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My Rape, the Cornell Case—and Why We Need Better Approaches to Teaching How Consent Works

I tried to process the experience of being raped by disassociating. We have to show our kids a better way.

I was raped in college. This is a fact about me, and not one I think about much because it happened in 1997. It took me a day or two after I was assaulted to even acknowledge it, because I’d shoved it to a corner recess of my consciousness, where I hoped it could disappear forever, shrinking over time into something less menacing. Just a thing that happened. When I finally felt comfortable talking about it, the first thing I learned was that my experience was horrifically common.

Nearly every woman I know in adult life has been sexually assaulted, and for most of us, our first sexual assault—some of us have more than one—happened in college. There is nothing specific about an educational setting that lends itself to enhanced sexual danger for women; it’s simply the first time many of us are out in the world constantly interacting with people our age we barely know. For women, this means initial encounters with men who may or may not have grown up with norms about sex and consent that protect women from predatory behavior. We’re all suddenly adults with complete freedom of movement, and our social lives are ours to govern. We can stay out late, go to parties, drink—do the things adults do, in other words.

It’s not a coincidence that culture warriors on the right like to suggest that this wouldn’t be risky behavior if we all got married and stayed at home right after high school. They do not want women out in the world, educating themselves, making decisions, acquiring power of their own. Some of them view the risk of rape as fair punishment for not staying in the kitchen. Many of the women I know who say they’ve never experienced sexual assault got married as soon as they graduated from high school. They do not socialize with men who aren’t their husbands and do not have much in the way of a social life outside of church. Some are happy, and some are not. Isolation from men is certainly one way to avoid sexual assault, but social confinement shouldn’t be the price of safety for women. When opinion makers on the right talk about it as a kind of protection, they’re not looking out for the women; they’re looking out for the men.

I recently saw a frustrated influencer talking about the Cornell University rape case; she argued that we don’t need more education around consent—that these men knew what they were doing. I agree that they knew what they were doing, in the sense that they intuitively knew it was wrong. You can see that in the way some of the men in the fraternity tried to make amends with the victim before the gang rape’s aftermath escalated into the consequences now belatedly facing its perpetrators.

But I also think about my own college experience and what I was taught before I left my small, heavily conservative hometown. That prompts me to differ with the claim that consent-based education isn’t a viable response to cases like this. Where I grew up, we were educated about sex mostly by our peers, not our parents or teachers. I believe that’s still the case for most American boys, and Internet porn is an aggravating factor, in that it generally doesn’t model consent and gives them an unrealistic idea of what real consensual sex is like.

My school had no real sex ed, mostly because the parents in my largely evangelical community believed it was the job of parents to do that. This all but guaranteed that every one of my classmates got a message of abstinence and no actual sexual education. The one exception was the chapter or two we had on human anatomy and reproduction in biology class. To give a sense of how reproductive issues got discussed there, one of my classmates asked if women could still urinate when they were pregnant.

Otherwise, most of the sex ed was folk knowledge passed among us, some of it correct and much of it woefully wrong. The kid who had the most forbidden knowledge would inevitably disseminate it to everyone else, and as we aged into puberty, some kids my age began to have sex armed only with the knowledge of whatever dumb shit an equally ignorant classmate had passed on.

Consent was never part of the discussion, since it plays virtually no role in an abstinence-only approach to sex education. In a largely gender-segregated social environment, boys acquired the bulk of their understanding of the acceptable ways to treat girls from their peer group. The broader code of silence surrounding sexual matters, which were dogmatically deemed “inappropriate” for kids our age, predictably resulted in teen pregnancies, sexual assaults, and abuse.

I grew up in rural Alabama, but this wasn’t just a red-state or right-wing problem. It still isn’t.

My 11-year-old son goes to a Brooklyn public school that skews very liberal. We were informed that this year students and teachers would be talking about consent “but in an age-appropriate way” that involves using examples like whether you should be able to borrow someone’s phone without asking.

I understand the reticence, but I think 11 is a perfectly appropriate age for frank discussions of sex. Some of my son’s classmates are already capable of having sex and getting pregnant. Every single kid in the class already knows the basics of what sex is because we live in 2026; not only does the kid in the class with the most forbidden knowledge........

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