Maybe Your Son's A Rapist: A Response to Time Magazine's Criminal Defense Lawyer Comment

Time Magazine’s May issue was perhaps the greatest summary of different views and realities about campus sexual violence over the past year.  Along with being one of the most awkward purchases of my life (the Barnes and Noble cashier only saw the giant “RAPE” flag on the front and was a little afraid), the “Debate” section really opened my eyes to some different opinions.

Naturally, one made me angry.  A criminal defense lawyer gave the following opinion.

“Colleges will risk sanction by the Department of Education if they don’t take action in favor of women who report sexual assault.  The school’s incentive is to set up a process that results in guilt.  One way schools accomplish this is by defining sexual assault as sex with any one who has been drinking.  But drunk sex isn’t what Joe Biden is talking about.  The ‘drunk sex=rape’ rule is systematically unfair to male students, especially when we all know drunk sex is common in college.  When my daughter leaves for college, I want her to be protected from sexual assault.  But when my son goes to college, I want him to not risk his future whenever he has sex after a party.  And based on the cases I’ve seen, I’m more concerned for my son than my daughter”

Initial rage-summary:  I’m more concerned that my son will be in trouble for fucking anything that moves without any regard for consequence than I am about my daughter being raped.

But seriously, I actually want to unpack this step by step (SO THAT WE CAN GO DEEPER).

(1) “The school’s incentive is to set up process resulting in guilt.”

           

Ugh, no it isn’t.  A school’s incentive is to do whatever is attractive to incoming students.  That is to under-report rapes and therefore to set up a process resulting in innocence.   Whenever the administration can say “oh, those crazy kids”, the school can just write it off with a relatively clear conscience. In theory, colleges have always been at risk for Department of Education sanction due to under or misreporting because doing so is a Title IX violation (and they’ve known about it since 2011 according to TIME).

Sure there is a little more drive and push after 55 schools have been publically called out for being under investigation, but we all know that only a few will actually be found “guilty” and it is really unlikely that federal funding will be pulled. 

(2) “Schools define rape as sex with anyone who has been drinking.”

First off, school’s tend to define rape as having sex with anyone who is unable to give consent.  Being drunk means you are unable to give legal consent. 

Notice how these definitions are different.  If I go out and get drunk with my girlfriend of four years, and we both agree to have sex when we get home, and then DO have sex when we get home, all else being equal, it isn’t rape.

However, if I just met a girl at a party and we are both drunk, maybe it is rape.  OR at the very least, a truly well-meaning good guy should be operating under the assumption that it might be. 

But how are guys supposed to make the kind of judgment call?  I don’t know, the same way they decide not to go on homicidal shooting sprees after a night of drinking.  Which leads me to…

(3) The whole, “systematically unfair” and “worried about my son” part.

Why is this guy so afraid for his son?  Let’s disregard the whole part about how he is more concerned for his son’s  (if history gives us any evidence) slap on the wrist for being accused of  rape than for his daughter’s potential rape.

He claims he is basing this fear off “the cases he’s seen”.  Now, as someone who makes a living defending rapists… I mean men accused of rape, I could understand how you would be more likely than others to find evidence that there are many women who lie.  But just like nurses who think full moons bring out the craziest injuries, the data just doesn’t support it.  According to One in Four and a host of other research, less than 10% of all reported sexual violence cases are unfounded.  It is important to note that this statistic in its collection is likely flawed in a way that would make the actual value even lower.  For example, police officers may dismiss a sexual violence case if the victim has a prior relationship to the assailant or if drugs or alcohol were involved. 

You could see why this would be a big problem at college.

Furthermore, David Lisak and other researchers have gone on to study perpetrators of sexual violence.  In their studies, as reported by TIME, somewhere around 6% of men report rape perpetration behaviors, and half of those (3% of men) report multiple offenses, with an average of 6 rapes each. 

Why is this important to our lawyer friend?  If drunk sex were so common in college, and it was so easy to conflate drunk sex with rape, wouldn’t we expect to see these report behaviors way higher than 6%?  Or is it possible that 94% of men out there know when something is wrong; that having sex with a woman who is too drunk to give consent is wrong.   The claim that these policies are “systematically unfair” to men is only true if we admit that men have no responsibility to be morally cognizant of the rights of those around them.

There is also the equally likely possibility is it possible that women aren’t falsifying reports (what!?!).  There is some fear out there that women love to make up rape stories.  Why?  Why would a woman’s desire to claim someone raped her be any stronger than a man’s desire to say he was the victim of a crime?  Perhaps the nature of the crime being difficult to prove and the social stigma placed on the accused…

Hmm… how is that working out for them?

What should Mr. Lawyer’s take away be?

Rape culture has created a world that has blinded you towards the truth of what is happening.  So much has been made of campus sexual violence that a sensationalized media brings you stories of men falsely accused of rape.  Because these stories are so accessible compared to the statistical reality, we cling to these and claim they are the norm, plunging us into a world where women apparently love to take time out of the best 4 years of their life to sit in front of some deans and make up stories.

Rape culture has created a world where we fear our sons will be accused of violence, but lack the courage to ask ourselves whether we have prepared them to be good men. Is it possible that they are capable of violence.  Rape culture is when we say sexual assault policies work systematically against men because we believe the only thing that separates a rape from a drunken mistake is what side of the bed the girl wakes up on the next morning, leaving good men “vulnerable”

It is time for us to face reality, as represented by what we know from data and facts.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth, Mr. Lawyer.  If your son is accused of sexual assault in college, it’s probably because he did it.

The Killing Joke and the Abyss

In honor of “The Dark Knight Rises”, I thought I would take a look at what is widely accepted as one of the greatest Batman graphical novels, “The Killing Joke”.  The story not only sets the stage for future events, but challenges the reader to think about The Joker and The Batman in entirely different lights.

WARNING, CONTAINS SPOILERS (Just incase you're going to read the comic... yeah I just realized how stupid that sounded)

For those of you who haven’t read the Killing Joke, I will provide a very brief synopsis.  Essentially, the Joker hatches a plot to reveal that everyone is really just “one bad day” away from being as crazy as he is.  To prove this point, he goes to Commissioner Gordon’s home and shoot’s his daughter (also Batgirl for those of you who don’t know) in the spine and paralyzes her.  He then kidnap’s the Commissioner and forces him to look at very graphic pictures of her lying in pain.  As you might imagine, the Clown Prince sends an invitation to Batman to see the friuts of his labor.    

Frequently throughout the novel, the Joker has flashbacks to life before he became the Joker.  As a struggling comedian with a wife and baby on the way, he took a job sneaking gangsters into a factory.  During the planning session, his wife is killed and he is grief stricken, although the gangsters make him go through with the heist anyway.  Batman shows up during the heist an accidently knocks him into acid, the last straw in his “bad day”.

Batman arrives and the Joker begins to run away.  As Jim is being freed, he tells Batman to make sure he brings the Joker in by the book.  Upon arriving the Joker proudly proclaims that the doesn’t care if Batman sends him back to Arkham Asylum, because he has already proven his point that everyone is just one bad day away from insanity.  After a final confrontation, the Joker is defeated and lies at Batman’s mercy.  In an attempt to reach out to him, Batman states that one of these battles will eventually lead to one of their deaths, and that they ought to stop their fighting.  Batman offers the Joker a truce and offers to help him get through whatever happened to him.  For what happens next, it may be best to look at the actual panels.

Believe it or not… the goddamn Batman laughs!   At least until he apparently strangles the Joker, or is laughing so hard that he needs the Joker for support.  Or both.  The ending is left intentional vague, and to be honest I’d rather leave it that way.  It doesn’t take a genius to realize that a major point of this work was to paint a side of Batman that showed that in his own dark and twisted way, he’s pretty insane, and his relationship with the Joker curious.

            The real interest I have in this story is what the joke the Joker tells actually means to tell us.  It is undoubtedly inserted to be a metaphor for Batman and the Joker’s relationship; the dramatic situation reminds Joker of the joke for one, and the actual panels imply it as well.  As the Joker mentions “two lunatics”, the scene pans out to reveal both Batman and the Joker’s silhouettes. 

            The joke itself took me a minute to fully understand, mostly because I read it too fast.  The first lunatic offers to shine his flashlight across the gap so that the other lunatic can walk across the beam of light.  Obviously, this is impossible. However, instead of picking up on this impossibility, during the punch line the lunatic refuses for an absurd reason.

            Assuming that the punch line is a direct allegory for the dramatic situation, the offer to “shine the light so that you can walk across the beam” is being compaired to Batman’s offer to the Joker to live.  Batman admits that the Joker may succeed some day in killing him, so by asking for a truce Batman offers the security of life.  To the Joker, the security of life is as much of an impossibility as walking across a beam of light.   The joke points out that for Batman to try to reach the Joker on this level is insane, and for the Joker to accept it would be insane.  For the Joker, Batman’s offer of a secure life is a bad offer not because the tangible, biological state of life is unreliable (like the man holding the flashlight), but because such a life cannot even exist in his world.   Batman speaks of life for the sake of itself, while the Joker speaks of life for the sake of living.

            Batman firmly states during the final confrontation that the Joker has failed and that Commissioner Gordon has NOT been driven insane.  However, after going through that Gordon did, wouldn’t it be insane to not be insane? Gordon insists that Batman comply by the rules in apprehending and defeating the Joker, but the Joker’s point is that an ability to fall back on the concrete rules or laws does not constitute sanity or living a valuable life.  In a strong sense, the Joker has succeed in revealing both Batman and the Commissioner’s insanity; simply because Gordon can buck up and remember the rules does not mean he is sane

            So according to the Joker, (1)adherence and compliance to rules and morals despite such overwhelming force does not constitute sanity but rather quite the opposite, and (2) simply living does not constitute a life, and believing otherwise constitutes insanity.  Batman, as his is popularly imagined, defies both of these rules with his failure to kill the Joker.  No matter what the Joker does, who he hurts, or who he kills, Batman will not kill the Joker.  And despite what you may think after seeing Batman Begins, it really doesn’t have a whole lot to do with a commitment to justice, but rather simply because the Joker really hasn’t given Batman enough cause to kill him yet.  In Batman: Hush, he believes that the Joker killed an old friend of his and comes within inches of killing the Joker with his bare hands.  He needs to be talked down (strangely by Gordon, although I really don’t remember which novel comes first).

            Elegantly summed up in “The Dark Knight”, the Joker’s main point is that “the only sensible way to live in this world is without rules”.  Ultimately, after dissecting the Killing Joke, it seems that this is true because rules are simply sticks and leaves over the abyss.  Albert Camus was a nihilist but believed that creating your own meaning in life avoided the suffering of life in the face of the abyss staring back at you. We might be reminded of Camus’ Sisyphus who can’t help but feel a small iota of meaning in his repetitive task. The Killing Joke presents two such ways to handle this information.  Batman and Gordon put meaning into rules and life for its own sake.

The Joker puts meaning into the chaos of the abyss. He claims that we “have all these rules, and [we] think they will save [us]”, when really if we didn’t go out to create meaning (rules) and define meaning (life), we’d be saved from a system that could fall apart when a small part goes away, like a Jenga tower.  To the Joker, Sisyphus isn’t content because he’s found meaning in his life, even in hell.  Sisyphus is content because he is completely free from ever having to ask the question about whether or not his life has any meaning in any sense.

That was a big jump…  Why so serious?