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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.
Rape is a bit of an odd crime, in that in theory almost everyone agrees that it is an extremely severe crime - nearly as bad as murder, if not worse. My armchair theory is that this is because the prototypical crime people imagine is entirely gratuitous. They can conceive of circumstances in which they might think murder is acceptable or even good (likewise for theft, etc...), but it's hard to imagine a "virtuous" rape unless you're a psycho. Even when people joke about things like prison rape, the victim is a bad person being victimized by other bad people.
However, when it comes to actual, concrete accusations, things come apart. Circumstances are usually far more ambiguous than "creep jumps out of the bushes", accused rapists are often otherwise respectable members of their community, and different people have radically different views around consent and sexual ethics. You've got very stringent views of consent, where both parties need to be sober and vocally assenting. And on the flip side, you've got very loose views (the extreme cases being things like "being alone in a room with a man is consent for whatever happens next" or thinking that women secretly want to be raped).
Rape is seen as an extremely severe crime committed against the sacred honor of the victim and her family in patriarchal societies (IF the woman in question is seen as having honor). Alternatively rape is seen as an extremely severe crime committed against the sacred sexual autonomy of the victim in feminist societies (unless the perpetrator is the member of the ingroup). This is a rather big difference.
Illicit sex, not rape. The consent of the woman is not the point, and in general patriarchal honour codes make no distinction between seduction and rape.
The concept of "rape" first existed because some patriarchal societies (including cisHajnal Christian Europe) carved out a near-empty subset of illicit sex where she is wholly innocent and he is wholly guilty. But the most common patriarchal norm is that the victims (i.e. her male relatives) punish both perpetrators without bothering to investigate. Naturally, in these types of societies men mostly stick to raping/seducing women with no living male relatives or whose male relatives don't have the ability to punish them.
The most common ancient patriarchal law codes treat rape, seduction, and kidnapping as the same crime, and punish it with a fine and a requirement for the rapist to marry her. One must imagine that not infrequently the ‘rape’ was entirely consensual, not even dubiously so.
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