Our Victim-Blaming Culture

When I first picked up Vanessa Grigoriadis’s book, Blurred Lines, in late September, Harvey Weinstein hadn’t yet been outed as a serial predator who used his power to silence aspiring young women. Nor had Leon Wieseltier, or Knight Landesman, or Mark Halperin, or Kevin Spacey, or Michael Oreskes, or Louis CK, or any of the many other men exposed by the long-overdue wellspring of people—mostly women, all very brave—coming forward.

Now, in the toxic stew of rage, frustration, and confession that the current news cycle seems stuck on, the contents of Grigoriadis’s book—though still limited to the scope of campus sexual violence, its survivors, and those accused of assault—refracts a different kind of light. What’s happening on our university campuses may be indicative of the larger structures at play in our workplaces, public spaces, and personal lives.

Blurred Lines is not an easy read. Its title seems designed to provoke attention—of any kind. (When I mentioned the title of the book I was reading to two coworkers, both of whom are sexual violence specialists, they immediately recoiled.) Grigoriadis interviews both survivors and students accused of assault—the latter a choice for which she’s received criticism—as well as a bevy of other sources, including campus sexual violence consultants, families of accused boys, fraternity brothers, sorority sisters, and student activists from Syracuse to Wesleyan.

Grigoriadis has a keen eye as a journalist, and her tone can be unflinching and unsparing. It can also feel, at times, out of touch: her audience is the parents of college-aged students as much as it is millennials themselves. One of the recurring cast of characters in Blurred Lines is a sorority sister at Syracuse who calls herself the “Blackout Blonde” and blames sexual misadventures on tequila and not a misunderstanding of consent; another is noted activist-artist Emma Sulkowicz, Columbia University’s “mattress girl,” whose story frames the book.

A self-proclaimed feminist, Grigoriadis’s politics inflect her writing with a second-wave, anti-porn bent. struggles with a generational divide, portraying and confronting a generation of young feminists much more inclined than Grigoriadis is to call certain acts, which historically might have just been classified as bothersome, sexual assault. And indeed, it is this generational divide over exactly constitutes sexual violence—and what should be done about it—that is one of the central