by Claude Opus 5.5
Hirsch and Khan argue for “sexual citizenship” and attention to “sexual geographies” such as who controls space. How does a fraternity house’s control of space bear on the ethics of what happens there?
In Sexual Citizens (2020), Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan report on a large research project at Columbia University that combined surveys with in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation of student life. Rather than treating sexual assault as a problem of a few bad individuals, they asked what features of the social world make it more or less likely. Three of their concepts are particularly useful. Sexual projects are the reasons people seek sexual experiences, from pleasure and intimacy to status and self-discovery. Sexual citizenship is the acknowledged right to sexual self-determination, together with recognition of others’ equal right. And sexual geographies are the physical and social spaces in which sex happens, including who controls them, who has access to privacy, and who must depend on others for somewhere to be. The case behind these seminars concerns allegations about events in a fraternity house. Whatever the facts of those allegations, the concept of sexual geography raises a question that does not depend on them: how does control over space affect what is ethically required of those who control it?
What control of space involves
A fraternity house, for the duration of a party, is a space in which one group of people has almost complete control and another has almost none. Members decide who enters and who is turned away. They supply the alcohol and decide how much is served. They know the layout, including which rooms are private and which doors lock. They control lighting, music and the flow of people. They may also control transport, if guests have been brought from elsewhere. Guests, by contrast, are often younger, unfamiliar with the building, dependent on hosts for drinks and for a way home, and in a setting where leaving early or alone may be awkward or unsafe.
Hirsch and Khan found that the unequal distribution of space on campus mattered a great deal. First-year students often lived in shared rooms with little privacy, while some older students and members of certain organisations had access to spaces they controlled. This meant that sexual encounters often took place in someone else’s territory, where the other person had more power over what happened and over how easily one could leave. They argued that changing sexual geographies, for example by creating more social spaces not controlled by any single group, is one way to reduce assault.
Control as a source of responsibility
The ethical significance of control can be understood in several ways.
First, there is an old moral tradition of hospitality. To host is to take on responsibility for guests. In many cultures and moral traditions, harming a guest under one’s own roof is a particularly serious wrong, because the guest has entrusted their safety to the host. A fraternity party is a commercialised and casual form of hospitality, but it is still hospitality: guests enter on the understanding that they will be safe.
Second, the law recognises duties that arise from control of premises. Those who own or occupy property owe duties of care to those they invite onto it, and some jurisdictions impose liability on social hosts who serve alcohol. These duties are not arbitrary. They reflect the principle that those who control a space are best placed to prevent harm within it.
Third, philosophers such as Robert Goodin have argued that responsibilities follow vulnerability: we owe special duties to those who are particularly vulnerable to our actions and choices. When guests depend on hosts for alcohol, transport, information and exit, hosts acquire special duties to protect them, not merely to refrain from harming them.
Implications for consent
Control of space also bears on consent. Consent is meaningful only if a person is genuinely free to refuse. That freedom is affected by context: whether one can leave, whether one is outnumbered, whether one is intoxicated by drinks someone else supplied, whether one has a way home. Hirsch and Khan’s framework does not imply that sex in a space controlled by others is never consensual. It implies that those who control the space have a heightened responsibility to make sure that refusal remains possible and safe. Where many people are present and a group shares a strong identity, as in a fraternity, the pressure on someone who is a guest can be considerable.
Responsibility beyond the individual
Attention to sexual geography also shifts some responsibility to the organisation and to the university. A fraternity that controls a house controls the conditions of its parties, and can decide how they are run: whether there are sober monitors, how alcohol is served, whether private rooms are open, how guests get home. A university that permits or depends on fraternity houses as central sites of social life has made decisions about campus geography. If those decisions concentrate control in the hands of one group and channel others into their spaces, the university shares responsibility for the foreseeable consequences.
This also bears on the role of bystanders. In a house controlled by a group, members are not simply onlookers. They are hosts. A member who sees something troubling has both the knowledge of the space and the authority to act within it in a way that a guest may not.
Sexual citizenship as an ideal
Hirsch and Khan’s positive proposal is that communities should cultivate sexual citizenship: the recognition that everyone has the right to determine their own sexual lives, and the obligation to respect others’ equal right. Control of space is relevant to this ideal because citizenship requires conditions, not only attitudes. People cannot exercise sexual self-determination in spaces where they are dependent, outnumbered and unable to leave. Creating the conditions for sexual citizenship is therefore partly a matter of redesigning space.
Applied to the case behind these seminars, the framework does not tell us what happened. But it does suggest that the moral analysis should not stop at individual conduct. Those who controlled the space, and the institutions that made that space central to student life, had responsibilities that arose from their control. Whether those responsibilities were met is part of the ethical question, alongside the question of what any individual did.