Title IX Witchhunts, Anti-Sex Frenzy and Bourgeois Feminism
Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus - A Review
http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1121/kipnis_review.html
Date Written: 2017-11-03
Publisher: Women and Revolution
Year Published: 2017
Resource Type: Article
Cx Number: CX21842
Is the specter of sex haunting the campus? Under the pretense of targeting sexual harassment and assault, university administrations have been whipping up a climate of fear and imposing neo-Victorian values. As the recent book Unwanted Advances - Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (HarperCollins Publishers, April 2017) argues, "The new campus codes aren't preventing nonconsensual sex; they're producing it.” Written by Northwestern University professor and self-described left-wing feminist Laura Kipnis, the book exposes the vastly expanded definitions of sexual assault, which criminalize anything from drunken hook-ups to student-professor romance and even allow for consent to be withdrawn retroactively.
Abstract:
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Excerpts:
it is no help to victims of real abuse for voluntary and involuntary acts to be lumped together under the umbrella-like designation of "sexual misconduct," i.e., to make no distinction between discomfort and coercion.
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The Title IX apparatus has become the latest tool in the rulers' decades-long anti-sex crusade to justify augmenting the police forces of the state and legitimize intrusion into private life
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Stirring up mass anxiety conveniently diverts discontent away from the horrors of life for the bulk of society: unemployment, plunging wages and soaring costs of housing, health care and education.
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Sex -- which under bourgeois morality is colored by shame, fear and religious dogma, not to mention class and racial inequality -- is often messy and complicated. But we do not believe that someone who is simply older, has a better job or is in a position of authority inevitably turns his or her "subordinate" into a passive automaton. As long as those participating consent at the time, nobody else, least of all the state or campus administrators, has the right to tell them if or how they can do it. For Marxists, the guiding principle in sexual relations is effective consent: what two (or more) people agree to do, regardless of age, gender or sexual preference, is no business of the government or campus authorities.
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