‘Mattress Girl’ Is a Perfect Icon for the Feminist Left

Ian Tuttle:

To anyone who’s followed the case of Emma Sulkowicz, Columbia University’s “Mattress Girl,” the fact that her symbolic protest doubled as a credit-earning work of performance art seems a fitting commentary on the whole situation.

Sulkowicz, who graduated Sunday, spent her senior year hauling a 50-pound mattress around campus to protest the Columbia administration’s failure to expel her alleged rapist. It would be difficult to overstate the adulation showered upon her: She won the National Organization for Women’s Susan B. Anthony Award and the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Ms. Wonder Award; she was the subject of a glowing New York Magazine profile (“she’s the type of hipster-nerd who rules the world these days“); she was invited to this year’s State of the Union as a guest of New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand; earlier this month, United Nations ambassador Samantha Power likened Sulkowicz to women fighting for their rights in Afghanistan; the “art” itself was reviewed in the New York Times. (Assessment: “Analogies to the Stations of the Cross may come to mind.”)

From a wmn carrying a mattress on her campus to Afghanistan's Wmn's Nat Cycling Team, reaching true equality req showing change is possible.

— Samantha Power (@AmbPower44) May 17, 2015

Such praise might have been deserved — if Emma Sulkowicz had actually been raped. But unlike New York Magazine, the New York Times, the New York Post, and a bevy of other national and international publications, Reason’s Cathy Young actually dug into Sulkowicz’s claims that she was anally raped in August 2012, and in early February published a long investigative report in The Daily Beast that threw serious doubt on her accusations.

The essay included not only an interview with Sulkowicz’s alleged rapist, German scholarship student Paul Nungesser (whom no one else had bothered to talk to), but transcripts of text-message conversations between the pair — you know, “evidence.” Young revealed that Nungesser had been cleared by the university of Sulkowicz’s accusations, and of similar accusations by two other women whose complaints were apparently encouraged by acquaintances sympathetic to Sulkowicz, and possibly by Sulkowicz herself. At Reason today, Young adds that accusations from a fourth accuser, a male who says Nungesser sexually assaulted him in 2011, also were found unreliable by the university. Keep in mind, the university adhered to a minimal preponderance-of-evidence standard, meaning not a single of Nungessser’s accusers could show that it was “more likely than not” that what they claim happened did, in fact, happen.

Add to all of this Nungesser’s lawsuit against the university for failing to protect him from gender-based harassment, which includes transcripts of sexually explicit Facebook and text-message conversations between him and Sulkowicz, and the evidence in Nungesser’s favor is overwhelming.

The continued lionization of Sulkowicz has proven so instructive: It has made clear how utterly uninterested the feminist movement is in anything like an appeal to facts or common reason.

Which is why the continued lionization of Sulkowicz has proven so instructive: It has made clear how utterly uninterested the feminist movement is in anything like an appeal to facts or common reason. It is a happy coincidence that Sulkowicz herself may be the best example of exactly this phenomenon.

Following Young’s February article, feminist outlet Jezebel attempted to debunk her debunking. Young had noted that Sulkowicz originally agreed to annotate the transcript of the text messages she and Nungesser had exchanged, and then suddenly refused. Jezebel published the exchange between reporter and subject — and the result does not serve Sulkowicz well. Responding to an e-mail from Young she wrote:

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