In George Cukor’s brilliant 1940 comedy The Philadelphia Story, Tracey Lord has divorced the love of her life, a recovering alcoholic who is a rich, Philadelphia blueblood like herself, and she is foolishly about to marry a shallow, social-climbing, “man of the people.” The night before the wedding all this begins to be a little too clear to her. Uncharacteristically, she has too much to drink and indulges in a romantic late night swim with Macaulay Connor, a young writer/ journalist covering her wedding. He takes her up to her bed . . . The next morning, Tracey can’t remember the evening, but she has found a man’s watch on her bedside table. She innocently asks the gathering, including both her ex- and future husbands, whose it could be. Macaulay, just as innocently, claims it with glad surprise. The prospective husband demands an explanation, insinuating that his rights have been offended. Macaulay assures him that nothing at all happened: he just carried her up to her bed. Tracey, who has resisted repeated attempts to cast her as an ethereal, pure goddess, rather than a flesh and blood woman, glares at Macaulay and asks, “Was I so undesirable?” And, Macaulay replies softly, “No, you were very desirable, but you’d also had too much to drink, and, well, there are rules about that.”
The reporting on recent cases of rape on U.S. college campuses has a surreal quality. It begins to appear as if academic administrations think this violent crime needn’t be treated as one. Currently, 55 universities and colleges in the U.S., including Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Florida State, and Ohio State, are under federal investigation for their handling of sexual assault.
Last week stories surfaced of a particularly brutal gang rape at the University of Virginia in one of its fraternity houses, a rape that had been planned in advance. In the aftermath, the university’s history of dealing with sexual assault has come under scrutiny, and it appears that university officials may have encouraged students to pursue cases of sexual assault through university channels, rather than the criminal justice system. Administrators have admitted that assailants who confess and ask forgiveness in a reconciliation process are not expelled and receive lighter sanctions than students convicted of cheating or stealing. The administrator in charge of the disciplinary process asserts that it leaves victims “generally feeling quite satisfied with the fact that the person has admitted that they’ve done something wrong.” The gang rape in the fraternity house at UVa occurred in September 2012 and was referred to the police for investigation only two weeks ago after an exposé in Rolling Stone Magazine.
