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An old staple of the culture war has resurfaced: District attorney reopens case of alleged Cornell University 'gang rape'. The core allegation is that the girl went to a frat house, got pressured to snort ketamine, passed out, and was raped by multiple people while unconscious.
I first heard about this case from someone at Cornell a bit after it happened. She was adamant that the frat boys were guilty and that there was conclusive proof (though she didn't personally know what the proof was), but the administration went easy* on them because of misogyny. Obviously, this set off alarm bells in my head because it pattern-matched well with Duke Lacrosse, Mattress Girl, etc. I said that it sounded like there wasn't enough evidence to tell, while in the back of my mind thinking that the accusation was probably false.
I was somewhat surprised when I read today that this conclusive proof does sort of exist, in the form of a Snapchat screenshot wherein someone in the fraternity's group chat posted that there was "free pussy upstairs". It's not quite conclusive proof, but it's much better proof than I expected. At this point my assessment is that the accusation is probably basically real.
This got me to thinking about whether it was time to update my model of the world, and whether the discourse around campus rape has changed over the past 10+ years. In a media environment where Jezebel is dead and Rolling Stone irrelevant, should we still expect the mainstream media to be biased to the point of uselessness? What about the power dynamics? Who is Cornell more afraid of, feminists or Republican OCRs?
There're also the evergreen questions, like what the responsibility of a university should be in cases like this, or what the police department or justice system should do. Seasoned culture warriors will point out that wanting to be hard on this kind of crime correlates with wanting to be soft on other kinds of crime.
Another thing that came to mind was the question of how grievous a crime we should consider rape to be. In my lifetime, rape has generally been considered equivalent to murder in severity ("rape and murder" usually being used to indicate the category of "super serious crime"), and the question of whether that's a good thing has been debated to death. However, Zoomers are famously more prudish than Millennials. Does it follow that Zoomers also regard rape as a greater crime, relatively speaking, than Millennials do?
*I see people claiming on Reddit and other places that the alleged rapists' only punishment was that they had to write apologetic essays, but this is not true -- at least two members of the fraternity were expelled. Whether this is a light punishment is up for debate.
The "free pussy" thing doesn't strike me as proving anything except that there was some sort of group/sequential sex going on.
It may strike some sheltered folks as crazy that there are women who will turn up to a mostly-male venue for a gangbang of their own volition. First one I saw was in the hotel at MEPS, some aspiring airwoman made good use of the free hotel room. I passed a few guys waiting outside in the hallway and got the lowdown, and "free pussy" was about the extent of what they'd heard. I didn't figure to bat sixth at best.
Leftism struggles with the hole their deracinated religion removed from sexual mores. We have an intuition that women should not be doing that, and neither should the guys. People with sexual mores in their belief system can chalk it up to weakness, sin, moral failings, just bad ideas, daddy issues, unhealthy behavior etc. For leftists, the only value in sexual morality is consent, and thus all bad sex has to be rape, and if consent was explicit there must be some arcane emanation from a penumbra to make it not count.
I’ve always had that problem with the whole “victim blaming is bad” thing. It’s just pretty well obvious that going to a fraternity house, getting high and blackout drunk, etc. are things that will end very badly for you. I’m sure this is a surprise to absolutely nobody. And I don’t feel all that bad about “shaming” a woman who does that kind of thing and has the predictable happen. Like, why shouldn’t that be pointed out? It’s done routinely for every other crime out there. You would not think twice about “shaming” a guy who walked down a street in Compton in fancy clothing and flashing cash. Of course he was going to get robbed. Nor would not think twice about shaming someone who got robbed after posting that they were going on a ten day cruise. Things that are bad ideas should be pointed out. It doesn’t mean they deserve to be robbed, but at the same time, if you insist on being an idiot I don’t feel much need to feel bad for for pointing out that you are or were being foolish.
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It doesn't even prove that. It just means there were horny girls around.
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Was consent explicit?
Like sûre, doing drugs with a guy and stumbling off to another room with him voluntarily is one thing, but it doesn’t imply consent to group sex.
But if group sex happens, as one might predict, and she's not screaming no and is not unconscious, should the men in the situation specifically be locked in a cage? If so, long should they be locked in a cage for?
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It seems that in her initial interview with the police last year, she said she was offered a threesome and accepted (at least in part) because she hoped that meant the two hot frat guys were going to be gay with each other, too. A third guy asked to join in. She said no because she assumed that meant upping the ante to include anal, and Guy #3 left without a fuss.
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