Masculinity & Title IX: Bullying and Sexual Harassment of Boys in the American Liberal State

Nancy Chi Cantalupo

In February 2012, a University of Virginia men’s lacrosse player, George Huguely, was convicted of second-degree murder of a fellow student. The murder occurred after the student broke off her abusive dating relationship with Huguely, which included at least one attack on a classmate who Huguely believed had kissed her, and one public assault in which Huguely hurled racist and sexist epithets at the female police officer who arrested him. Both Huguely and his victim were products of private, single-sex schools, with Huguely attending Landon School, an all-boys high school with “a reputation for cultivating athletes—especially lacrosse players—and using athletic competition to instill a boyish camaraderie.” Huguely’s first appearance in the local media occurred in a Washington Post interview in April 2006, when accusations of rape against members of Duke University’s men’s lacrosse team were the subject of much local and national attention. Several of the accused players were former members of Landon’s men’s lacrosse team, as was Huguely. Although the rape accusation was later deemed false, several of the uncontested events on the evening when the alleged rape had occurred painted a picture of general misogyny and racism among the players. Accounts of Landon in the local media seemed to point to a similar culture there, as the school had previously experienced difficulties involving questionable accusations of cheating against an African American honor student, and unsuccessful attempts made by a group of Landon parents to remove a coach with a record of making homophobic remarks to his players, along with remarks equating them to women. Not long after the Huguely murder, a group of Landon students were caught developing a sex “fantasy league” involving the “drafting” of primarily ninth grade girls from other schools onto “teams” such as the “Southside Slampigs” and the scoring of points based on the amount of sexual contact Landon boys could achieve with the girls on their “teams.”

The Huguely murder and related incidents are not the only recent incidents involving sex-segregated educational environments, sexual harassment, gender-based violence or the like. Most recently, Bloomberg reported that, based on its review of court documents and news accounts in 2012 to 2013, “[m]ore than 40 high school boy[-athletes] were sodomized with foreign objects by their teammates in over a dozen alleged incidents reported in the past year, compared with about three incidents a decade ago.” In April of 2012, Rolling Stone published an extensive expose of Dartmouth College’s all-male fraternity culture, documenting hazing and sexual violence-related abuses against both Dartmouth men and women. That February, New York University Professor Pedro Noguera reported that a fouryear study on recently created public K-12 single-sex schools serving Black and Latino boys found that “there is no magic to be found in merely separating boys of color from their peers.” Professor Noguera’s report was preceded in September 2011 by an article in Science magazine entitled “The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling,” authored by a collection of respected academics from a range of disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, child development, and social work, which concluded that sex-segregated education is “ineffective, misguided and may actually increase gender stereotyping.” Finally, the previous fall, Yale fraternity pledges chanted, “No means yes! Yes means anal!” outside the campus Women’s Center, the latest in a string of such incidents, and a series of teenaged boys committed suicide due to sexual harassment and bullying.