The Power Behind Affirmative Consent

Ashe Schow writes about yet another example of a college man getting his day of justice after a school is forced to settle a lawsuit after the student was expelled, unjustly, for alleged sexual assault.

Washington and Lee University has settled with a former student who filed a lawsuit alleging gender bias as the motivation for his expulsion over a sexual assault accusation.

The student, identified as John Doe in the lawsuit he filed in late 2014, was expelled after an investigation in which he was not allowed legal representation or cross examination, and which was conducted by an administrator who allegedly told his accuser that “regret equals rape.”

John and the university have “compromised and settled all matters in controversy,” according to new documents filed in the case. Terms of the settlement were not disclosed. Typically, accused students win very little in settlements; they might get their record cleared and a small amount of money that doesn’t even cover their legal fees.

Here’s the reality, though.

Conor Friedersdorf:

Here is what Klein believes:

– The number of sexual assault victims is “far too high,” so high as to justify “sweeping” and “intrusive” legal measures–specifically, California’s new law.

– This law is “sweeping in its redefinition of acceptable consent.”

– The law could define as rape “two college seniors who’ve been in a loving relationship since they met during the first week of their freshman years, and who, with the ease of the committed, slip naturally from cuddling to sex.”

– The law intrudes on “the most private and intimate of adult acts.”

– The law’s “overreach is precisely its value.”

– The law “will settle like a cold winter on college campuses, throwing everyday sexual practice into doubt.”

– The law will create “a haze of fear and confusion over what counts as consent.”

– If successful, the law will cause all or most college men “to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.”

– If the law succeeds, “colleges will fill with cases in which campus boards convict young men (and, occasionally, young women) of sexual assault for genuinely ambiguous situations.”

– The existence of cases “that feel genuinely unclear and maybe even unfair” are especially necessary for the law to succeed.

– “The Yes Means Yes laws creates an equilibrium where too much counts as sexual assault. Bad as it is, that’s a necessary change.”

When you look at the activities feminists activists perform, you don’t see them working to help individual women and individual victims. What you see from feminist activists is an advantageous power play, a power play that some would argue (with strong evidence to back up their assertions) was always the intent of feminism from the beginning.

Conor states that “[m]any proponents of affirmative-consent laws would dispute the way Klein characterizes them, and favor them with the expectation that they won’t result in injustice.”

Feminists have never been all that great at following the evidence and coming to a conclusion, but evidence doesn’t matter as long as they can still get what they want. And all of these legal wins we can keep celebrating are for naught as long as the damage has already been done. The intent isn’t to help individual women who may be victims of sexual assault. It’s to damage the psyche of men who are seeking to succeed in life because feminists are very close to eviscerating “Patriarchy.”

Now that women have economic and academic power, they are making another power play. Women always had the power of creation and the access to the pleasure to partake in the activities the create that life. Now that they have even more power to create and end life, they are even freer to govern their lives. This may be a good thing, but, as a consequence, it has also shifted the monopsony of romance and domestic partnership even more in women’s favor, and with government standing behind them all the way, even as far as often providing them with financial support in place of a domestic partner, women are needing men less and less.

What better position can women be than in this modern age in the west, the first time in history where women can go their entire life without a single man in it – whether they’re poor mothers who are supported by government subsidies or middle and upper class educated women who, unless they decide to become mothers, make more money than men (“Women in their 20s earn more than men of same age, study finds”)?

But that’s not enough. Because feminists are not egalitarians, they want to make sure that the “Patriarchy,” whatever they decide to define it in [current year], is finished. They want to make sure that men are fearful of entering sexual relationships with women. Any day now, any man could be a victim of sexual assault without any physical contact ever occurring. He can be charged with sexually assaulting a woman and, without recorded proof (a felony in some states) of consent, he would have little to no chance of proving consent was given.

There’s no better way to ruin a man’s life than to make them forfeit their future by labeling them a rapist, especially with the power to spread this knowledge with the permanence of Google and social media, and by ruining their chance to get an education and make a living? There’s no better way to instill fear in a man than to place a risk far too great for them to take.

A reminder from Conor: “If successful, the law will cause all or most college men ‘to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.'” Those who want to fundamentally reform society will silence and instill fear in those they believe have social and economic power and, in doing so, proving they are the ones truly in power.