Didn’t they tell you you couldn’t go back to that campus? 
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At one point during college, my friends and I feigned interest in joining a fraternity so they’d ply us with lots of free dinners and drinks, which worked really well (until we refused their actual offer of membership, which wasn’t pretty). Frat guys are some seriously gross dudes with girls and being in a frat house is a gross experience overall.
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Why not start with the basics like,
- What is consent.
- Why binged drinking and substance abuse is dangerous and destructive.
- What is inappropriate behavior.
- A description of healthy consensual behavior.
Ultimately we are talking about broad social reform and habitualization. It will not happen by itself. It needs to be clear, focused with strong institutional support.
If frats are a negative social institution then they should be banned from schools.
Abstinence is not a virtue. And abstinence based policies are delusional.
Guns and sex are not equivalent and this is not going to be derailed into another gun thread. Let me tell you what happens when you try to bar horny young adults from having sex. They do it anyway, in secret, where it’s even harder to hold predators accountable. I appreciate that you want to solve the problem. That would not solve it, it might well exacerbate it, and meanwhile real solutions like accountability would fall by the wayside.
Also, and this is a separate issue, but college is not a job. College is school.
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I’m with you in terms of “that’s why claims should be taken seriously and investigated”.
But the “believe all allegations” vibe that is in the air poses some obvious problems. First, if you’ve you’re old enough, you’ll be cynical of this as you’ve probably met enough people who seem nice on the surface but are in fact manipulative, resentful, vindictive, cruel, disturbed – people really do get like that, and people really are willing to lie in order to see someone else suffer (and I’m not just talking about allegations of a sexual nature, to be clear).
Also, if people are just believed – even simply by the general public – now with the force of social media, we could potentially create an environment where it becomes easier to mount a false claim. TJ’s life has just suffered a major blow (losing work, losing reputation) and if his version of the story is true, that’s a great injustice.
So I tend to think this way – if your friend discloses an assault to you, it’s pretty likely you’ll believe them and hopefully that will mean you will take them seriously. If not, you’re probably not a good friend, or your friend is a serial liar – otherwise you have no good reason to behave that way. But in cases where high net worth public individuals are involved and civil suits are a possibility, I think you have to go case by case and make up your mind, and it’s OK to be equally sceptical and look at the facts in search of the truth.
And no, in civil suits, where the standards are not as robust as criminal cases, the liars are not necessarily going to be exposed. I know people who have been sued on completely baseless grounds, and as the legal fees started stacking up, they decided to quietly settle.
So… it’s a complicated world out there, and we should meet it as such.
My two cents.
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First there is nothing wrong with abstinence. People that practice abstinence are normal. It’s their choice. Also virtue and sex are not incompatible. Virtue is probably essential in a sexual relationship. What virtue and ethicals are is debatable and flexible.
Yep. Telling people not to fuck doesn’t really work. Might work for some, but a lot of times that is also due to lack of opportunities. Even the Puritans had pre-marital sex. When she started to show was when the wedding was announced.
Unless you play for an NCAA sport, and then it is a bit of both, but with out pay.
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There is nothing wrong with abstinence, but it isn’t a good public policy because of the failure rate.
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How about a frank discussion of how to have sex from a mental health perspective.
That’s not the point.
AFAIK, no charges have been brought against him. If it turns out he’s been falsely accused, his accuser will likely face even greater opprobrium than he would if they turned out to be true and may face civil charges.
Back when I had employees, if one of them came to me with an allegation of wrongdoing of any kind in the company, my partners and I would have put that person on paid suspension during an internal investigation and if the allegations proved true would then be fired for cause and any relevant authorities notified. If the wrongdoing was criminal in nature, the authorities would be notified immediately upon the allegation. It’s not ethical business to keep someone in the office until such an allegation is resolved.
There’s a difference between being skeptical and publicly questioning the person bringing allegations. If you’re willing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt (within reason), then there is no reason why you need to publicly doubt any one party involved in an allegation.
There’s a fine line between nuance and obfuscation.
You say that as if that was in any way shape or form what I said. It wasn’t. I said it was not a virtue. I did not say it was wrong.
Virtue is absolutely essential in all aspects of life. Water is also wet.
What’s worse is that when colleges ban students from having sex, victims of sexual assault are forced to weigh coming forward against themselves being punished.
Solid point. My frustration with the exploitation of college athletes and college athletic culture is a whole other topic.
It is precisely the point.
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(Walks into the room with an enormous ocelot, a lush velvet coat, and an array of delicious muffins. Some blueberry, some bacon, some unidentified. Sits down, and kicks up his feet on the plush 300 year old BBS ottoman, perhaps from the vestiges of the empire.)
There is nothing wrong with abstinence. I practice it every day. There is something wrong with enforcing it.
(Slides off the loafers, and dons Bob Ross slippers)
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Ethical behavior is regulated in the work space. That includes consensual relationships between co-workers.
PS. It was just a conversation starter.
That’s called going to BYU, and the only people who actually agree to do it are brainwashed.
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I basically agree I supposed, though the way I tend to think about things is to equally doubt everyone. That doesn’t mean you go around being a jerk and harshly question people, and we always have to resist how easy it is to turn a blind eye to victims. But I dunno, I’ve seen a couple of very fishy public cases now that INSTANTLY caused serious financial harm to the alleged perpetrator. That’s a problem too, and it’s troubling to because we’ve seen how these things can spiral out of control – like the Satanic daycare sex abuse scandals.
And like… women have personally disclosed to me that they’ve been sexually assaulted, and of course I believed them, and supported them. But I believed them because I have good friends, and their stories made sense to me. Not simply on the basis of their gender or because I’ve been following the latest hashtag trend.
There are a lot of seemingly paradoxical effects that kick in when we’re dealing with human psychology, and the idea of banning sex on colleges might seem like it would solve one kind of problem, but it seems to me to be a very dangerous idea (and not to mention probably a violation of human rights).
Somewhere along the way we seem to have lost the plot – we should create a sex positive culture that isn’t so freaked out about this stuff, especially taking the time to talk to friends about all this and engaging in a meaningful way with these topics.
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Come on, let’s be real. Ethical relationships are just work based. Different rules? Sure, I’ll grant that. Otherwise, no.
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Um… no. They are adults. They don’t get to be better adults by being treated like children.
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I am pretty sure I picked up on ethics around ten? I won’t deny jerk kids, but I think I grasped the fundamentals before a decade.
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