Judith Grossman probably never expected that her feminist activism would come back to haunt someone like her, but she found herself personally affected by the heavy hand of feminist legislation when her son was accused of having raped his girlfriend at a “small liberal-arts college in New England.” The alleged rape had occurred some two or three years previously, and police were not contacted, but the new, Title IX-mandated tribunal was set into motion against her son:
I am a feminist. I have marched at the barricades, subscribed to Ms. magazine, and knocked on many a door in support of progressive candidates committed to women’s rights. Until a month ago, I would have expressed unqualified support for Title IX and for the Violence Against Women Act.
But that was before my son, a senior at a small liberal-arts college in New England, was charged—by an ex-girlfriend—with alleged acts of “nonconsensual sex” that supposedly occurred during the course of their relationship a few years earlier.
What followed was a nightmare—a fall through Alice’s looking-glass into a world that I could not possibly have believed existed, least of all behind the ivy-covered walls thought to protect an ostensible dedication to enlightenment and intellectual betterment.
Welcome to a man’s world, Ms. Grossman! This is how you have reaped what you’ve sown with your feminist activism all those years back.
But rather than condemn her for past errors, I’d like to at least give Judith Grossman credit for recognizing and pointing out the worst part of these troikas:
Thankfully, I happen to be an attorney and had the resources to provide the necessary professional assistance to my son. The charges against him were ultimately dismissed but not before he and our family had to suffer through this ordeal. I am of course relieved and most grateful for this outcome. Yet I am also keenly aware not only of how easily this all could have gone the other way—with life-altering consequences—but how all too often it does.
Across the country and with increasing frequency, innocent victims of impossible-to-substantiate charges are afforded scant rights to fundamental fairness and find themselves entrapped in a widening web of this latest surge in political correctness. Few have a lawyer for a mother, and many may not know about the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which assisted me in my research.
That’s absolutely right. Few of us have family in a position to help us should we be falsely accused. The worst excesses of these troikas will inevitably afflict working and middle class boys who can’t claim any protected status. It will be the kinds of boys who are struggling to make something of themselves, perhaps to move up in the world, who will be hammered down hardest. This is an oppressive system that has nothing to do with justice, and everything to do with stripping power from young men in the name of fighting “the patriarchy” — a threadbare excuse that today sounds so cynical that only vicious and vindictive feminists, whose sole motive is power at the expense of others, could continue to use it.
