Columbia University senior Emma Sulkowicz, 21, says she was raped in her own bed at the beginning of her sophomore year. This week, two years after the alleged assault, Sulkowicz, a visual-arts major, has made a promise to carry her mattress around campus every day as part of her senior thesis. It is, she says, a symbol of the burden sexual-assault survivors carry with them every day.
“The act of carrying the mattress from inside my room out into the light has mirrored the way my life has changed, as I’ve brought my personal story out into the light,” Sulkowicz told TIME. “This project is a way to heal one of the most difficult things that happened to me. As I will build muscle and get stronger, hopefully I will also build emotional strength.”
Sulkowicz started the performance-art project on Tuesday, and she said she is determined to continue carrying the mattress wherever she goes — to class, the library, the gym — as long as her alleged rapist is still on campus. That means her project could last until graduation day in May 2015 — unless her alleged assailant is either expelled or chooses to leave the school. Last year, Sulkowicz and two other women reported the same person to the university. All three cases were dismissed.
The president of Columbia at the time refused to shake her hand when she crossed the stage at graduation.
Good. She’s better than him and he doesn’t deserve to shake her hand. Fuck him.
Did she carry the mattress on stage?
Yes. He hadn’t been expelled at that point.
So, not sure how a handshake could have been possible.
Fucking immense face palm.
Carrying it around everywhere doesn’t mean she didn’t regularly put it down to do other things.
Moar like she should have refused to shake the hand of the rapist enabling president
I’m sure Socrates and Plato turning over in their graves looking at MBAs running educational institutions.
Probably should have picked two philosophers who didn’t have significant portions of their works dedicated to defending slavery and the literal Greek patriarchy.
Slavery then was very different from the horrors that are chattel slavery. From my reading Socrates and Plato both reject the Greek patriarchy, but if you have writings of Plato’s that shows otherwise I’d love to see them.
You’re a trash person who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and even if you were right, you’d still be a garbage heap for thinking “but it wasn’t about race” or “but their children wouldn’t always be slaves as well, unless of course they fell into debt while their slave parents died in the mines” is a defense.
Just straight up LMAO at them not defending Greek patriarchy btw.
Shit, you ignorant fucking ape, they had chattel slavery too, and what the Spartans did to their helot class was as bad or worse than anything the South did.
Woah buddy everything is alright man. Take a chill pill.
You triggered them, sure.
You’re gonna address the point they made though? How they had chattel slaves AND the alternative ancient slave systems you defended are literally worse?
As the linked article didn’t include any photos of what was being discussed…
I appreciate the friend behind her helping her carry it. Solidarity.
The story’s lead image, of the person that famously always carried the mattress… is of her not holding a mattress?
Did we do a journalism, Dad?
It wasn’t the mattress that she was raped on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattress_Performance_(Carry_That_Weight)
It was the same model, though.
Purchased online from Tall Paul’s Tall Mall, the 50-lb (23-kg), dark-blue, extra-long twin mattress is of the kind Columbia places in its dorms, similar to the one on which Sulkowicz said that Nungesser had raped her
All she had to do was trick him into saying ‘Free Palestine’ and Columbia not only would have expelled him but they would also ensure he never got a job in any top firm
Is this the case in the US? It’s basically the opposite in sweden.
God, the internet was fucking horrible when this happened. I remember constant comments about how she was lying for attention or just regretted it. Pre-MeToo era was a hellhole.
Oh don’t worry, the internet is continuing to be horrible about this and the Cornell rape. It never really went away unfortunately and we’re in the middle of a huge misogyny resurgence.
Absolutely the shitheads are still here and being loud, but to me the overall culture has shifted enough that they’re at least recognized as shitheads and not just treated as a normal opinion that some men have. I’m sure that’s not the case everywhere, but that’s been how it’s shifted in the past 10-15 years where I’ve seen.
Yeah where I am in the US, we literally elected a rapist as president. The misogyny hasn’t really shifted much from my perspective after Me Too. Like…there’s more lip service paid to it, but like with the Cornell situation, there’s still no real consequences for most rapists and younger generations are demonstrably more misogynistic.
I get where you’re coming from and you’re probably right that some of the general sentiments have shifted enough that we can talk about these things more openly, but overall not much has changed.
younger generations are demonstrably more misogynistic.
I just really have to disagree here. Growing up in the 90s, blatant misogyny was utterly pervasive throughout our culture. Now raising a son, sometimes 90s (or earlier) media comes on and the sexist tropes make me cringe.
While the internet has enabled a loud subgroup of misogynists to organize, the culture among young people in the real world that I observe daily is waaay more accepting and progressive than the predominant culture 30 years ago.
What an absolute shit university Columbia has become.
Good for her
This is completely unacceptable. The fact that multiple women reported the same guy is a huge red flag
In January 2015, New York’s U.S. senator Kirsten Gillibrand invited Sulkowicz to attend the 2015 State of the Union Address.[5] Families Advocating for Campus Equality said the invitation was “undeserved and violates the principles of confidentiality and gender equality of Title IX”,
Wow, TIL about this asshole NGO that defends rapists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Families_Advocating_for_Campus_Equality
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Due process protects you from the government. You don’t get due process when you get kicked out of a private business or university for misbehaving. They can kick you out for no reason at all.
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Getting fired is life changing yet we accept that we could be fired at any time for no reason here in the US. Protections against getting arbitrarily kicked out of a private university would require legislation. Right now that’s a risk you assume when you go to a private institution versus a public one.
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But getting kicked out of university for supposed rape when you’re innocent is a life sentence.
What do you think having to drop out of University because of the trauma of being raped does to a person?
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So two wrongs make a right? This person had their life horribly disrupted for reason A so an unrelated person should have their life horribly disrupted for reason B?
People should not be subject to arbitrary harm from others and we should be against all forms of it, whether that’s sexual assault, economic coercion or lack of due process.
This article is from 2014
Yes it is. We’re in the TIL community.
I’m not judging, just thought it was useful information to add.
It’s also turned out to not be true.
Two things can be “almost true”. Wiki
See the references for more reputable sources.
This dude is referring to the fact that the carrying of the mattress was, indeed, performance art. That said, she did this performance art because she had been assaulted and hadn’t received justice.
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If you don’t want a rapist on campus, do, then process, and make sure nobody finds the body.
What? I can’t quite make out what you’re saying here.
@velma A Gen X solution that was quite effective at one local college.
Her family wasn’t playing at all.
He was never found.
Oh…
It would be cooler if authorities took rape allegations seriously.
It would be even cooler if men stopped doing rape.
You turned out to be a real piece of shit.
Didn’t she also release that performance ‘art’ video where she hired a guy off Craigslist to rape her?
God forbid an artist use a traumatic experience to create art.
Sulkowicz devised Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight) in the summer of 2014 as a senior thesis while at Yale University Summer School of Art and Music. Her first effort was a video of herself moving a bed out of a room, accompanied by the audio of her filing the police report, which she had recorded on a cellphone.[24] The mattress later became the focus of the piece.[25] Sulkowicz’s thesis was supervised by artist Jon Kessler, a professor at Columbia. As the idea for Mattress Performance developed, Kessler and Sulkowicz discussed the nature of endurance art and the work of Tehching Hsieh, Marina Abramović, Ulay and Chris Burden.[26] Sulkowicz described the work as “an endurance performance art piece”. Sulkowicz told the Columbia Daily Spectator: “I do think that nowadays art pieces can include whatever the artist desires and in this performance art piece it utilizes the elements of protest …”[27]
Purchased online from Tall Paul’s Tall Mall, the 50-lb (23-kg), dark-blue, extra-long twin mattress is of the kind Columbia places in its dorms, similar to the one on which Sulkowicz said that Nungesser had raped her.[11][24] Sulkowicz spent the summer of 2014 creating the rules of engagement, which defined the parameters of the project. Written on the walls of her studio in the university’s Watson Hall, these included that Sulkowicz had to carry the mattress when on university property; that it had to remain on campus when she was not there; and that she was not allowed to ask for help in carrying it, but could accept if help was offered.[24][28]
In early September 2014 Sulkowicz began carrying the mattress on campus.[29] A homeless man was one of the first to help. Sulkowicz told New York magazine: “He was the first person who helped without some sort of preconstructed belief for why they were going to help. He was like, ‘Oh, look, a struggling girl—let me help her and be a nice human being.’ That was probably the most honest interaction I had.”[30] Sulkowicz kept a diary throughout, amounting to 59,000 words at the end of the work, recording the artist’s experiences as well as the misunderstandings of commentators.[30]
Sulkowicz said the work would end when Nungesser was expelled from or otherwise left Columbia, and that she would take the mattress to her graduation ceremony if necessary.[11][25] In the end Sulkowicz carried it to the graduation ceremony on May 19, 2015,[7] despite a request from the school that students should not bring “large objects which could interfere with the proceedings”.[4] Several women helped carry the mattress on stage. As Sulkowicz approached, university president Lee Bollinger, who had been shaking other graduates’ hands, turned away as if to pick something up, and did not shake her hand; the university said this happened because the mattress was in the way.[10] The next day posters appeared in Morningside Heights near the university calling Sulkowicz a “pretty little liar”.[31]
After graduation Sulkowicz said she had known the university would not expel Nungesser, and had expected to carry the mattress for nine months, the length of a pregnancy, which was an important part of the work: “To me, the piece has very much represented [the fact that] a guy did a horrible thing to me and I tried to make something beautiful out of it.”[30]
Artists are actively standing against Israel’s genocide, a genocide that Columbia supports. It makes sense that people who are so lacking in anything resembling decent values would be scared of those willing and able to highlight Columbia’s shameful behavior.
