Carrie Welsh
You’re listening to “Ethics & Education.” I’m Carrie Welsh. This episode is about sexual citizenship.
Jennifer Hirsch
There already is a vaccine for sexual assault. We can’t expect people to have sex without hurting people if we don’t ever teach them.
Shamus Khan
Sex is not a degendered, desexualized activity that equally applies to everyone in this way. And so giving young people the analytic tools to sort of see gender and sexuality and power as integrated sets of things…Really, that’s essential.
Carrie Welsh
Grace Gecewicz and Maddy Brighouse Glueck interviewed Jennifer Hirsch and Seamus Khan about their book, Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power and Assault on Campus. This conversation offers a hopeful vision for the future of sex ed, preventing sexual assault, and developing an empathetic understanding of young people today.
Grace Gecewicz
I’m Grace. I recently graduated from the University of Wisconsin where I studied philosophy and Gender and Women’s Studies. Now I am a student teacher at a middle school in Oakland, California.
Maddy Brighouse Glueck
I’m Maddy. I’m a first year PhD student in the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin, and I was previously a teacher in a secondary school.
Jennifer Hirsch
Hi, Jennifer Hirsch. I am a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. I was co-principal investigator of the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation, or SHIFT, which was the big research project out of which this book grew. And I’ve spent my career working in gender and sexuality, including developing the sex ed curriculum at my son’s school.
Shamus Khan
Hi, I’m Shamus Khan. I’m a sociologist at now Princeton University where I’m also affiliated with the American Studies program. And I co-directed the ethnographic portion of SHIFT with Jennifer.
Maddie Brighouse Glueck
So kind of on the book, what is a sexual citizen?
Shamus Khan
So a sexual citizen is not–maybe I shouldn’t start with what it isn’t, but it’s kind of important to note what it isn’t. It isn’t something people are born with. And that actually is part of the big point of the book, that sexual citizenship is something that communities cultivate and develop. We heard a story from one young woman who told us about slipping into the party scene in New York and going downtown and hanging out and meeting these guys. And she was very excited to tell us the stories of sort of meeting them and then going back to their hotel room, and it was sort of like, you know, not very well known athletes and kind of B or C list actors. And she would get to their room, and she didn’t really want to “do stuff” with them. And so she then explained that her resolution, the way to get out of that room, was to, quote, give them a blow job so she could get out of there. And that story highlights the failure of those men to recognize her sexual citizenship. That is her right to say yes, and her right to say no to sex, and the failure of the communities that raised her to help cultivate her own sense of sexual citizenship. And in those stories, eventually, she told us many other stories of sexual assault or just really kind of difficult and problematic sex, where she figured out sexual citizenship by herself. And so one of the main points of Sexual Citizens is to argue that one of our sort of moral imperative of communities is to cultivate within young people a sense of their own sexual citizenship, by which we mean the right to say yes, and the right to say no to sex, and the obligation to recognize the equivalent rights in others.
Grace Gecewicz
Thanks for that question. That was really interesting. So in the book, there is discussion of sex, sexual assault, and rape. And one thing that was striking to me was that there’s this discussion of them as distinct, but maybe not as distinct as some people think. So they are interrelated. Can you talk about that? And is that is that the right way to think about it?
Jennifer Hirsch
It’s the way we think about it. Most of the conversation about campus sexual assault has focused on adjudication. So a problem has really been owned by lawyers and and by psychologists who have studied the individual level characteristics of people who are likely to experience assault and to some extent the characteristics of people who are likely to commit an assault. And we take a really different approach in sexual citizens. Austin was a young man who in many ways is a sympathetic figure in the book, the one kind of sexy sex scene as well was with Austin and his girlfriend. And yet he told us a story about an experience freshman year in which he assaulted someone. And he didn’t describe it as assault at first. And then in the process of the interview, he came to recognize that it was assault. So in Sexual Citzens, our goal is to shift the conversation from that focus on adjudication to talk about prevention, to think about what could have prevented that assault that Austin committed and the others that we described in the book, rather than thinking about sexual assault as the something that happens because of broken people, which is a sort of psychological approach, or focusing on the question of like, what is the line between assault and sex? And obviously, there’s a distinction, we’re not arguing that there isn’t a distinction, we show how assault is produced by the social organization of sex so that the ways in which people have sex makes vulnerability, to experiencing assault and committing assault. So we take sexual assault to be, sadly a normal feature of how we’ve organized our communities. And that recognition then allows us to think about Okay, what could we reorganize in those communities to prevent assault, so the necessity of, of seeing sex and assault in dialogue with each other as opposed to in opposition, is it you can’t, you can’t acknowledge that many assaults happen in circumstances in which the either they begin as sexual interactions or in which one person the whole time thinks they’re having sex. And you can get to that insight without putting sex and assault in dialogue with each other in the way that we do in Sexual Citizens.
Maddy Brighouse Glueck
In the same vein of distinctions and describing, you have sort of these concepts of sexual projects, sexual geographies, and then the concept of Sexual Citizens that you just talked about. So I’m wondering if you could kind of put those concepts in conversation with each other for us.
Shamus Khan
So Jennifer and I are ethnographers, and we kind of like to elucidate concepts with stories or narratives of people that we’ve observed. And, you know, Charisma was a Latina and Black woman who described Columbia as a white institution. And what she meant by that was that it was a space, in her words, where the social life was like, filled with white guys who couldn’t dance who drank too much, and didn’t find her attractive. And so for her finding a place where she belonged meant leaving campus, and she ended up meeting this guy through her roommate, and she went from campus, which is in Morningside Heights, which is Upper Manhattan to Brooklyn. And for those of you who don’t know the sort of geography of New York, Brooklyn to Manhattan is not very far in miles. But in time, it takes a really long time to get to where she went. And she tells us the story of meeting up with this guy, and he ends up putting his hand on her leg and she moves it away. And then he puts it back on her leg. And she says, In the interview, I didn’t have a plan B, my plan was always to use body language to communicate my desires, and I didn’t know how to articulate them otherwise. Now, there’s a lot that can be said about this story. And we do much more with it in the book to help elucidate a range of things. But it does help highlight sexual projects, sexual citizenship, which we’ve already spoken about, and sexual geographies. Sexual geographies is the idea that space matters and that control over space is essential and that control over space is tied to power. And what Charisma highlighted to us was that the space of campus life was primarily a space of whiteness. And when she ended up in this man’s apartment in Brooklyn, she was in a space that he controlled. And that highlights how we should think about spatial dynamics as essential to the experience of sexuality, as well as the explanations for why assault happens, and that the interrelationship between space and powers essential sexual projects emerges out of some of Jennifer’s earlier work, which is the answer to the question, what is sex for? And you might think only academics could ask what sex is for but as it turns out, sex is for lots of different things: pleasure, of course, but it’s a way in which we connect with other people, come to understand our own identities, achieve status within a group or maintain the status of our existing group, give comfort to a loved one–there are lots of things that sex is for. And for the young man in this story with Charisma, he was very clear about his sexual project, which was to have sex. Charisma was less clear about her sexual project. Also this challenge for her was in having sort of a lack of clarity about what she wanted out of sex. And just as we talk about how sexual citizenship isn’t something that people are born with, sexual projects are not natural things. So when Jennifer earlier said that we need to think about the social organization of sex, some of that is thinking about the social organization of sexual projects, or how it is that what our projects are with our own sexuality is something that communities help clarify and cultivate. In the book, what we argue is that very few communities actually help clarify and cultivate sexual projects in young people, just as very few of them help clarify and cultivate a sense of sexual citizenship, and that this community level failure is one of the things that puts people at risk.
Jennifer Hirsch
I would just add on to that we’re agnostic about whether there is a right sexual project, as researchers, right. We’re like, kids live your best life. So there’s no better sexual project than others, although we do trace out in Sexual Citizens how a sexual project that is very focused on self, as opposed to other, is a sexual project that puts you at risk of assaulting someone because it treats other people like objects through which you can accomplish your goals as opposed to equally self determining humans. So on the other hand, sexual citizenship has a very strong moral normative framework, and is not an individual, it shouldn’t be an individual choice. It’s something that we need to build together. And then sexual geographies in terms of the way it fits into those two other ideas is the dimension that’s most easily institutionally modifiable. If you think about campus spaces, and the ways that most residential higher education institutions automatically give better spaces to students who’ve been there longer, that builds in a power disparity, where first year students don’t have spaces that they can control to host parties, or to have sex with people without shuffling around roommates. And so sexual geographies, to us, opens the door to a range of community level approaches to prevention that go beyond just telling people to act better, which is not our A-game in public health.
Grace Gecewicz
What is the next frontier in sex education?
Jennifer Hirsch
The next step is recognizing that we can’t expect people to have sex without hurting people. If we don’t ever teach them. Shamus and I use the example of driving. When young people learn to drive there is a whole system in place to ensure that they can do so without hurting other people. So there’s driver’s ed–you don’t just learn to drive from watching movies of like all the terrible things that could happen if you drive, which is pretty much what students–you know, students, when we asked them about sex ed, they were like, ‘Oh, you mean my sexual diseases class.’ And you certainly don’t teach people to drive by explaining to them how spark plugs work. And when students do get sex ed, it’s frequently taught in a health context. And it’s very biology, which is not bad to know how you know about ovaries and fallopian tubes. But that also doesn’t teach people about healthy relationships, or how to have sex without hurting people. And so it’s not that affirmative consent is bad or wrong, or that bystander programs are bad or wrong, but it’s a little bit like starting with calculus when kids haven’t even had arithmetic. And so we argue very strongly in Sexual Citizens for comprehensive, age-appropriate, medically accurate sexuality education as laying the groundwork for sexual assault prevention. We found in the survey research part of SHIFT, in a paper led by my husband, we found that women who’d had comprehensive sex ed before college that included training in how to say no that sex they didn’t want to have–which is not abstinence only sex ed, it’s just sex ed that includes skills development, like any good education, those women were half as likely to be raped in college. That is a big effect size that is the target effectiveness for the COVID vaccine, which now apparently, we’ve like far overshot. That is about as effective as the flu vaccine is every year. So there already is a vaccine for sexual assault and state legislators are choosing not to make it widely available, right. The heterogeneity of sex ed policy across the United States is astonishing and shameful. There are nine states that still require that if sex ed is taught that it discriminate against queer people. Well, that is like written in the law. So sex ed, I think is clearly the the next step in what prevention needs to look like. There’s so many students, not just at Colombia and Barnard, but everywhere who experience sexual assault before college. And then of course, there are many people in America who don’t go to college. So comprehensive sex education is not going to solve the whole problem, because sexual assault is not one thing, it’s many things. But it will lay the groundwork for prevention. In other research, I’ve done, I’ve also shown how sex ed could be a very useful and powerful tool in teaching people not to assault. So again, just circling back to the driving metaphor, there’s not going to be one magic bullet, we need to layer together multiple solutions at the skills building level and at the normative level and at the environmental design level. But sex ed has to be a component of that.
Shamus Khan
And I just wanted to layer on that sex ed is essential to helping prevent assault, but there’s a lot of sex that can be harmful that isn’t assault. One woman told us this story about how she had this ongoing hookup with a guy and it was great, it helped her relieve her stress and satisfy her sexual desires. And then one day he came and talked to her, you know, after they hooked up, about how he was sad, because his grandmother had just died. And she ghosted him. She was like, ‘not talking to you anymore,’ because she was down for sex, but she wasn’t down for feelings. Now, there’s nothing like assaultive about that. It’s, you know, great that she was clear about her own sexual boundaries and desires. But like, it’s kind of harmful to that guy, right? I mean, there were things where it was like, you know, you could imagine, finally talking to somebody about something that would matter to you, somebody you feel like you connected with, and they just totally blew you off and refused to ever speak to you again. And so one of the things to think about with sex ed is like it’s not just about assault, it’s about how to help prevent a wide range of harmful experiences that people might have. And our position of going beyond consent is like–meaning, consent is a necessary step along the way. But we need many other steps when it comes to teaching people about sex. Like just having in almost like a formulaic way, like ‘check, yep, I followed the consent guidelines,’ doesn’t actually help you completely have the kinds of sex that I think affirm other people, and that allow you to have clarity about what it is that you want. To continue with the driving metaphor, one of the things that Jennifer and I say is like, it’s really important when you drive to know to stop at red lights and stop signs, right? I mean, that is essential to safe driving. But if you only know how to stop at red lights, and stop signs, you can still do a lot of damage with your car, because you don’t know a lot of other things that you similarly need to know how to do, like, you know, merge into oncoming traffic, without a kind of more comprehensive understanding of this. And one of the things that we argue in Sexual Citizens is that the silence and fear around sexuality that is like built into our culture, and to our education does a lot of harms, some of which are making sexual assault more likely to happen. But there are many more harms that it also does that could be prevented if we took this seriously.
Maddy Brighouse Glueck
So I’m kind of interested in like the responsibility of educating, you know, sexual citizens about sex, where does it fall, does it fall on K-12 teachers? Universities, parents, someone else? How do you see that kind of landscape of institutions like working together to like, solve this problem?
Shamus Khan
So one of our arguments is that sex ed, and discussions about sex are far too siloed. And so the kind of answer that we give to your particular question is like, it’s everybody’s job. The way that we’re going to tackle this is not by saying, like, we just need to give like the Women’s Center more funding. And then if the Women’s Center has more funding, they can do more outreach and education. Like no, actually, we need to think about sexual assault as something that happens because of a range of factors and that a wide range of people is going to need to be engaged in prevention. So let’s sort of highlight a little bit of what that looks like. Well, first, it doesn’t mean that like we start talking to young people, when they’re two years old about the mechanics of sex. That there’s lots of sex ed that we can provide to young people that doesn’t necessarily involve sex. So you know, saying to a young child, ‘don’t grab, use your words,’ is a sexual assault prevention strategy, because it communicates the necessity of speaking what it is that you want, and not simply taking it without communicating that. Now, parents may not think that that’s a sexual assault prevention strategy, but it absolutely is. And one of the things that we need to do is to connect those everyday lessons about bodily autonomy, the necessity of developing a sense of your own bodily autonomy, the necessity of developing a sense of clarity about what it is that you want, the necessity of communicating that to other people, and the necessity of listening to other people when they communicate with you. All of that is part of a sex ed prevention strategy. In the book, Jennifer and I also argue that like, there are so many stakeholders who are underutilized right now, who could be part of a broader strategy. So in the discussion of sexual geographies, Jennifer said, you know, one of the really important aspects of sexual geographies is it’s modifiable. There are things that we can do about our institutional landscape when it comes to control over space. But it’s also something where we can bring in a range of stakeholders who have control over space, and who can begin to see themselves as sexual assault prevention actors and critical players in this. And we say this not in the sort of broad, abstract conceptual sense, but actually, really, practically, in the course of doing the research. One of the people at Columbia who ended up being kind of a champion of our approach was the person who was responsible for facilities and you know, housing and dining services. And as we talked to him about our understanding, a kind of light bulb went on, and he was like, ‘oh, wow, there are things I could actually do to help prevent sexual assault.’ And so, you know, I’ll name check him, his name is Scott Wright. And he realized when we were talking about how students have nowhere to go after, say, hanging out at a party on campus, late at night, on a Friday or Saturday, the only option that they have is to go back to somebody’s room. And they may not want that. Rooms typically have like four pieces of furniture: a desk, a chair, a bureau, and a bed. And if you’re going to sit somewhere, you’re going to sit on a bed together and sitting on a bed together at three in the morning has a kind of meaning. It doesn’t necessitate sexual assault, but it makes it more likely. And so Scott Wright said to himself, you know what I can do, I can keep a space on campus open all night, on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, when students are most likely to be out at these kinds of events. Now, what that points to is how there can be many different people who are engaged in sexual assault prevention, including people which we haven’t spoken to so much, who are engaged in work like diversity, equity, and inclusion, and I don’t know, Jennifer, if you want to talk about the range of other stakeholders who might be involved in this kind of activity.
Jennifer Hirsch
I would lift up two kinds of institutions. I think first, the family. like people who raised children. And just building on what Seamus said about just the basic messages that you give young children about respect and other people’s self determination. I think as children get older, if, as a parent, you have a moral vision for sexuality in relation to your kids. And, you know, parents are the most important sources of socialization around sex. So if you want your child to approach sex in a way that brings commitment, and care, and pleasure together, the best way to do that is by allowing them to do that. And that means approving the sleepover, right. So like, you know, there’s really interesting work on the difference between Dutch families and American families. For many American families, the sort of default is ‘not under my roof,’ which doesn’t keep kids from having sex, right, it just means that they do it, like, in a car or on a park bench, or in one case that I know of, like in the driveway, which is technically not under the roof. You know, I know that not all parents agree on this, and I had my bluff called by my own children, you know, but if you do, you can say to your child, ‘when you’re in a relationship where your partner wants to join us for dinner, they can stay for breakfast.’ And it is the most awkward cup of coffee you will ever make the next morning but I think it’s also a really powerful message about seeing young people’s emerging sexual citizenship and acknowledging and supporting it. So, families, I think that healthcare institutions by ensuring that young people have access to reproductive health and sexual health technologies, whether it’s condoms, or IUDs, or whatever, like that is another way that young people can be recognized as sexual citizens. And then religious institutions, I’m gonna throw in a third set of institutions. So like, we have a lot of conversation over the past 20 years in America about religious institutions as sites of sexual harm. And so I think for many of those institutions, what they’re going for, is just to not be sites of sexual harm. And I’m like, you know, you could set the bar a little higher there. If the whole point of religion is to teach people what it means to live a good and meaningful life, then sex has to be a part of that. And also, I think, from a very practical point of view, if religious institutions want to bring teenagers in, there is no more interesting thing to talk about, than gender, sex, and relationships. And so I think that that that’s a space where there is a lot of potential for having these morally grounded conversations around what it means not just like, what body part can go in what slot, but like, what does it mean to have a relationship with another human being? What do we consider to be sacred? Those are important conversations to have that are very absent from young people’s lives.
Grace Gecewicz
What should I teach if I teach sex education? And what should I teach if I never teach sex education, and continue teaching something like middle school social studies?
Jennifer Hirsch
I mean, regardless of whether you teach a formal sex ed curriculum, you are teaching sex ed already, right? Because you are reading books with your students where gender and sexuality and racial inequality are part of the text. And by choosing to lift those up and help them develop critical thinking around them–that’s one message. And by not acknowledging that, and then that’s part of the the the hidden curriculum that teaches young people that you can talk about those things. So regardless of what is actually going on in your, in your classroom, in the broadest version, in terms of helping young people think about relationships and what we owe each other as human beings, it’s already happening. And then you know, there are lots of people who have more expertise in curriculum selection than we do. I’ve always been a fan of the Our Whole Lives curriculum. That’s the one that we used as the basis for developing a comprehensive K-8 program in our son’s own school. So there’s a Unitarian version of that, and then there’s a secular version. But I think that, you know, the fact that you’re a social studies teacher, underlines the real, I think, the real potential for innovation, which is to think about integrating what’s in the sex ed curriculum with the rest of the curriculum, because students, young people, everybody needs to learn to think about power, right, the power that they wield the power that other people might wield over them. And those are questions that are best explored in social studies and English and history, not in the formal sex ed curriculum. So I think you have the power, even if your school won’t let you teach sex ed, you still have the power to address those broader questions in the classroom.
Shamus Khan
Yeah, I mean, I would just layer on, you know, that no doubt you’re teaching about Rosa Parks and racial justice. And one thing to highlight is that Rosa Parks, some of her earliest work was on sexual assault. That was actually a lot of the activism that she was doing in, you know, the late 40s and early 50s. And so, you know, pointing to that, and raising up how racial justice and issues of bodily and sexual autonomy were intimately tied to one another as social movements is very important. If you can’t do that, though, as Jennifer said, you know, highlighting how control over space and power are deeply intertwined, gives young students a set of analytic skills to help see power. to return to our conversation about consent. there’s the kind of famous ‘tea video’ which is about consent and how it’s ‘as simple as a cup of tea.’ And it’s a you know, it’s a video that kind of went viral and people love it. And Jennifer and I sadly hate on the tea video a little bit. And one of the reasons we do is because even though it’s cute, and it’s like you know, if you make tea for somebody, and then they say they don’t want tea, don’t force them to drink tea and don’t pour hot tea down someone’s throat if they’re asleep. You know, there’s all these things. But one of the challenges with that video is that it’s stick figures. The stick figures are there in order to be inclusive of different gender identities and different sexualities. So the tea video can apply to everyone in the same way. The problem is, is that like sex is not a degendered, desexualized activity that equally applies to everyone in the same way. And so giving young people the analytic tools to sort of see gender and sexuality and power as integrated sets of things that create sort of huge disparities in experience, understanding and capacity for expression–really, that’s essential. And even if you’re not connecting that with sex, but simply conveying those lessons, it’s something that then can serve as a foundational kind of understanding for young people, as they then begin to navigate their own intimate lives.
Grace Gecewicz
I would like to return to the driving analogy. I did many months of behind the wheels, driving with my parents, I drove in a parking lot. I had lots of practice, I passed the test. And still, a few months after I got my driver’s license, I got into a minor car accident. And I’m curious, from an ethical perspective, if it seems like we should be forgiving to young people who make mistakes,
Jennifer Hirsch
I’m not sure I would frame it as forgiving. I think your insight is certainly spot on that people will hurt each other, right. And I think what we need is a way for them to acknowledge that harm, do what they can to address it, and learn not to hurt other people. And again, because our focus is not adjudication, we don’t dive deeply into what restorative justice means on campus. But there are campuses that are experimenting with incorporating restorative justice approaches–when survivors want it, because not everyone wants it. And I think that it’s a way that that brings people who have hurt each other back into the moral circle and gives them a chance at redemption. Rather than casting them out in a way that just means that they’re going to integrate into some other community and really not have learned in any fundamental way how to do better. So I think that I wouldn’t go to like, a no-fault model, because I think that first of all, sexual assault is not one thing; it’s many things. There certainly are people who intentionally harm others. That’s not really our focus in Sexual Citizens. But so there’s not going to be like a one size fits all solution for this. But I think you know, your point about giving people a way to recognize that they’ve hurt someone and then to do better, is fundamental. If you think about how common sexual assault is, it can’t just be a handful of bad actors. It is people like us.
Maddy Brighouse Glueck
So I guess kind of to close out, who do you hope reads this book? So if it’s people like us who do this, who do you want to be reading this book?
Shamus Khan
Everyone, in a word. You know, when we started this project, Jennifer and I agreed that we of course, had an aim to write a series of academic papers. And we have we’ve written you know, well over a dozen academic papers on this, that really kind of get into the academic literature and make sort of discrete contributions in different areas of that literature. But we knew that we wanted to communicate with a much broader audience. And so Jennifer and I undertook this writing project of Sexual Citizens as one where we envisioned our audience, not just as our colleagues, you know, in the offices down the hall, but also to try and write a book that could reach parents of young people or young people who were thinking about becoming parents themselves. We wrote it in a way that we thought could reach high school students. So you know, it’s an academic book with lots of footnotes and citations, but they’re all in the back of the book. And the narrative is pretty clean and straight throughout the whole thing. And it uses narratives and stories about people’s experiences, kind of pulling back the curtain on what it’s like to be a college student today in general. And so what we’re hoping is that like, high school seniors read this book, and we’re working actually with a range of high schools where that has happened or is happening. So much of sex ed is, as Jennifer said earlier, about instituting fear in young people. Fear of the consequences of having sex, be that sexually transmitted infections or unwanted pregnancies or, you know, a litany of things. That fear seeps its way into our conversations about sex. One young woman in the book told us why she drank so much before having sex. And she said, ‘well, you know, getting drunk before having sex, it’s kind of like novocaine before going to the dentist. It numbs you for what you’re about to experience.’ And that articulation as a way of thinking about and experiencing sex is deeply built in shame and fear. And Jennifer and I wanted to write a book about sexual assault that isn’t grounded in shame and fear, but instead its emotional valence is empathy and hope, articulating a hopeful vision for how we can actually prevent sexual assault and having an empathetic understanding of young people today. And so our hope for the audience is that, you know, seniors in high school who are thinking of heading off to college, can open the book kind of get a portrait of what college is like at least at one college and have an understanding of the greater clarity about their own sexual projects, their sexual citizenship, their obligation to recognize the citizenship of others, and the foundation of an analysis of geography and power that will help them not just in college, but far beyond.
Carrie Welsh
Thanks for listening. We make these audio pieces to help think better about ethical questions. For many of these episodes, we’ve also created study guides for you to teach with, which you can download for free from our website. And if you’re interested in teaching the Sexual Citizens book, there’s a list of great resources for teaching and discussion at sexualcitizens.com.