Threats Are Not Protected Speech: A Reply to Wendy Kaminer

Threats Are Not Protected Speech: A Reply to Wendy Kaminer

Lindsay Beyerstein: Threats Are Not Protected Speech

One night last fall, a group of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity brothers escorted a group of pledges to the freshman women?s dorms at Yale. The pledges chanted, ?No means yes, yes means anal!? and “My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac, I fuck dead women.?

Fed up, a group of sixteen Yale students and alumni filed a confidential complaint with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Education accusing Yale of denying women their Title IX right to an equal education by failing to address a pattern of public harassment. The complainants allege that the ?No means yes? incident was just one of several instances of public sexual harassment that Yale failed to address appropriately. The complaint also accuses Yale of mishandling allegations of private sexual assault.

Reading between the lines, it seems like some fraternities at Yale have all but institutionalized public displays of misogyny as initiation rites.

The OCR announced in late March that it was investigating the charges.

Feminist and civil libertarian Wendy Kaminer objects to the complainants making a federal case out of this:

Civil libertarian feminists have always been a political minority, but these days we seem on the verge of extinction. Reviewing the charges of sexual harassment underlying the Title IX complaint by a group of Yale students and alumnae, I can’t find feminism — at least not if feminism includes independence, liberty, and power for women. Instead I find femininity — the assumption that women are incapable of fending for themselves in the marketplace of epithets or ideas, the belief that women are rendered helpless by misogynist speech and the sexist tantrums of their male peers.

Kaminer implies that there?s something wimpy about exercising one?s legal rights within the system. That?s an ironic stance for a civil libertarian to take. Kaminer suggests that women just taunt the men right back.

I too am a civil libertarian feminist. If a student wrote an op-ed in the campus paper arguing that no means yes, I?d defend his right to free expression.

However, when bellowed by a mob of strange men in the dark outside one?s home, ?No means yes, yes means anal!? isn?t just a taunt, it?s a threat. Ditto: ?My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac, I fuck dead women.?

Threats are not protected speech. It doesn?t matter whether the pledges intended to act on these sentiments. The women in the dorms had no way of knowing what their intentions were.

A female freshman should be able to set out for the library at 9:30 at night without having to worry about whether the howling mob outside her building is just kidding about wanting to fuck dead women. That?s the kind of equality that the complainants are demanding with their Title IX complaint.

For Kaminer, true equality means puzzling this out for yourself, every single time. She thinks only shrinking violets get lawyered up and try to make sure it never happens again.

This incident was not an exchange of controversial views, it was an exercise in intimidation. Would you go outside while a mob of young, possibly drunk men was howling such abuse outside your window? Would you advise your daughter to go down and give the frat boys a good taunting?