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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.
I think basically any sober analysis will conclude that murder is fairly obviously worse than rape. However: I think most people will think that someone being a rapist (without additional information) makes them a worse person than if they were a murderer (again, without additional information).
I think a large part of the reason is that there are a lot of circumstances where murder is morally permissible or even necessary (self defence, military action, the cops shooting a hostage taker, not to mention the shitloads of revenge stories where we cheer when the protagonist murders the antagonist). There are no similar situations where rape is morally permissible (in most people's views). It's really hard to argue that you raped someone in self defence.
I'd argue that raping the local women in the conquered lands of a heinous defeated enemy is mostly seen as not objectionable in most patriarchal societies especially if we apply the feminist definition of rape to the matter at hand.
Not quite. They may have understood that rape and pillage are bound to happen so the men can cool off, and looked the other way, but it was still morally objectionable.
Is it really morally objectionable if no one's actually gonna do anything about it, including those who could do something about it?
People frequently did do something about it, up to and including killing the rapist soldiers. Generally speaking, officers/generals who kept their soldiers from raping conquered women have often been portrayed as positive.
They also frequently didn't do anything about it, but AFAIK it has been a point of contention in many cultures. Definitionally, nobody can keep the conquerors from doing what they want in the moment (that's the whole point of conquering!), so the only thing you can do is portray benevolent conquerors heroically, and cruel conquerors negatively after-the-fact.
IMO the key difference to today is that it was overwhelmingly seen as one vice among many, not as that singular horrible crime that overrules anything else.
Perhaps in part because treatment of civilians by conquering armies was just generally extremely poor- the looting, massacres, enslavement, etc would also not be acceptable today.
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