Vanessa Grigoriadis - Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus

Copyright 2017 by Nessie Corp.

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-0-544-70255-4

Cover design by Martha Kennedy

e ISBN 978-0-544-70260-8
v1.0817

For my father

Composite and imaginary characters do not appear in this book. In most cases, I have identified people by their real names. Pseudonyms are noted with asterisks.

I met Emma Sulkowicz on a hot day in August 2014, a month before Columbia University was back in session. We were having tea at a caf in Manhattans Greenwich Village, and she was listing all the ways she felt her university had failed her by what she perceived as a combination of incompetence and malevolence. Suddenly, she brought up her plan: she was going to carry a mattress around the campus every day until the school expelled the student she said had raped her. It was so crystalline and simple, such perfect payback. I laughed, not because schlepping a fifty-pound mattress around campus sounded insane, though it didand if Nungesser wasnt ejected, she vowed to carry it for the entire school yearbut because it was an act brilliantly conceived to capture the attention of our outrageously performative, meme-happy, absurdist age.

Sulkowicz herself laughed too at first, because she has a good sense of humor, but then she abruptly stopped. One of several students I was meeting for age-appropriate drinks to talk about sexual assault at Columbia, she sat in a square of sunshine, her black T-shirt hanging loosely over her lean, athletic frame, her eyes eight-ball black, her shoulder-length hair dyed at the tips in a Monet-at-dusk palette. She spoke slowly and deliberately, her words punctuated by an occasional nervous giggle at a perceived error or ill-phrased statement. When she didnt like what Id said, she became severe and cold.

Japanese and Chinese on her mothers side and the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors on her fathers, Sulkowicz seemed a few years older than a college senior, if you ignored her Invisalign braces. Her self-assured bearing was likely a product of being raised by two psychiatrist parents, one of whom is now a leadership consultant for corporate executives. Her scholarly focus toggled between science and artspecifically, mechanical physics, which she expected to major in, and fine art, which she chose instead. When I asked her to describe her own personality, she said an older sister. She was even-keeled. In charge. In high school, people always said, Emma never cries, Emmas very Zen, she explained. Im stoic in many ways, and the one who isnt going to be emotional or dramaticunless something really bad is happening.

In high school, Sulkowicz floated around cliquesnot a nerd, not a jock, but an individual, a fencer who scarfed down six eggs each morning to build muscle, and an artist so talented she helped other students in drawing class. She was quiet. She had her first kiss at fourteen, but when she entered college, and even on the night at the beginning of sophomore year when she says she was assaulted, she had yet to have a boyfriend. Like most students, she was casual with those in whom she was romantically interested, and over the course of some months, hooking up was what shed been doing with a German architecture student, Paul Nungesser.

On the night in question, theyd started kissing in an ivy-covered courtyard, then retired to her dorm room, where they had extensive intercourseoral, vaginal, anal. The first two, they agree, were consensual. But Sulkowicz insists the last was not. Many months later, she reported the incident to the school, and many months after this, a Columbia disciplinary panel, operating in a confusing manner, ruled against her. They left Nungesser unpunished, a decision that made her angrier, perhaps, than anything else had in the course of her short life.

This was the bad thing that happened, and it not only turned Sulkowiczs Zenned-out world upside down but changed the collegiate experience of a generation. Until a few years ago, an Ivy League student who went public about a rape was a rare bird. But soon after our chat at the caf, Sulkowicz inverted the typical public roles of rape cases, the long tradition of a Kobe Bryant or William Kennedy Smith declaring his innocence at a bank of microphones while the victim began her offstage downfallbecame depressed, dishonored, maybe even suicidal. A sexual assault victims anonymity, ostensibly for her own protection, was a precept of the old system. Now victimsor, in the current parlance, survivorsstepped into the spotlight, and the accused tried to hide in the shadows. Now Sulkowicz pointed one of her neon-painted fingers at the university as an enabler. Now she insisted, despite scant evidence, that the public believe her story (there was no smoking gun here; in campus cases, there almost never is). Most important, now she called into question the definition of consent in teeny-tiny, linoleum-floored dorm rooms across the country.

For Nungesser, Sulkowicz, or her imagewhich were not quite the samegoing viral was a horrifying experience. Before she was a victim and he was an alleged rapist, they were both star students on a straight path to success. Nungesser was on a full-ride merit scholarship to this refuge of solemn urban quads that was founded as Kings College in 1754 and today is so competitive it accepts only 7 percent of applicants. Sulkowicz, unbelievably, hadnt stepped foot on campus before she was accepted (Columbia was something of a safety school for her). Now her life was completely upended, and his was too. He claimed to be terrified of Sulkowicz, whom he perceived as a vengeful ex-fling. He provided context for their relationship by making old messages between them publicmessages that many took as proof of his innocence. People were like, maybe this is a misunderstanding, Nungesser declared. But the matter of the fact [sic] is its not a misunderstanding. He said she was the villain in this story, not him.

The situation outraged both sets of parents, and parents, more than their children, are the universitys true customers, the ones paying the increasingly astronomic bills. You know, you send your kid off to school, and like all kids that age, they have that special mix of competence and vulnerability and yet need to prove themselves and be grown-up and independent, Sulkowiczs mother, Sandra Leong, told me. So they rely on the school. The idealization and trust in the school as an institution is crucial as a place that can provide safety, support, and guidance along with the necessary freedoms and introduction to the world. And when the institution betrays them, its devastating. Nungessers parents were shaken to the core too. In a letter, they desperately appealed to Columbias president, Lee PrezBo Bollinger: We have just learned that our son was ambushed outside his residence by two reporters, they wrote. Do we have to wait until Paul is beaten up, severely wounded or even killed?... We just talked to Paul on the phone and found him devastated, depressed and without any support... You are again massively worsening our sons situation... Shame on you, Mr. President!

The mattress meme soon spread beyond Columbia, becoming an embodiment of all the confusion, righteousness, and anger that roils around sexual assault, the most complex topic on college campuses today. Sulkowicz was transformed into Mattress Girl (a nickname she found offensive, but it stuck), a modern curiosity that, in an era in which sensations as varied as the Leave Britney Alone guy to biologically Caucasian NAACP activist Rachel Dolezal to the dress that half the population saw as blue and black and half as white and gold, suddenly became one of the biggest stories in America. She flew in and out of Americas inboxes and web tabs, making news everywhere from the