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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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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.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/09/28/nyregion/tompkinscornell.html

While there, Jane Doe opened one previously unopened can of beer. She and Male Number 1 “danced a little" in a way that “was definitely flirtatious in nature.” Male Number 1 brought Jane Doe to a “quiet area” and “asked how [Jane Doe] would feel about having a threesome with two male partners." Jane Doe "agreed due to how attracted [she] was to [Male Number 1] on top of [her] drunken curiousness.” When she learned that Male Number 2 would be the third participant, Jane Doe "remembered being excited because [she] thought that [Male Number 1 and Male Number 2] wanting to have a threesome meant that they were gay."

Is it gay to have a threesome with your bro?

Yaoi and it's consequences...

She seems to be a usual middle-class white female NPC who reads too much female-oriented porn. Maybe she assumed the two guys were about to have sex with each other and were merely inviting her to watch?

Meanwhile, actual gay guys: What? No. Hell no. God, fuck no. Get your gross-ass pussy out of here. No one wants to see that.

There's a bit more variation on that than you'd expect. The median falls that direction, and one of the (thankfully few) things I know about my brother's preferences is that he turned down a threesome with a guy he really wanted because the guy's girlfriend wanted to watch fully-clothed.

But there's a lot of gay exhibitionists, and a surprising number who either don't find it that much of a turn off or where the taboo is part of the point. And it's moderately well-known that if you're an exhibitionist guy posting pole, about a third to a half of your viewers will be women.

That said, skeptical here.

Was the girlfriend an experienced watcher of homosexual sex or just liked the idea? Also I feel like whenever girlfriend gets invoked in these sort of stories there's a very high chance it's a Trans person which further complicates it.

Don't know the couple in question that well, so didn't ask as to MMF threesome (or MFM, for that matter) experience, either before or after. I know they've had kids the conventional way since, so given that and the time period, presumably not trans.

That said, I do know a decent number of cis women into watching, being a spitroaster rather than spitroastee, or into the 'forced bi' kink, and have taken it past the 'that's a nice porn/written smut trope' stage. There's more than enough selection bias going on I'm not even going to pretend it's representative -- and I've heard people complain about women that thought they'd like it and got really complex feelings afterward, enough to believe my samples aren't representative -- but it's enough of a demographic to show up.

There's a bit more variation on that than you'd expect.

I'm sure it's not universal, but I've had a fair number of gay acquaintances explicitly call the female plumbing "disgusting", with no real prompting. Made it seem like a common and commonly expressed sentiment.