Hofstra False Rape Case – the Continuing Saga
The Hofstra false rape allegations haven’t yet run their course. The District Attorney still hasn’t charged the accuser, Danmell Ndonye with a crime. Newsday still hasn’t published either her name or photograph.
And now we have Emily Bazelon tossing her two cents into the pot here (Slate, 9/21/09). Unlike several of the commenters over at Feministing.com, Bazelon is not desperate to prove that in some way Ndonye actually was raped, but just needs a touch of feminist re-education to make her realize it. She says Ndonye (without using her name, of course) lied. She describes the Duke lacrosse case as one of false accusations and reminds her readers that the three young men were exonerated.
No, Bazelon is aiming at smaller game. She cites feminist Laura Sessions Stepp’s concept of “gray rape,” which is nonconsensual sex that can’t be proven to be rape by the DA. It’s that nasty “he said/she said” scenario that, without more, adds up to a non-prosecutable case. Neither Stepp nor Bazelon likes the idea, but, without saying so outright, the burr under their saddle is the presumption of innocence. Without that, ”he said/she said” could indeed result in convictions and jail time.
But Bazelon seems to grudgingly accept, at least provisionally, the lynchpin of a thousand years of due process rights. As far as she’s concerned, innocent until proven guilty can remain the law of the land. We’re all grateful to her for that. And having done so, she moves on to what really concerns her.
Let’s agree that something disturbing happened to that 18-year-old woman at Hofstra. Something she feels awful about. Any good, right-thinking feminist, and any good girlfriend, would encourage her to talk to a counselor about her story. The problem is that by going to the police and then recanting, she fit into a new story that backfires on her and on feminism in an ugly way. She becomes the false accuser, and the boys, like the Duke boys, become the victims. In these moments of recantation, all we can talk about is how wrong she was. And then we lose the conversation that happens at a level beneath the law: about how these late-night moments in a random bathroom that everyone regrets can stop before they start. I’m not sure how you do that. But I wish this was where we’d go, now that we know that whatever happened to this girl, it wasn’t the legal definition of rape.
I’d like Bazelon to consider another possibility – Ndonye had sex with five men that night because she wanted to. My guess is that, at this point at least, Ndonye really does regret (a) abusing her relationship with her boyfriend and (b) falsely accusing the young men. Whatever the actual case, I’m willing to assume that she does.
But what if she hadn’t had a boyfriend? What if there had been no one to ask uncomfortable questions and send her off into a spate of lying and false accusations to the police? What if Ndonye had just gone home that night and slept it off? In short, what if the only thing she had to regret about that night was having sex with five men, one right after the other?
Would she? Would she regret it? Maybe she would, but maybe she wouldn’t. I’m not calling her a slut; I’m saying she might have wanted to do exactly what she did that night, for whatever reason. Indeed, isn’t that the very concept of consensual sex – that each person is doing what he/she wants to do?
I don’t know Danmell Ndonye, but maybe she was experimenting with a fantasy she’d had for years. Maybe she’d read something about having sex with more than one man, or maybe a girlfriend had talked to her about it. Maybe it’s something she’ll never do again; maybe it’s something she will.
And that’s what strikes me about Bazelon’s piece in Slate. In it, there is no room whatsover for the concept that what Ndonye did that night is what she wanted to do at the time. To Bazelon, having sex with more than one man is, per se, “something she feels awful about.” It’s something she needs counselling for. For Bazelon, what Ndonye did is what “everyone regrets,” and what we must figure out how to stop before it starts.
As Bazelon sees it, Ndonye’s willing participation in group sex must be pathological; it can’t be right and it must be regretted. It is the symptom of an illness that must be cured.
In truth, my guess is that something like what happened at Hofstra happens frequently, minus the false allegations. My guess is that group sex is not all that uncommon. So why is Bazelon so stubborn in rejecting the very possibility that women need not regret participating freely, willingly and even avidly?
Well, it’s hard to ignore the idea that she, like so many feminists before her, simply can’t rid herself of the concept of women as pure and virtuous. It seems never to occur to Bazelon that women are capable of wanting to do what Ndonye, according to all we know about the incident, wanted to do and did. Because if we ever actually admitted that women’s sexuality was as varied as it actually is, then we’d have to change our cherished notions about female virtue. And what’s worse, as far as many feminists go, we’d have to give men who have sex with women at least some benefit of the doubt when the cry of “Rape!” is raised.
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