I work at Frist on Saturday nights. It's always enjoyable getting drunken people to leave when the building closes at 3 a.m., because everybody knows drunk people are witty and ingenious. The routine is always the same.
"I'm sorry, the building is closed. You have to leave," I say in my firmest voice. "I'm just going to put some salt on my pizza, dude," mumbles the drunken boy, who proceeds to salt his pizza for 10 minutes. I resist the urge to substitute his eyeball with the saltshaker.
"Guys, please leave now. The building is closed," I repeat.
"Oh! I'm scared! We have to leave now!" gurgles his drunken girlfriend, cleverly satirizing my request with hearty, groundbreaking wit. Her longhaired friends, like poodles, chortle along with her, while the men make vague equestrian noises. Having proved herself the next Tina Fey, I lavish gifts of myrrh and frankincense upon her, scrubbing her feet with my hair.
According to the people who work at SHARE, however, that beacon of light and grace may one day be sexually assaulted at an eating club. At fault, ostensibly, is the use of alcohol, particularly during Bicker and Initiations. Apparently alcohol causes belligerence (This came as a big surprise to me. My socks were knocked off).
Furthermore, according to law, inebriated women cannot consent to sexual intercourse. The law is not gender-neutral. If a drunken boy and girl decide to fornicate and the girl decides to rescind her participation, she has been raped. According to New Jersey law 2C:14-2 on sexual assault, "an actor is guilty of aggravated sexual assault if he commits an act of sexual penetration with another person," where sexual penetration means "vaginal intercourse, cunnilingus, fellatio or anal intercourse between persons or insertion of the hand, finger or object into the anus or vagina either by the actor or upon the actor's instruction." This conception of rape as a primarily male activity construes sexuality as completely masculine and women as the passive recipients of penetration. It assumes that men always want to have sex, and women choose who they want to have sex with. SHARE's activities are confined to protecting women as rape victims and preventing male sexual predators.
This is not a useful stance to adopt. In a community such as Princeton, drunk men who force themselves upon drunk women are rapists, but drunk women who force themselves upon drunk men are just loose. There are many circuitous arguments regarding this state of affairs. I'm not interested in them. Instead, the logic of rape at college must be attributed to several attitudes about power and the rites of initiation.
The use of torture against helpless innocents has been sanctioned for ages throughout history, perpetrated by diverse and colorful entities such as the church, the Marquis de Sade, Goody Putnam, Lyndie England, Dean Malkiel and drunks at Frist on Saturday nights. Of particular interest is the Iron Maiden, a body-shaped cabinet lined with movable spikes that pierce through parts of the body painfully but not fatally. The victim would be forced to stand while bleeding to death, and when they could no longer stand, their flesh would press down upon the spikes. Yuck.
The traditional relationship between the torturer and the tortured is primarily a socioeconomic power imbalance. The recipient is physically penetrated through the application of this power, encased in an opaque identity through which nameless victims pass. But today, that power imbalance seldom exists in everyday social life (though it does exist in certain blind spots). Consequently, torture today has been reinterpreted as BDSM. In a world where social power structures are no longer explicit, all that remains is the simulation of torture.
In the case of Bicker and Initiations, we can look to many enchanting sources in order to find the origins of whatever sexual activities may occur. From the semen-swallowing rites of Melanesian tribes, where prepubescent boys are anally penetrated by older men so that they might produce their own semen, to fin-de-siecle fathers who once brought their teenage sons to prostitutes to "become men," sexual activity has long been part of growing up and an initiation into the world. Today, like "The Lord of the Flies," when civilization recedes into the background, ritualistic simulation is resurrected. That's what the eating clubs are for during Bicker and Initiations. We can call it rape, but the fact is that mutual "rape," a Bacchanalian orgy of debauchery, is a primordial institution of college life and a wonderful institution. There is no power imbalance, no Iron Maiden. What constitutes rape in most cases cannot be reified as the mere objectification of women as victims today. That era has left the building. Johann Loh is a freshman from Singapore. He can be reached at loh@princeton.edu.
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