The Revolt of the Feminist Law Profs - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Writing in the California Law Review, Gersen and her husband Jacob argued that the creation of a “sex bureaucracy,” as the title of that article christened the system of administrative oversight of student sex lives, entailed “the enlargement of bureaucratic regulation of sexual conduct that is voluntary, non-harassing, nonviolent, and does not harm others.” The Gersens go on to note that “watered-down notions of nonconsent” embedded into regulation allowed “ambivalent, undesirable, unpleasant, unsober, or regretted sexual encounters to meet the standard.” The system thus “will investigate and discipline sexual conduct that women and men experience as consensual (if nonideal) sex.” The conduct deemed illegal, the Gersens wrote, “plausibly covers almost all sex students are having today.” ...

The sex bureaucracy, in other words, pivoted from punishing sexual violence to imposing a normative vision of ideal sex, to which students are held administratively accountable. Georgia Southern University, for instance, explains that “Consent is a voluntary, sober, imaginative, enthusiastic, creative, wanted, informed, mutual, honest, and verbal agreement.” The California Law Review article culminates in a discussion of a case in which a gay male student was found responsible for sexual misconduct for waking his partner with a kiss (the sleeping cannot consent) and for looking at his partner’s genitals without consent while showering (consensually) with him....

Recently, for instance, a black, autistic student with cerebral palsy was charged and found responsible for a Title IX violation for asking a woman to give him a fist bump. In a separate article on the Title IX system, Janet Halley describes an order placed on a student at an Oregon liberal arts college to avoid any contact with a female student because he reminded her of someone who had raped her, forcing him to quit his job and placing him in constant jeopardy of being punished for violating the order, despite no wrongdoing on his part even being alleged. ..."