A handful of deans and professors, myself, another student, and a physician sat around the board table enjoying Au Bon Pain pastries, compliments of the Yale Dean’s Office. It was 8 a.m. at the biweekly meeting of the Yale Sexual Harassment Grievance Board, which hears informal complaints of sexual harassment and assault from the undergraduate community. “Informal” means we have no disciplinary power. We mainly counsel and negotiate such awkward logistical issues as room changes, if your rapist happens to live upstairs. We also direct victims toward more formal means of recourse, like reporting the incident to the police or, more likely, Yale’s Executive Committee. By more likely, I mean neither of these options is likely at all.

Two months into the semester and those informal complaints totaled an impressive zero. Impressive, that is, from the standpoint of the school administration, which has to publish annual assault statistics in accordance with the Clery Act. It’s tragic, however, from the perspective of the one in five undergraduates who experience rape or attempted rape by the time they graduate.

My experience on the Grievance Board was echoed by the Center for Public Integrity’s investigation into campus sexual assault, which found that only 5 percent of victims report their experience. I agree with Emily that the results are disturbingly archaic. Epidemic under-reporting and university indifference should have been kinks ironed out in the first few turbulent years of coeducation and Title IX’s triumphant enactment. But the culture of silence that surrounds sexual assault is an enduring college tradition.

When students finally land on campus as newly minted adults on unfamiliar turf, they are unsurprisingly hesitant to report a sexual assault, most likely experienced as a freshman and, for 70 percent of victims, perpetrated by someone they know. Muddle in a few drinks and the double standard embedded in college hook-up culture and guilt and self-blame are the predictable results. Even in the most unambiguous case, reporting, let alone pressing charges, would be academically and socially disruptive, even devastating. "Victim" is an uncomfortable label for a teen carving out her first semi-independent home.

Even students who want to report may find themselves excluded from their university's internal tally. The Clery Act requires that universities report sexual assaults that occur on and near campus. This is dangerously muddy wording, given that the most fertile ground for sexual violence at Yale, and at many other universities, lies outside its gates. Off-campus houses, especially fraternities, host the biggest college ragers, advertised often with titillating posters and titles like “Champagne and Schoolgirls,” “CEOs and Corporate Hoes” and “Playboy Mansion,” which all encourage titillating attire for the female attendees. As the hosts of these parties often are upperclassmen men and the guests mainly freshman girls (for whom the brothers kindly serve grain punch as a less-caloric keg alternative), there is often a predatory power dynamic that make these particularly likely sites for sexual transgressions, both casual and criminal. Yale, however, does not include fraternity houses, or any other off-campus residence, in their statistics. Those rapes slip through the holes of Yale’s institutional memory.

The year I served on the Grievance Board—2008—the campus sexual assault line recorded 24 incidents on campus, while the school’s official crime statistics recorded only eight ( the actual figure is around 175, according to statistics kept by the Department of Justice). The fragmentation of the system is partly to blame for this discrepancy. Students may make their complaints to the Grievance Board, deans, peer counselors, health services, the police, the Executive Committee or our three-year-old sexual-assault crisis center. While victims deserve a lot of reporting options, they also deserve an apparatus of aggregation that delivers accurate statistics to the student body. The Executive Committee also keeps no record of their deliberations and all but the victim are sworn to silence. Even if you chew through all the bureaucratic layers of the sexual assault reporting infrastructure, the disciplinary system at its center is completely opaque.

Two months into the school year and the head of the Grievance Board told us, again, that there were no assault complaints to discuss. So we channeled our bleary-eyed energy instead into editing a description of the Grievance Board to be published online. It was a manifesto of self-definition and self-justification that had tellingly taken almost all semester to craft. On that morning, a glimpse inside the murky world of college sexual assault reporting would reveal eight people, sleepily brainstorming synonyms, and a platter of cheese danishes.

That’s the problem.

Tags: campus sexual assault, center for public integrity, clery act, college, sexual assault, sexual harassment

After our debate on this site about Sandra Tsing Loh's Atlantic piece about her liberating divorce and Christina Nehring's book about the death of passion in the modern marriage, I kept waiting for someone to write about the other side. Now Elizabeth Weil has finally done it in her upcoming New York Times Magazine story, taking us deep inside her relatively happy, companionate union. This is a truly fascinating piece about what you discover when you put a perfectly good thing through the test:

I started wondering why I wasn’t applying myself to the project of being a spouse. My marriage was good, utterly central to my existence, yet in no other important aspect of my life was I so laissez-faire. Like most of my peers, I applied myself to school, friendship, work, health and, ad nauseam, raising my children. But in this critical area, marriage, we had all turned away. I wanted to understand why. I wanted not to accept this. Dan, too, had worked tirelessly — some might say obsessively — at skill acquisition. Over the nine years of our marriage, he taught himself to be a master carpenter and a master chef. He was now reading Soviet-era weight-training manuals in order to transform his 41-year-old body into that of a Marine. Yet he shared the seemingly widespread aversion to the very idea of marriage improvement. Why such passivity? What did we all fear?

Conversation page photograph of couple by Stockbyte/Getty Images.

Tags: companionate marriage, elizabeth weil, marriage therapy

Hanna, given that he’s one of the most famous people in the world, Tiger really has guarded his privacy better than most public figures, so he actually does have some standing to invoke that privacy now that it’s come out he had a mistress, two mistresses, three mistresses—all of whom work in the nightclub industry and all of whom apparently took a photograph of Angelina Jolie to their plastic surgeons and said, “That nose, those lips, and also throw in a set of DD breast implants.” However, since the girlfriend revelations of once-squeaky-clean Tiger have now reached critical mass and he is having thermonuclear bimbo eruptions, whether he wants or deserves privacy, he has to face that it’s gone. For someone with such famous control, did he not think that unless he was very, very generous with his gifts to these women (which means no trinkets from Zales), eventually one or all might realize they could make years' worth of income by selling their story to the tabs? Now, at least, we may see how canny Tiger was before he got married if we learn what kind of pre-nup he had his wife sign. As for whether all this will affect his endorsements, see this alleged note to mistress Rachel Uchitel and be comforted that if Nike drops him he can always endorse Ambien.

Tags: tiger woods, Tiger Woods and privacy, Tiger Woods apology, tiger woods cheating

Oh, hey! Great news! There’s a new predator-type female in town, this one created by Spencer Morgan of the New York Observer. Welcome the cheetah: a young woman, fresh out of a relationship, on the prowl to take advantage of helpless, drunk, out-of-her-league men. She's the girl who stays for two games at the sports bar, not to watch football, natch, but to feast on juicy man tidbits. The cheetah is described nonsensically in the title as the “cougar’s younger cousin,” though later in the piece Morgan disowns the comparison, writing that the cheetah’s “hunting methods and psychology bear no resemblance to the cougar.” And that’s just the beginning—the article is full of comparisons and leaps that don’t make any sense. Welcome to the world of bogus trend pieces! Hop aboard! Let’s take a ride through this murky tale.

The first page: Seth is drunk. Dana offers to share a cab with him. Next thing you know, Seth has been violated: ““I woke up with a condom still on my dick.” Of course, nothing is said about how drunk Dana is, and what exactly she did that's so egregious. Are we supposed to think she date-raped him? I doubt it, but what happens in between the cab ride and the morning is left out of the story, making the cheetah, most probably, a girl a guy takes home and then regrets hooking up with in the morning, so she's conveniently labeled a "predator." And the insinuation that Dana committed some sort of violation (i.e., date rape)? Well, that’s super classy, considering one out of six women is sexually assaulted in her lifetime.

Of course, if said female violator were smoking-hot, perhaps she wouldn’t be considered a predator at all. You see, the cheetah is continually described as someone who has to connive for sex, because they’re not attractive, or at least not as attractive as they used to be.

Here:

He rightly pointed out that the cheetah isn’t just looking for whatever carcass she can haul out of the bar—incidentally, cheetahs are one of the few animals that will not eat carrion—but rather it is about women past the first flush of youth wanting to date or at least fuck “above their station."

Here:

Recently out of a relationship, K.C. has discovered that getting a man was no longer as easy as it once was. “It seems like whenever she can, she winds up going home with the drunkest guy in the bar,” said Angela. “Of course, in the back of her mind she’s hoping that her pussy’s still good enough to keep him."

And here:

He added that the cheetah was not necessarily unattractive but that for some reason or another, she was not aware of her attractiveness. That said, the cheetah he had in mind was notorious for looking dreadful without her makeup on and, as with Dana, working her way through his friend group.

In these passages, the cheetah is painted as an insecure girl, trying to find out if she can still bed cute guys, the assumption being, of course, that it's taking advantage because she doesn’t deserve to bed men “above her station.” But near the end, the aims of a cheetah change suddenly and dramatically (Bogus trend alert No. 3), with Morgan concluding that the goal of a cheetah is really just to find long-term love:

... the cheetah, who hopes that her victim will find something in her searching eyes when he rolls over the next morning, and will try to subtly guilt him into another round next time they meet: “Hey, where’ve you been? I haven’t seen you in so long."

So let’s go through the checklist:

You sleep with a drunk man, you’re a cheetah.

You watch two football games in a row at a bar, you’re a cheetah.

You hook up with someone casually, you’re a cheetah.

You hook up with someone with the aim of starting a relationship, you’re a cheetah.

You’re single and looking to meet guys, you’re a cheetah.

So, uh, according to the standards of this "trend," exactly who ISN’T a cheetah among us? Oh yeah, hot girls.

Photograph of Cheetah by Tona Karumba/AFP/Getty Images

Tags: bogus trends, cheetahs, cougars

The Girl Scout Research Institute has a new report out on the beliefs of school-age children and teenagers, and according to the press release, they've found that, "American teenagers are apt to make sound ethical and responsible decisions on a range of issues from smoking and drinking to premarital sex than they were just a generation ago." Certainly it is good that 62 percent of youths surveyed said they would not cheat on a test, compared with 48 percent from the 1989 survey. But I found the results of the premarital-sex question troubling. 33 percent of seventh to 12th graders said they would wait until marriage to have sex, up from 24 percent in 1989.

It's troubling news because the teens who say they will wait until marriage will beat themselves up when they inevitably fall short of that goal. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 95 percent of people have sex before marriage, and the vast majority of people have been having premarital sex for decades, so it doesn't look like this statistic is going to change much. In addition, teens who make virginity pledges are less likely to use condoms if and when they do have premarital sex, and are equally likely as non-pledge-making teens to have STIs.

What's also upsetting is that "waiting until marriage" is being referred to by the Girl Scounts as an "ethical and responsible decision," along with not cheating on a test. So it follows that not waiting is on the same level as outright deceit. In my moral universe, that's not a positive development.

But there is much good news in this report, particularly when it comes to diversity. Teens are much more accepting of homosexuality and minorities than they were back in '89. Perhaps this bodes well for the eventual passage of gay marriage laws ... as long as the gays wait to have sex until they're married, of course.

Tags: condoms, girl scouts research institute, Guttmacher Institute, premarital sex

As Ann points out on Feministing, it's dispiriting to read this new investigation of campus sexual assult by Kristen Lombardi for the Center for Public Integrity. We're supposed to be past the time when universities are indifferent to women's reports of assault, or actively discourage them from going to the police or bringing disciplinary charges, or force them to keep the proceedings secret if they do. And yet clearly we're not. This gibes with my own reporting for a story for the Yale Alumni Magazine several years ago (which I can't link to because it's not online). The question of what's rape or gray rape or date rape remains a confusing one for the women who experience these things and all the variations on them. But women who come forward should not find themselves blocked by their schools, and that is what is still happening, far more often than we'd like to think, Lombardi's reporting shows.

Also troubling is the confusion at universities over the Clery Act, which requires schools to report crimes committed on or near campus, and also the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which requires them to keep confidential student records, including disciplinary records. Lombardi explains all of this well; I'll just add that it's past time for Congress or the federal Department of Education, which monitors compliance with Clery, to clean this up.

Tags: campus sexual assault, center for public integrity, clery actd, family educational rights and privacy act

Tiger Woods has written a very moving and heartfelt plea “for some simple, human measures of privacy.” It’s the same thing politicians always ask for in such moments and it always brings up the same question for me: Are you allowed to use domestic props—wife, children, dogs—to manufacture a public persona, and then demand privacy when it turns out there’s more to the picture? Tiger has not won his endorsement deals merely because he is a great golfer. He has always traded in on his love for his father and his beautiful family to carefully guard the image of himself as a clean, “boring” guy, as he likes to put it. Europeans don’t make this bargain. They don’t demand uncomplicated home lives from their icons, so a cocktail waitress from Vegas does not change anything.

Maybe no one is surprised that Tiger has been having affairs. Maybe no one is outraged. But can he really ask us not to be interested?

Tags: tiger woods, Tiger Woods and privacy, Tiger Woods apology

The Salahi party crash just might be the most mind-numbing White House scandal in recent decades. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer a good sex scandal to a sneak preview of The Real Housewives of D.C. But since the story won’t die, the Washington Post’s Robin Givhan (she who moved from New York so as to cover Michelle Obama’s shorts and “Post-Title IX arms”) has turned her eye to White House social secretary Desirée Rogers. The most fascinating part of the piece is the way Givhan explains her decision to grant anonymity to Rogers' pals:

"Just because she has this job, it's not going to make her a worker bee,” says a friend who did not want to be identified in order not to offend. “She's glamorous.”

And later:

"All this talk about Desirée being lifelong friends with the Obamas is bunk. She's there because of Valerie [Jarrett]," says someone who has known Rogers for years but didn't want to be identified so as not to upset her.

“In order not to offend”? “So as not to upset her”? This is politics. Backstabbing may be de rigueur, but usually it’s at least masked as done in the name of the people, the party, or the Constitution. Rogers’ buddies just don’t want to make their friend mad, which is fine, but then they should have either elected not to return Givhan’s calls or come up with a better excuse for staying unidentified. “Didn’t want to be identified because of fear of retribution” would have been a good way to go.

Slate’s Jack Shafer would be displeased with this use of what he terms anonymice. His close reading of the reasons cited for granting sources anonymity found that the process works best when it adheres to the “Dana Priest rules”:

They're disciplined about their use of anonymous sources, and give more credence to whistleblowers than blowhards. They present multiple sources, increasing the likelihood that the information is accurate. They serve their readers, not their sources' agendas. And the information they publish is remarkably specific—proving dates, locations, events, circumstances, participants, quantities, and the like—which makes it falsifiable. By falsifiable I mean that the very specificity of the anonymously sourced information opens the article to the possibility of being proven wrong by naysayers.

By those standards, Givhan has failed. But I bet gatherings of Rogers’ social circle will be a little tense for the coming weeks.

Photograph of Desirée Rogers by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images.

Tags: Desiree Rogers, Robin Givhan, Salahis

Hanna, New York, where I worked as a prosecutor, has a similar pro-arrest policy in domestic-violence cases to Florida's, and it's a good one. It eliminated what we used to call the "walk around the block" rule—wherein an officer would take the aggressor for a walk to "cool off" and then encourage the combatants to work it out. It's not politically correct to say so, but in some cases, that's not a bad thing to do. It's just that when it is a mistake, it's a very big mistake. The costs of arresting someone and imposing a mandatory restraining order (the violation of which will often result from children being removed from the home—a big incentive for victims who'd like, rightly or wrongly, to give their partners another chance) are outweighed by the very real risk of greater harm.

But there still is—and ought to be—some room for discretion. Tiger Woods isn't a protesting victim who's called the police in, and now—once he's out of danger—wants them to back off. Nor is he someone whose neighbors called in the kind of disturbance that's frightening the block, or whose battered appearance is worrying his family and friends. No witnesses have reported threats or incidents. Those aren't the only things that call for the police to make an arrest against the wishes of the victim, but they're some of the more common ones. Truly, in these circumstances, the police and prosecutors look at three things: Is any one individual in danger, is the public in danger, and is this situation going to come back and bite us later? (That last one's nothing to be proud of, but—see Mike Huckabee—it's both an emotional and a political calculation.)

I just don't see any of those things being issues here. What I do see is a fourth consideration—the "press case" consideration, which goes as follows: Are we going to be accused of doing things differently because there's a celebrity involved? I think your argument is that the police are responding differently—that without Tiger's fancy lawyers, the police would be going after those medical records. I think you're wrong. Pro-arrest policy or not, I think the police would have done the same thing here. They were called for a small one-car accident, they dealt with a small one-car accident. They saw signs of an underlying incident; they put the fear of God into the parties about that underlying incident. They considered—rightly—the three questions and concluded that neither Tiger Woods, the children, nor the public was at risk. Now—with their eyes open and in the absence of any other complaints—it's time for them to move on. If they do anything else, it's going to be in response to that fourth consideration, and when police and prosecutors are forced to spend their resources on a celebrity case for any reason other than public and personal safety, other people—the people who really need that attention—suffer.

I am willing to bet that, right now, there are other cases in that Florida county that need, and are getting, the kind of attention you're talking about. Medical records are being examined, and experts asked if they can legitimately say that there's no way those injuries resulted from "walking into a door." Friends, neighbors, and family members are being pressed to testify even though the victim refuses to do so. Kids are being gently interviewed, and the right people know that the victim can't be allowed to make her partner's bail. And even with all that, it still may not work. Whoever that victim is, she needs all the help she's getting. Tiger Woods can take care of himself. The Florida cops are right to let him.

Tags: tiger woods, Tiger Woods and domestic violence

I was watching the Today Show (again!) this morning, and Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira were teasing a segment with Meredith Baxter Birney, the former matriarch of Family Ties. "Meredith Baxter Birney has a SECRET," they kept saying ominously, and I thought she either had a previously undisclosed meth addiction or was dying of some rare disease. What a relief it was that she just turned out to be a (her words) "late-in-life" lesbian. This expression is already a meme of sorts, and ABC News wrote an article about it earlier this year: women in their late middle age leaving their husbands for other women.

But naming them "late-in-life lesbians" seems awfully reductive, especially when you recall the epic New York Times Magazine article about female desire that DoubleX contributor Daniel Bergner wrote back in January. There is fairly substantial evidence that female sexuality is more fluid than male sexuality, and that women can be attracted to the person, not the gender. According to sexologist Lisa Diamond, who was quoted in Bergner's article (and in that ABC News piece)

Diamond doesn’t claim that women are without innate sexual orientations. But she sees significance in the fact that many of her subjects agreed with the statement "I’m the kind of person who becomes physically attracted to the person rather than their gender." For her participants, for the well-known women she lists at the start of her book [Ann Heche, Julie Cypher] and for women on average, she stresses that desire often emerges so compellingly from emotional closeness that innate orientations can be overridden.

In Birney's case, it sounded like she had sworn off men for good, so perhaps the moniker is fitting for her. What's more (and more appalling), she intimated that she was only coming out on live TV because the paparazzi was following her and her partner. If only we could accept less rigid definitions of our sexual orientations, it wouldn't be news no matter who a former TV star was sharing her life with.

Tags: family ties, late-in-life lesbians, meredith baxter birney