of consent but not the whys. The questions are more complicated, and intellectually richer, than we acknowledge. This gives us an opportunity — in fact, an obligation — to extend the conversation to the classroom, not relegate it exclusively to orientations and extracurricular workshops. The academy’s resistance to taking it there not only shortchanges our students but is also a failure of the imagination.
Hookups have a certain cachet as the ultimate expression of sexual liberation — a “no strings attached” encounter that proves just how far we’ve come from the oppressive sexual mores of the 1950s. In The End of Men: And The Rise of Women (Riverhead Books, 2012), the journalist Hanna Rosin even argues that hookups are essential to women’s professional aspirations and future careers.
As a feminist, I, too, once assumed that students were throwing off outdated judgments about promiscuity in favor of sexual liberation — until a group of my own students passionately disabused me of this belief. Their revelation was followed by nearly 1,700 online surveys and 111 in-depth student interviews I conducted for a national study about hookup culture, which confirmed exactly how sexually disempowering it can be to both women and men, gay and straight.
Not all hookups are problematic. But a culture of hooking up teaches students that the only acceptable attitude about sex is that it should not have an impact on you (especially if you are a man). “Ideal” college sex is meaningless, and communication with your partner can seem risky because it might lead to attachment. By fostering complex sexual, (anti-) relational, and (anti-) ethical dynamics among our students, hookup culture helps perpetuate systemic sexual violence. Along with subjects such as how our society structures masculinity and how racial and class biases influence sexual relations, it is one of the issues that we need to unpack.
Yet ideas about what counts as “legitimate” scholarship generally exclude the subject of consent from the conversation, and that, in turn, dissuades faculty members (especially junior faculty members) from raising it in their classrooms. Delving into this subject is a professional risk, costing them the respect and support of colleagues.
Recently we have seen a rare exception: After Columbia University made headlines in 2014 when a student, Emma Sulkowicz, carried her mattress everywhere she went to protest the university’s handling of her sexual-assault complaint, a group of researchers there launched a major study about sex on the campus (called Shift, for Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation). Its findings are already transforming how education on consent and sexual assault is handled at Columbia; the university has become a leader in the field.
Consent is complicated, but typically we try to make consent education “easy” — as easy as “yes means yes” and “no means no.” It usually involves a first-year orientation lecture or a series of comedic skits, with maybe an online human-resources tutorial — and not much else. Think of the clever, tongue-in-cheek cartoon video “Tea Consent,” which includes lessons such as, “Unconscious people don’t want tea,” and “If someone said yes to tea around your house last Saturday, that doesn’t mean they want tea all the time.”
Even among the vast resources provided by Columbia’s new Sexual Respect website — which boasts a section that lists opportunities for conversation and workshops painstakingly broken down by school — nearly all of the offerings are individual events, and all of those are run and/or taught by “Sexual Violence Response staff and volunteers” as well as students. Not the faculty.
We teach the hows of consent but not the whys. The questions are intellectually richer than we acknowledge.
Likewise, only a few of the colleges I’ve visited over the years have experimented with semester-long, for-credit options, and those, too, are rarely taught by faculty members. We’ve convinced ourselves that consent and sexual violence are subjective issues that deal with the private bodies and bedrooms of our students, and so should be dealt with by the team in charge of those areas: the office of student affairs. Fortunately, student-affairs professionals have been willing to take on this difficult task, despite few resources and a decided lack of interest from the rest of us.
It’s not that these programs are bad, but they fall far short. Beneath those one-syllable words “yes” and “no” lurk structures of power and violence that students inherit and may perform without question, reflection, or analysis. These discussions require more time in the classroom.
We already have the people on campus we need to do this work: not just gender-studies scholars like me but also ethicists, historians, literary scholars, sociologists, philosophers, psychologists, and scholars of education, religion, law, politics, and the performing arts. Sex, love, and everything in between have been the subjects of masterpieces of literature, philosophy, theology, among other fields.
Even a single day’s discussion, say, in a philosophy class, devoted to considering consent in light of Plato’s dialogue about love and eros in The Symposium, or Aristotle’s ideas of virtue and friendship, could offer students a new framework for thinking about sex and all that goes with it. Within religious studies, teachings and practices around social justice, compassion, and the centrality of human dignity, if raised in light of the realities of systemic sexual violence in culture and on campus, would offer students powerful tools to evaluate their own behavior and the behavior of their peers on the evenings and weekends.
In the same spirit, academics need to identify what dissuades most of us from taking up questions like consent and sex. Faculty and administration hold power over which topics and methodologies count as academic and which do not. We need to ask ourselves why our tenure-and-promotion criteria still devalue the personal (and, quite literally, the “I”) within the classroom and in academic pursuits — a question that feminist scholars have been asking for decades — and to assess the cost of this attitude to our effort to confront sexual violence.
Students need intellectual space for discussions about sex and consent — but they are not alone. We need to make these subjects safe as well for the faculty members who are willing to engage them. It does not have to be all of us, but it must be some of us. The intellectual benefits of this effort could be enormous. But the benefits to our students should be all the encouragement we need.
Donna Freitas is a nonresident research associate at the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame and a visiting associate professor of English at Adelphi University, in New York. Her book Consent on Campus: A Manifesto is out this month from Oxford University Press.
