THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Monday, August 19, 2019 |A
Campus
Confidential
Consent
By Donna Freitas
(Little, Brown, 328 pages, $28)BOOKSHELF| By Christine Rosen
W
hat is consent? It’s not a simple question, but in the
wake of the #MeToo movement it dominates the
public conversation about how men and women
should treat each other. Into thisconversation comes Donna
Freitas, a writer whose previous books include young-adult
fiction as well as nonfiction studies of the campus hookup
culture. She calls “Consent” a “memoir of unwanted attention,”
but it is more than that. Ms. Freitas admits that she is using
her own experience “as a case study of sorts,” since
“conversations about harassment, assault, and consent have
become one of the central aspects of my professional identity.”
Indeed, they have. A self-described feminist, Ms. Freitas
has criticized administrators for doing too little to prevent
sexual assault on campus. She has condemned Education
Secretary Betsy DeVos for rescinding Obama-era guidelines
for campus assault investigations, guidelines that had
effectively denied the accused dueprocess. By contrast,
Ms. Freitas approves of former
Columbia Universitystudent
Emma Sulkowicz, the “Mattress
Girl” who claimed she had been
raped by a fellow student and
lugged a mattress around
campus as a form of protest art.
(Columbia eventually cleared
the male student of wrongdoing
and settled a lawsuit he had
filed.) Such is the context for the
broader resonance Ms. Freitas
hopes her story will have.
The story itself is fairly
straightforward: While pursuing
a Ph.D. in religious studies, Ms.
Freitas finds a wonderful mentor in one
of her professors. Heencouragesher intellectual
curiosity during the conversations she has with him in his
office. Soon they are going out for meals together and sharing
personal details. Then things take a turn. The professor begins
calling her at home, stoppingby unannounced and pressuring
her to spend more time with him. He sends her dozens of
letters and tries to insinuate himself into her parents’ lives.
Ms. Freitas indulges his behavior because she understandably
fears repercussions for her academic career if she balks, but
she is bothered by the shift in their relations.
“My life split in two,” she says. In one life, she felt “utter
sexual empowerment” with the men she was dating; and she
was “studying feminist theory, eating it up and loving every
second of it.” Her other life, by contrast, was one of “fear,
uncertainty, of self-condemnation,” prompted by her
professor’s attentions. She came to wonder if his behavior
was a kind of karmic retribution: “What is the punishment
for a young woman with sexual and intellectual confidence?
Doesn’t she know that the world sees this as hubris?” Later
she concludes that the professor “was the man God sent,
that the world sent, that the patriarchy sent to take the
giddy light that burned inside of me and snuff it out.”
As it happens, the professor who stalked her was a
Catholic priest. With one exception—when he awkwardly
kissed Ms. Freitas goodbye on the cheek after she drove him
home—his behavior was never overtly sexual, although it
was certainly inappropriate. Raised a Catholic, she was
hesitant to accuse a priest of bad conduct. “To question this
professor’s intentions toward me was to question the
priesthood itself.” Her unease was warranted, but she felt
she could tell no one about it.As an attempt to wrestle with such feelings, “Consent” is
an affecting memoir. Ms. Freitas is a fluid writer, if prone to
hyperbole. She calls the professor a pollutant, a monster, a
“putrid, stinking chemical.” Upon receiving one of his letters,
she writes, “my dread ballooned outward to encompass the
entire apartment, oozing through the screens of my open
windows and poisoning the humid summer air.” Excess
aside, Ms. Freitas does convey the intensity of her ordeal.
But as a case study for broader claims, “Consent” is less
persuasive. Ms. Freitas spends a lot of time indicting a
system that she thinks failed her. But by her own account,
as soon as she did tell others about what she was going
through (a trusted male friend and a male professor), they
offered their unconditional support and helped her report
what had happened. The administrator in charge of her
complaint is clearly more interested in protecting the
institution than in defending Ms. Freitas’s rights, but Ms.
Freitas acknowledges that she was a reluctant witness at best.
More troublingly, Ms. Freitas conflates her experience
with the experience of victims of sexual assault. “The abuse I
suffered was mental, it was emotional, it was not physical,”
she says, only to claim in the next sentence that, even so, “to
me it was also physical, the way he began to encroach on all
the spaces surrounding my body.” She likens her decision to
accept a small financial settlement from the university to
physical mutilation: “I cut out my tongue in the university’s
office of human resources and offered it to the woman whose
job it was to take it.” She describes human-resources
personnel as butchers who “disfigure” victims and fill “file
cabinets full of the bloody tongues of women.” Given the real
physical violence that so many women have suffered, such
comparisons feel shockingly tone deaf.
Ms. Freitas also blames her stalker for her lack of
professional success. All she wanted was “to be a college
professor”; that she isn’t one, she says, is “on him.” Yet she
landed a tenure-track job after completing her Ph.D. Her
anxiety over her graduate-school experience, coupled with
grief over her mother’s death, made it impossible for her to
fulfill her new obligations, however. The “tenured men in
my department,” she writes, “used my absence at
graduation, among other events, as marks against me.” She
is vague about the details, but clearly her performance was
not considered adequate. She concludes that women in her
situation “are unable to be a part of our chosen profession
because of abusive men”—adding that, “once again, in the
context of a university, I had no agency.”
Agency and responsibility are crucial aspects of any
discussion of sexual relations. It’s a shame that Ms. Freitas
didn’t explore them with the care and nuance they deserve.
No one should have to go through what she did as a
student, but the conclusions she draws from her experience
do little to advance the conversation we should be having
about consent.Ms. Rosen is senior writer at Commentary magazine.A professor becomes a wonderful mentor,
encouraging a graduate student’s intellectual
curiosity and ambition. Then things take a turn.I’d Rather Read With My Ears
I
don’t read books, I de-
vour them. A friend re-
cently asked how I read
so many books so quickly.
When I told him I listen to
each one as an audiobook, he
guffawed: “That doesn’t
count!”
He isn’t alone in that view,
but that doesn’t mean he’s
right. Humans, after all,
weren’t always so beholden
to the written word. From
ancient Greek philosophers
and Elizabethan thespians to
revivalist preachers and
barnstorming politicians, the
world has long been capti-
vated by the spoken word.
Before the Sermon on the
Mount became a series of Bi-
ble chapters, it was...a
sermon.
Yet despite the rich oral
origins of literature, in some
book clubs there’s an almost
palpable tension between
those who read and those
who prefer to listen. What’s
more, as I’ve read book re-
views and commentary on-
line, I’ve frequently found ev-
idence of people thumbing
their noses at audiobooks.
Like it or not, our media
landscape is continually
changing. While print and e-
book sales have either de-
clined or remained stagnant,
audiobook sales have doubled
every year for a decade.Maybe it’s worth under-
standing why people like me
prefer audiobooks in the first
place. One obvious reason is
convenience. Jessica Ham-
zelou explains in the New
Scientist that when our
minds wander, they switch
“into autopilot mode,” which
enables us to “carry on doing
tasks quickly, accurately, and
without conscious thought.”
The region of our brains that
does this is called the default
mode network, or DMN, andit becomes active only when
performing rote tasks.
That’s great news for
multitaskers. Driving, mun-
dane work assignments,
chores, exercising and gro-
cery shopping can all be re-
petitive activities. Such
tasks are likely to activate
your brain’s DMN. If you’re
going to perform the same
rote activities anyway, why
not immerse yourself in a
good book at the same
time?
Especially because listen-
ing as opposed to reading
actually improves compre-
hension. In a recent New
York Times op-ed, Daniel
Willingham, a psychologist
at the University of Virginia,
explained the literary tech-
nique known as prosody:
“the pitch, tempo and stress
of spoken words. ‘What a
great party’ can be a sincere
compliment or sarcastic put-
down, but they look identi-
cal on the page.” Thus the
written word can be ambigu-
ous: “Inferences can go
wrong, and hearing the au-dio version—and therefore
the correct prosody—can aid
comprehension.”
There’s also a kind of in-
nate enjoyment that comes
with hearing a great story
read by a great narrator.
Homer didn’t write the “Il-
iad” or the “Odyssey” to be
read on a page, and Shake-
speare’s plays were meant to
be heard and seen on a
stage. As the theater and
film bring words to life, so
too narration enhances the
overall experience.
Instead of looking down
on the medium, bibliophiles
should celebrate the way
audiobooks make the written
word more inviting and ac-
cessible. Without them I’d
likely never know the won-
derful contents of so many
books at all.
Read, yes. But as the most
famous of all books puts it:
He that hath ears to hear, let
him hear.Mr. Austin is a writer and
small-business owner in
Utah.By Daryl Austin
The ‘Iliad’ was an
audiobook before it
was a printed one.OPINION
The Argentine
peso gained
ground late
last week af-
ter a three-
day rout that
followed Pres-
ident Mauri-
cio Macri’s
crushing de-
feat in the
Aug. 11 pri-
mary for a second term. But
there’s no sugarcoating reality:
The Argentine hunger for dol-
lars has shot up alongside the
risk of holding peso assets.
At least part of the small
recovery may have come about
because on Thursday the cen-
tral bank put a limit on the
amount of dollars commercial
banks can hold. Swooning
trust in the national currency,
anemic growth and an unsus-
tainable debt burden fore-
shadow another rough ride in
2020 for Argentines—no mat-
ter who wins the presidential
election set for Oct. 27.
Stabilizing prices is job
one, and the best way to do
that would be to dollarize of-
ficially. The dollar wouldn’t
solve all the country’s prob-
lems, but eliminating the
peso, scourge of the Argen-
tine people for decades,
would go a long way to re-
storing confidence.
As with most problems in
Argentina, however, the barri-
ers to dollarization are politi-
cal, not economic.
Political parties had already
chosen their candidates when
Argentines went to the polls
last week. So the “primaries,”
in which voting was compul-
Argentina Needs the Dollar
sory, acted like a test run of
the election. Left-wing Per-
onist candidate Alberto
Fernández and his running
mate, former President Cris-
tina Kirchner, stunned the na-
tion by winning 48% of the
vote. The center-right Mr.
Macri trailed with 32%.
The specter of a Peronist
return to power sparked a
stampede out of the peso.
The Argentine stock market
fell 37%.
At first glimpse it’s hard to
understand the vote. Mrs.
Kirchner drove the economy
into a ditch during her eight
years in power. She unleashed
judicial warfare against her ad-
versaries, went after the press,
and allegedly engaged in ob-
scene levels of corruption. Mr.
Fernández has promised more
populism and more power for
the unions if he’s elected. Ar-
gentines appear to be handing
Peronism the rope with which
it will hang them.
Yet voters seem to want to
punish Mr. Macri, who hasn’t
delivered on promises to make
them better off. Granted, he in-
herited a mess from Mrs. Kirch-
ner and a costly drought ham-
mered farmers in the 2017-
growing season. But the gov-
ernment has piled on debt to fi-
nance deficits. Commercial bor-
rowing rates are around 70%
and the economy contracted
5.8% in the first quarter. Infla-
tion in July, while trending
down, was still above 54% at an
annual rate. This isn’t a good
record to run on.
Mr. Macri also brought the
International Monetary Fund
back to Argentina in May- Its Argentine loan pro-
gram now stands at $56 bil-
lion, the largest in the fund’s
history. But far from “rescu-
ing” the country from another
financial and monetary crisis,
IMF intervention has gener-
ated more fear and uncer-
tainty because the nation as-
sociates it with financial
collapses followed by extreme
hardship.
Argentina needs the confi-
dence shock that dollarization
would bring to both foreign
investors and locals. As Johns
Hopkins economist Steve H.
Hanke has long argued, and
did again Aug. 12 in Forbes,
“Argentina’s government
should do officially what all
Argentines do in times of
trouble: dollarize.”
Argentina’s political class
resists the idea, arguing that
the country ought not lose its
“monetary independence.”
Which is to say that populism
is best financed by the infla-
tion tax, and for that a coun-
try needs central-bank print-
ing presses.
All the talk of a national
currency as part of national
identity is also bunk. As mon-
etary economist William Lu-
ther told me last week, Argen-
tines don’t seem to want to
hold pesos if they don’t haveto. “In June 2019, the total
amount of peso-denominated
deposit-account balances and
currency in circulation—which
economists call the M1 money
supply—was worth just $31.
billion,” Mr. Luther said. In
Chile, where per capita gross
domestic product is similar to
that of Argentina, M1 stood at
$53.1 billion.
Given that there are more
than twice as many people in
Argentina as in Chile, the low
level of Argentine holdings of
local currency is even more
dramatic. Since they “must
hold some money to make
day-to-day transactions,” Mr.
Luther said, and “they are not
holding very many pesos, we
can be reasonably confident
that they are holding quite a
few dollars.” Since Mr. Macri’s
primary defeat the number of
dollars held by Argentines is
logically even higher.
Argentines are far too fa-
miliar with the high cost of
low central-bank credibility,
and it may not be possible to
salvage the monetary author-
ity’s reputation in their eyes.
In a February 2019 essay for
the American Institute for
Economic Research, Mr. Lu-
ther and Argentine economist
Nicolás Cachanosky wrote:
“Half measures, like adopting
a fixed exchange rate or estab-
lishing an orthodox currency
board, might work elsewhere.
But Argentina has in the past
broken the promises implicit
in those reforms. In order for
its commitment to be credible
now it must go all the way” to
dollarization.
Write to O’[email protected].The peso swoons after
a presidential vote,
showing the risk
of an inflation tax.AMERICAS
By Mary
Anastasia
O’Grady
First they
came for our
plastic gro-
cery bags.
Then they
came for our
plastic
straws. Now
they’ve come
for our plastic
water bottles
at SFO. Yes,
you read that right. Starting
Tuesday, the sale of plastic
water bottles will be banned
at San Francisco International
Airport, one of the few places
they actually make sense. Cal-
ifornia has many dumb laws
and statutes and bans, but
this one is especially brain-
less—spurred by futile self-
righteousness.
After running late for your
flight after a 30-minute secu-
rity line only to have TSA con-
fiscate your Fiji water bottle,
you’ll now have to stop at a
crowded water fountain to fill
your own metal flask. Or buy
an overpriced glass or alumi-
num bottle at the concession
stand, paying another 10 cents
for a bag. And your teeth will
chatter if you drink through a
paper straw. Of course you
could risk dehydration instead:
Men lose up to a half-gallon of
water during a 10-hour flight.
Oddly, you can still buy sugary
drinks in plastic bottles at
SFO; only healthy, calorie-free
water is banned in plastic. You
can’t make this stuff up.
Other fields are even worse.
Starting next year, the Califor-
nia Building Standards Com-
mission will require every new
What Will California Ban Next?
home to have solar panels.
This will add $8,400 to the av-
erage cost of the state’s al-
ready expensive homes. With a
shortage of about 1.4 million
housing units, according to the
California Housing Partner-
ship, that’s a $12 billion un-
funded mandate.
But maybe the housing
shortage can be solved with
yet another legislative “fix.”
Last December state Sen. Scott
Wiener introduced Senate Bill
50, which would allow devel-
opers to ignore certain local
zoning laws within half a mile
of train or subway stations and
some bus stops. The bill would
allow five-story buildings, high
density and massive parking
structures. Although the bill
was tabled in May, many of its
growing group of supporters
argued it didn’t do enough to
create incentives for afford-
able housing. That tells me an-
other version of this bill will
pass eventually. So here’s what
may happen: Many towns will
preserve local zoning pre-emp-
tively by closing their train
stations. Lose-lose situation.
So what? you might ask:
Just take an Uber or Lyft .Not
so fast. Also winding its way
through Sacramento is Assem-
bly Bill 5, which would reclas-
sify “gig economy” workers as
employees, entitled to full ben-
efits and a $12 minimum wage.
This means the cost of rides,
deliveries and even manicures
would go up, up, up. The bill is
an overreach because most
drivers truly are temporary
workers. According to the de-
livery company Postmates, halfof delivery workers quit after
80 days and about 45% work
less than nine hours a week.
Once again California legisla-
tors are trying for a trifecta:
Fix a problem that may not ex-
ist, kill a very Californian inno-
vation, and damage the em-
ployment prospects of the
same workers they are trying
to protect.
There’s more. Proposition
64, passed in 2016, allows Cali-
fornians to grow six pot plants
at home. Why not seven? And
there is still no measurable le-gal limit for driving while
stoned. When hungry, you can
bring your dog to restaurants.
Since 2015 no one can stop
you. My son worked at a nice
restaurant and was told that
the only thing he was allowed
to ask was “Can I do anything
for your service dog?” Keep
your poodles away from my
noodles. Meanwhile, Starbucks
is rolling out sippy lids, like
toddlers’ sippy cups, to replace
plastic straws. Iced coffee
dribbled down your shirt can
certainly be humiliating.
Progressive taxes with top
marginal rates of more than
50%, plus San Francisco’s pro-
posed tax on initial public of-
ferings, will keep housing
prices high—in Incline Village,Nev. California’s electricity
prices are also progressive, in-
creasing to more than 50 cents
a kilowatt-hour after users ex-
ceed a meager baseline. Of
course residents can offset this
by picking up an electric car,
which the state deems worth
an almost 30% discount.
But don’t expect auto man-
ufacturers to make out well.
The California Air Resources
Board didn’t like the Trump
administration’s freeze on
emissions standards at 2020
levels, so it waived the waiver,
requiring the tougher rules
and 54 miles per gallon. Ford,
Honda, Volkswagen and BMW
have already cut a deal with
California to meet the higher
standards, but with many
loopholes. Auto makers like to
manufacture one car for all
states, so they comply with
California laws, dumb or not.
In some places, the right
laws are in place but no one
cares. San Francisco, like Los
Angeles, has a nasty homeless
problem. Fed up, voters in
2010 passed a “sit-lie” ordi-
nance that outlaws loitering
between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m.
“Outlaws” in this case mean
perpetrators are supposed to
get a ticket. But the police
don’t bother with that any-
more, so Karl Malden’s famed
Streets of San Francisco are
filled with needles and human
feces, which the city spends
$30 million a year to clean
up—ineffectively. But heaven
forbid you want to buy cold
water in a disposable bottle at
the airport.
Write to [email protected].Snatching away plastic
bottles is the latest
blunder in a state thick
with invasive laws.INSIDE
VIEW
By Andy
Kessler