Jack Kammer presents a fictional case of Jason, a male student sexually assaulted by a female peer, who finds the campus Title IX survey has no mechanism for male victims to report. After confronting classmates about the bias, Jason is suspended. Kammer argues the university's response reveals systemic double standards that protect female perpetrators while marginalizing male victims.
Chapters
Meet Jason. A sophomore and a fraternity member at a large Midwestern university. He's a very diligent student, he always has a smile on his face, and he wants to be a social worker. Jason has had a few dates with a student named Jessica, and sometimes they study together, but she likes him more than he likes her. He doesn't intend to date her again. They've never had sex beyond kissing and some light petting. At a party, Jessica comes up to him and asks him why he hasn't texted lately. He demurs, not wanting to hurt her feelings. Finally, he says, "Look, Jessica, I don't want to hurt your feelings, but I'm really not that into you." Jessica responds, "Well, I am very, very into you. How about if we say goodbye by letting me give you a nice blowjob?" No strings attached. Jason looks at her and says, "No, that doesn't feel right." Jessica says, "That's only because we haven't started yet. Come on," she says as she takes his hand and leads him up the staircase to an open bedroom. Jason lies back on the bed with his eyes closed, moaning softly. After a minute, Jessica lifts her skirt, pulls her panties to the side, and invaginates him. She rocks and thrusts a few times, but Jason opens his eyes and quickly rolls to the side to get Jessica away from him. She falls off the bed and bangs her elbow against the wall. "Ow!" she screams. "You hurt me!" He hurries out of the room and down the stairs to rejoin the party. By coincidence, the next day, a Title IX officer comes to the fraternity and asks Jason and his brothers to take a survey about sexual assault on campus. Unlike most of the brothers, Jason takes the survey eagerly and begins to fill it out, flipping through the pages with great interest. After a few minutes, Jason gets up to go to class. When he enters his social work classroom with 44 women and 4 men, he has a thought he has never had before. Why is there an effort to achieve gender balance in STEM but none in social work. During class, one of Jason's classmates launches into a common social science refrain about patriarchy and male oppression of women. Jason quietly snickers and rolls his eyes. The instructor stops her lesson and says, "Jason, is something funny?" Jason looks down at his desk. He sighs. He gets up from his desk and heads for the door. As he walks out, he tells the teacher, "No, it's not funny. It's bullshit." Later that day, Jason gets an email from the Dean. He is suspended until further notice because his teacher and several classmates have said they do not feel safe in his presence. Jason stops going to any of his classes. His best friend at the fraternity asks him what's up, but Jason won't talk. What is wrong with him?
Jason has a lot on his mind. He wonders about that whole emphasis on STEM. And why there isn't anything similar for getting more men into fields where they're underrepresented. He comes up with a male counterpart to STEM. He's up for a swap. The way he figures it, if there's a social benefit to getting more women involved in building roads and bridges, then surely there's a social benefit to getting more men involved in building families and communities. He keeps thinking about all this, and he thinks about switching from social work to something more about the gender issues of men. He finds his school doesn't offer a degree, or a certificate, nor even a single class about the gender issues of men. But he finds that there are 662 programs on gender studies, women's studies, and/or feminist studies in colleges and universities across the USA, including his own school. For a split second, he imagines transferring to one of them, but instantly he realizes that if social work—which at least has a code of ethics about respecting everyone—is hostile and blaming and demeaning to men, then those 662 women's programs are going to be at least as bad, and maybe a lot worse. No, he'll have to stick with social work. But the dean has said he can't come back until he apologizes to his teacher and classmates and takes responsibility for his threatening and inappropriate behavior. But Jason has vowed to himself that he will not apologize to anyone until he receives an apology and a correction from the people who started this whole mess. Remember when Jason took that sexual assault survey the morning after Jessica raped him? And remember that he was flipping through the pages eagerly? And remember how he got up and left abruptly? That was because the survey gave him no way to report what had happened to him. If he had had a vagina that someone put their penis into without consent, sure, he could have reported that. But for someone who has a penis that someone put into their vagina without consent, the people who created that survey had no thought that something like that could even happen, or if they did, they clearly weren't interested in hearing about it. It also made Jason slightly furious that the survey would not require Jessica to report her perpetration of raping him, and so as bad as being a mere statistic would have been, he won't even be that. So Jason is essentially a dropout. But more accurately, we should acknowledge that this good and sensitive and gentle and caring and idealistic young man was pushed out. Jessica raped Jason on March 7th, 2019. On March 15th, he wrote to the chief administrator of the survey he was given and pointed out the problem he had found. That same day, the administrator replied, "I will bring your question to everyone's attention when we meet again to revise the survey." As of January 31st, 2021, almost 2 years later, the problem with the survey still has not been fixed. And so Jason spends a lot of time in his parents' basement, waiting for what is sometimes called social justice. And playing video games. He laughs bitterly to imagine how quickly the problem with the survey would have been fixed if the genders had been reversed.
