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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.
This is why I would prefer to live in a Christian monoculture nation where getting gangbanged in a frat house is such a taboo that you could reasonably assume no girl would do that and therefore they are guilty.
Her behavior would also highly correlate with an effective altruist who rationally experiments with drugs and sexual pleasure.
Who knows? There was an investigation at the time and reports are she’s significantly changed her story. Two frat bros being expelled doesn’t really tell you much because schools were really harsh on those accused for a while.
There’s another story going around of a girl who did the same thing in college and got gangbanged at a frat house. She’s upset they took video and put it on snapchat not that she was gangbanged. So girls do happily get gangbanged today.
She’s suing for millions so maybe she’s just concerned about AI and trying to get her bag in time.
I’d prefer strong social norms against gangbangs but feminists won.
I think you're probably underestimating how much non-feminists are responsible for culture in which consensual gangbangs are permissible, and overestimating how much feminists are responsible for it.
I am technically a feminist, by some definitions, because I think women should have equal legal rights to men. But that's probably not what you mean by "feminist". I am guessing that I am not a feminist in your sense of the word.
I am nearly 100% in favor of culture being permissive of consensual gangbangs.
Why? For selfish reasons: I like wild sex. And for philosophical reasons: I like liberty.
The sexual revolution was caused by many factors of which feminism is only one. Certainly there were many men who supported it out of selfish or philosophical motives, and were not really part of the feminist movement in any substantial way.
Peter Baelish’s brothels existed for poor girls thru probably nearly every human society. So I do see how from a human evolutionary environment the female mind would be adapted to this. We have the prior accusations and it basically sounds like she agreed to party with the little lordlings and consented to all of it. And sometimes they end up having Roberts bastard.
So I do think females can find this enjoyable because it was a successful historical reproductive path. But I’d prefer the Christian society we once were as overall better for people than the pagan route we are going down now. Whatever path we went down that has unleashed this form of feminism is collided with a society that still has elements of Christian social norms.
We are in a weird time where a memory of Christian norms still exists while paganism is returning. A society with two moral frameworks is a weird society.
Christian societies had brothels. Thomas Aquinas even has a lengthy digression about why they shouldn’t be banned.
You should probably explain your point if you are going to quote something completely out of context.
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