On June 12, The Washington Post published a survey-based article about sexual assault on campuses nationwide.  More than 1,000 people were polled for information and feelings about “the prevalence of sexual assault among college students and the factors that play a role in those assaults.”  Several themes emerged in the article that also run throughout accounts of professor-on-student sexual assault.

One of those surfaces in survivor Alexandra Le Blanc’s narration of her experience.  When she and her date both became “pretty intoxicated” and wound up at his house, they began kissing.  What started as a consensual interlude went farther than Le Blanc wanted.  “I had zero intentions of having sex that night,” she says.  “It’s not what I wanted to happen.”  But when it did, “I didn’t really know what to do,” she remembers.  “I just kind of froze.  I was visibly crying during the experience.”  That someone wouldn’t object or fight to get away seems counter-intuitive.  If sexual engagement is really unwanted, why would someone give in to paralysis and allow herself to be assaulted?

While no single answer to that question is clear, the behavior is very common.  In most cases I’m familiar with, the victim’s passivity seems to trace to her confusion at the time, her disbelief that such a thing could be happening to her.  The assault is so unwanted, so repugnant, that she tends to grit her teeth, close her eyes, and wait for it to be over.  Such is especially the case if the aggressor is someone she admired and trusted.

Another recurring theme in the article is related to that of becoming “frozen” when under assault: the reluctance to report an incident because the victim worries that she shares responsibility for what happened.  Over and again in cases of professorial sexual misconduct, student survivors express fear that they led on a professor or somehow signaled that they’d welcome an advance.  One survivor has told me that she had a crush on the professor who molested her and, in retrospect, often worried that she had thus invited him to assault her.

But such is not the case.  If, as is now being increasingly believed, intoxication (of either party or both) is no defense against sexual assault, and if a woman’s dress, no matter how provocative, is not a license to touch her, then a student’s crush on a professor is no excuse for sexual misconduct.  The same can be said of a student who becomes deeply intellectually engaged with a professor.  That student’s attentions neither constitute sexual consent nor justify sexual overtures from faculty.  As difficult as that truth may be to embrace, embracing it is freeing to survivors who have been blaming themselves for what happened to them.

At the conclusion of the last post on this blog, I said I’d follow up with some practical pointers that may be useful to others.  I’ve met some people who compose and revise very closely to what I’ll describe here, though I’m aware of others for whom some of my tactics would seem anathema.  General rule of thumb: do what works for you, but be open to others’ suggestions. [Read more…]

Revising Prose is the name of the best book I know of on the subject.  In it, author Richard Lanham outlines the “paramedic method,” as he calls it, for eliminating wordiness, achieving clarity, and polishing style.  The method is brilliantly direct, practical, and applciable, although later editions of the book have tended to clutter the approach and needlessly—indeed, counter-productively—improve upon the elegant original.   I use the book when I teach advanced nonfiction writing to undergraduates and have even concocted my own exercise booklet on which students can practice the principles Lanham outlines. [Read more…]

Among its many intricacies and oddities, the English language yields several examples of word pairs that differ only by one letter between them and yet differ widely in meaning.  One of the most common such pairings is complement and compliment.  As close as they appear and, thus, as easy as they are to confuse, they have two entirely different definitions.  To use one where you mean the other can be more embarrassing than you might imagine.  One area where they’re easily mixed up is in descriptions of food and wine.  To say, for example, that a certain burgundy complements the short ribs you’re serving for dinner is to mean that the flavor of one rounds out and brings out the flavor of the other; each completes the other.  To substitute compliments for complements in such a situation isn’t entirely without justification.  Still, a more apt use of compliment might be what you pay the host upon tasting the deliciously complementary flavors of the burgundy and short ribs.  Typically, wines don’t dole out compliments. [Read more…]