EMMA SULKOWICZ, the famous “mattress girl,” used Columbia University, the international media, and the federal government, to bully and defame a fellow student with whom she had engaged in sordid encounters and who was no longer interested in her, according to a lawsuit against the university filed by the student, Paul Nungesser, who was publicly accused of rape. [WARNING: The text of the lawsuit is extremely pornographic. I only recommend you read it if you are thinking of sending your son or daughter to the Ivy League. Perhaps this will dissuade you or reassure you if your child will never end up at this sort of high-priced collegiate gutter. The Ivy League is a gutter. Poetry, love, romance — all dead at the Ivy League.] If the documented e-mails are authentic, the repeated public charges that Sulkowicz was raped, which were publicly defended by her physician parents, constituted an extraordinary witch hunt, a hoax and a case of widespread journalistic malfeasance and orchestrated mass revenge.

Even so, there is something inadvertently true about the mattress stunt. (Sulkowicz carried a mattress around campus for months as a form of political art and protest against her alleged attacker.)  Sexual hedonism is encouraged and marketed by colleges and universities, which could easily protect women and men by reverting to separate dorms and strict standards. The absence of standards causes mental instability, vendettas and physical disease (Sulkowicz had a sexually transmitted disease.) A school like Columbia encourages all these things. It then hypocritically calls for sexual assault codes and instantly canonizes an alleged victim.

Last September, The New York Times called Sulkowicz a “messianic artist” whose carrying of a mattress around campus to symbolize her alleged assault was a modern-day “Stations of the Cross.” Art critic Roberta Smith wrote:

Combining aspects of endurance, body and protest art and participatory relational aesthetics, it is a highly specific work of art in its own right, carefully conceived and carried out by one person expending considerable thought, time and energy for a very long time (up to eight months). It comes from a history that includes the relatively solitary ordeals of Vito Acconci, Tehching Hsieh and Marina Abramovic, but also relates tangentially to more extreme physical acts of political resistance — the fasts of jailed suffragists in early-20th-century Britain come to mind.

“Carry That Weight” might be called an artwork of last resort. It is the culmination of two years of pain, humiliation, frustration and righteous anger that began in 2012.

Smith’s paean is entirely based on Sulkowicz’s allegations, dismissed by the university and the police.

— Comments —

Paul C. writes:

The plaintiff was a fool.  I suppose it usually has been impossible to know a slut based on physical appearance.  Nowadays though, they apparently dress the same as everyone else.  The old stereotypes are long gone.  Sluts are now apparently the norm in college.  I don’t know what the plaintiff saw in Emma except that she was easy and solicitous.  I would not have gone out with her even if she had asked; she isn’t remotely pretty and her texts are not humorous.  In addition, it is incredible that a young man would talk with a woman who used the language she used and who spoke of how big a slut she was.  Yikes!  STD anyone?  I expect her bout was not the first and won’t be the last.  And what about her morals?  Who wants to marry a slut?  His morals were bad too.

The attorneys perhaps are being clever by not including the co-slut as a defendant and focusing on the behavior of the lousy university, which treated a female slut better than a male slut and fostered sexual harassment and breach of confidentiality.  Likely, this will settle for a large amount.  Too bad Columbia, which receives massive amounts of federal money, is probably not subject to section 1983 suits, which are suits based on the Constitution and allow massive punitive damages.  Based on the federal money, I would have thrown that in as a cause of action in order to test it and to threaten the university (which no doubt hates, along with feminists, the idea of the use of 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against private parties).  I learned to throw stuff in from a close friend who is a rich trial lawyer: “juke ‘em,” he said.  It is not too late to supplement their complaint.  Indeed, I shall write one of the attorneys.

You are putting parents on notice as they have never been before.  I hope parents refuse to indulge their children with these grossly overpriced colleges and make their children apply themselves at the local college and live at home where the parents can have a degree of influence over their children’s sexual behavior such as setting decent hours.  They can’t wholly enforce sexual restraint, but they can keep it under control in many cases.  Overpriced colleges would surely change their practices and lower their tuition.  It is much harder after college for people to have sex with many partners. The pretty college babes are no longer shoulder to shoulder every day.

But I hear many or maybe most high school students engage in various kinds of actual sex (such as Hillary’s husband’s “I did not have sex with that woman” kind) that stops short of copulation so the female remains a “virgin.”  If this is true, then Ivy League colleges (if not all away-colleges) must be as you say.

Laura writes:

The suit goes on and on about Nungesser’s great educational credentials and aspirations, and goes on and on about his parents’ impeccable liberal credentials (the mother works for a feminist organization.) Whatever his parents did for him, they failed to prevent him from becoming a barbarian. They failed.

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