CHARLOTTE ALLEN reports the latest sordid details in the case of Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia University student who has been carrying around a mattress for months to protest an alleged rape by another student. It all is too disgusting to keep up with, but I offer it to you in case you feel out of the loop when it comes to the campus “rape” war. Sulkowicz, whose case was dismissed by campus authorities and who refused to pursue her charges with the police, was not raped at all, the accused says. She texted love messages to him in the weeks after the alleged incident and had had trysts with him before, which has been known from the beginning. She admits to the messages and the previous involvement. She says her love messages were expressions of rape trauma.

Sulkowicz, by the way, is the daughter of two psychiatrists. The mother is Asian and the father apparently Jewish. One cannot help but wonder whether this strange mix and the confusion it would naturally create is not partly responsible for her delusions of feminist and artistic grandeur. Her parents are highly successful and sent their daughter to the prestigious prep school, Dalton. They have stood by her outrageous act of bullying and refer to her as a “survivor,” as if she had survived prison camp or torture.

Sulkowicz originally was a mechanical physics major at Columbia, but switched to visual arts. Her mattress stunt is a a piece of “performance art,” actually hailed by the “emperor-has-no-clothes” critics in New York. She cooked the idea up during a summer arts program at Yale. Anyone who knows anything about the academic art world, especially at a place like Columbia, will find all the signs here of the high-concept, political agitprop that comes out of the studios there and the desperation of art students to rise to new levels of novelty.

— Comments —

James N. writes:

Not only is Emma Sulkowicz now revealed as an open and notorious liar, but she was the guest of a United States Senator from New York, Kirsten Gillibrand, at the State of the Union address. Senator Gillibrand is apparently guilty of libel and slander of the young man involved, and to the extent that her remarks were not made in floor debate, and given that the young man in question is not a public figure, I hope he sues her pants off.

Laura writes:

Emma and her supporters would not agree that she is a liar. Nothing that has been revealed is inconsistent with their definition of rape, which they argue can occur in a mutually consensual encounter. Emma considers the incident a crime because the accused allegedly treated her roughly and engaged in sodomy against her will. (Suddenly sodomy is a no-no.)

The political pandering of women entails elevating them to victimhood and, with her mattress stunt, which the New York Times art critic compared to the Stations of the Cross, it didn’t matter what actually happened to her. The point was true. The essence of it was true.

Mark Jaws writes:

I was wondering if you have examined the cause behind this rape hysteria on college campuses.  As you may recall, I am a “shoot-from-the-hip” sort of fellow, who likes to go with his gut, so I will offer my two shekels.  I think this attempt to depict the college scene as a rape arena in which white males are allowed to pillage and rampage is a pretty shoddy attempt by the Loonie (Likely Lesbian) Left to divert blame away from the real reason to fear rape on these campuses – black males.

Laura writes:

There have been discussions of this issue here before. I’ll get you the links shortly.

No, I don’t think the primary motivation is to divert attention from rape by black males. Subconsciously, that may be an element, but I don’t think it is the primary cause.

The main factor is political. The state and profit-making institutions benefit from the unquestioning and devoted loyalty of women. If they can get women to rely on them more than on individual men, these entities flourish. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s organizations acting in their own best interests, often on an unconscious level. The government and education industrial complex offer paternal protection and foster division between men and women out of self-interest, to ensure their own existence.

It’s about political control of women and men.

But it’s also a reflection of the genuine confusion and sexual mayhem that reign on college campuses. It’s a mess. Women are offered the fig leaf of victimhood and it’s a relief, a way of escaping the power and responsibility they have in personal relationships and the consequences of their own decisions at a time when they are given way too much phony freedom, virtually no protection and overwhelming pressures to succeed in a masculine way. I think the real anger is against adults for having abnegated their responsibility to protect young women and for having pressured them to be like men. Girls pick up on this. They sense that as women they are viewed as inadequate by the feminist culture and must be more like men. Parents care passionately about their daughters careers and leave them to this sexual chaos. An adolescent will never admit he (or she) needs protection. Never. He is afraid to admit his vulnerability and far too proud to admit it. Much of the rebelliousness of adolescence (and I consider college-age men and women adolescent) is about covering up vulnerability and fear of being unable to meet the challenges of adulthood. That’s why adolescents commit suicide. They are afraid. An adolescent will do anything and everything to prove he is tough when he is not. Rebelling against men is a way for young women to prove they are tough and independent when they are not and when they are overwhelmed by the demands of being both men and women at the same time, which causes serious mental illness in some. The campus rape hysteria is an expression of fear and weakness and confusion. It is inflamed by the media and government and colleges for political reasons and out of stark self-interest.

Nothing can prevent feminism and the logic of its principles from continuing to unfold except entirely contrary principles. Nothing can prevent these forces from mounting except the rejection of social atheism.

George Weinbaum writes:

Mr. Weinbaum adds:

I remembered another thing about the 1994 incident. It didn’t matter if the rape occurred because it was “culturally true” whatever that means.

Mary writes:

Laura wrote: “But it’s also a reflection of the genuine confusion and sexual mayhem that reign on college campuses. It’s a mess. Women are offered the fig leaf of victimhood and it’s a relief, a way of escaping the power and responsibility they have in personal relationships and the consequences of their own decisions at a time when they are given way too much phony freedom, virtually no protection and overwhelming pressures to succeed in a masculine way.”

Exactly. And whether she was seduced, or coerced, or drunk, or God only knows what, this young woman engaged in a devious act; she is correct that she was violated in that that act is always a violation. It’s growing acceptance (which isn’t to say that she accepted it) is a product of pornography’s ubiquity teamed with the assimilation of homosexual culture (as is oral sex); any man who desires it is not a man at all.

This was not the typical date rape scenario: she was really good friends with this guy and had slept with him before; she trusted that her happy “friends with benefits” relationship would continue without trouble.

I feel sorry for young college women today. A lot of average guys are porn-fueled and assume, due to feminism, that women want what they want. Young men have lost the sense of female vulnerability. Feminism has untethered and weakened women to the point that a guy can emerge from a one-night stand either a beneficial friend or a rapist depending on emotional factors alone. Young women today live in a pop culture dream-world where hot guys who provide drinks and drugs and say nice things for sex will cuddle before leaving and call in the morning. Feminism has made the lovely, stable, true gentleman boring, an object of derision, to our great loss as a culture, just as being a real lady is no longer valued. It has unwittingly exalted the cad. Three priceless words of advice to young women going out in the world: be a lady. That covers an awful lot.

Many college women are blinded to the very obvious differences in male and female sexuality. They don’t understand that intercourse is an act of surrender for women; that in the bedroom this surrender will give them mysterious pleasure, will often cause them to lose resolve, to melt in the arms of a lover, to be pleased by pleasing; and that this is very, very lovely but is also the reason to take exquisite care in these matters – which means in the end, of course, to know and love completely, and to be known and loved completely, by anyone invited into her bed, which can only be ensured in marriage, in a unique and, yes, very liberating way.

Laura wrote: “I think the real anger is against adults for having abnegated their responsibility to protect young women and for having pressured them to be like men.”

Yes. As irritating as this young woman’s actions are she is coping the way she’s been taught, by parents, teachers and the culture at large: she is the perfect victim-as-opportunist, turning this ghastly experience into a political statement, a piece of performance art, and, using women’s inborn practical talent to make lemonade out of lemons, turning the whole thing into her senior art project, for which she will undoubtably get an A. But she is right to be greatly disturbed by what took place: that is her soul crying out in anguish. “Counseling” will not help. That her parents, her college and the prevailing culture provide her with no avenue to real healing, which needs supernatural help, is the worst injustice at work here.

 Laura writes:

When I read a description of the incident I had a similar reaction to Mary’s. If the description of it is true, this guy was into pornography.

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