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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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Cornell 7, Law, Truth, Sex, and Morality

I would like to compare and contrast two sources on the Cornell Seven case. The first is https://cornellseven.com/ which is the top search result one gets when searching the term. The other is «District Attorney statement re: Jane Doe v. Cornell University, et al.»

The first source begins with

In October 2024, a 20-year-old Cornell student went to the Chi Phi fraternity house to meet someone she considered a friend. According to her lawsuit, what followed was hours of drugging and sexual assault.

The second source largely agrees:

On September 18, 2026, I learned of the civil complaint filed in New York County Court alleging a series of heinous and despicable acts committed by members of the Chi Phi fraternity at Cornell University against a fellow Cornell student on October 19, 2024. The lawsuit, which has been published and widely discussed online, sets forth allegations of multiple sexual assaults committed by male fraternity members against a woman who is referred to as Jane Doe. Given the lawsuit’s graphic allegations of criminal conduct, the question of why those individuals were not criminally prosecuted has been raised. Over the past two weeks, many people have called my office, left voicemails, and sent emails about this case. Some people have understandably sought answers. Others have simply insulted and sometimes threatened my office and my staff. In each case, the comments and questions have been based solely on the allegations in the civil lawsuit and its characterization by news and social media sources.

Unfortunately, this is where the sources diverge. The more popular, but less informative source continues:

The complaint alleges that members of Chi Phi coerced her into taking ketamine, supplied her with marijuana and high-proof alcohol, and sexually assaulted her while she was incapable of consenting. It alleges that one fraternity member then sent a message advertising “free pussy” upstairs to the fraternity’s group chat, after which additional men entered the room. She says she tried to cover herself and push one of them away.

The more informative source disagreeing:

Jane Doe’s sworn statement in November of 2024 did not allege that she was drugged against her will or gang raped. On the contrary, Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual.

The police's summary of Jane Doe's statements is where this comes from:

Male Number 2 “asked [Jane Doe] if she wanted to do more Ketamine.” At that, Jane Doe remembered “that [she] had taken Ketamine at some point on the couch with [Male Number 1 and Male Number 2] during this night” but she could not remember “where or when that took place.”

Jane Doe thought that she “had already done Ketamine once so why not do it a second time.” “At that point, [Male Number 2] poured a line of Ketamine on his erect penis, implying for [her] to snort the line. [Jane Doe] snorted the line of Ketamine, which was a heavy amount of Ketamine.”

The popular source says:

The lawsuit further alleges that all seven men named on this site were present while ketamine was poured and snorted from her body, and that she was made to consume additional ketamine as the assaults continued. According to the complaint, the ordeal lasted until approximately 5:45 a.m.

But her statements say:

The males began complimenting Jane Doe and “talking about how pretty [she] was.” Male Number 4 “asked [Jane Doe] if they all could do drugs off of [her] perfect body.” Jane Doe responded, “Sure.” While the men were doing drugs off of her body, “[Male Number 3] and [another male] entered the room and said something like, ‘Ok we’re shutting down whatever the f*** this is.” Jane Doe felt dizzy due to a pre-existing medical condition causing dizziness combined with the effects of the Ketamine use. Male 5 or 6 (who apparently have the same first name) “encouraged [her] to stay seated as long as [she] needed.”

Eventually, “[Male Number 1] and [Male Number 4 ] ushered [Jane Doe] out of the room brought [her] upstairs to a small room.” Male Number 1 stated, “Let’s do more Ketamine.” Jane Doe “remembered snorting more Ketamine” and “remembered feeling extremely high.”

About being forced to go to 5:45 AM:

Male Number 1 “said he wanted to have sex again because he wanted redemption for passing out earlier in the night.” Jane Doe initially stated that she was tired and asked Male Number 1, “What happened to just you and me?” Jane Doe could not remember how it started but she then engaged in a threesome with Male Number 1 and Male Number 4 involving oral sex and vaginal sex. She described her level of intoxication as “8 out of 10” at this point. “The threesome continued until at some point, around 5:45am, [Jane Doe] said [she] was tired and needed to turn in. At that point, both guys stopped the threesome with [her] as far as [she] can remember.”


It would seem that the legal system has so far behaved reasonably well. No criminal charges have been filed, and the lawsuit was opened two weeks ago. Hopefully she will get no money, but now everyone will know about her. That would be justice in this case.

I think the demand for stories of male rapists outstrips the supply. A lot of people want the Cornell 7 to be rapists, but they aren't. In fact, they come off as rather meek to me. Something about sharing one girl between 7 men like they did just seems that way to me.

And that's where I see what I think this case says about the dating market and the relationship between young men and women in 2026. The demand for horny women also outstrips the supply, to the point that handsome, wealthy, intelligence, social Ivy League frat bros need to, in a rather fruity manner, have sausage fest 3-or-more-somes, instead of each of them getting girlfriends independently.

The actual root of this case, ironically, is that men are so respectful of what women say they want, that they now let a huge chunk of women sit out romance and sex entirely, producing extremely sexually deprived young males willing to to share a one night stand with 3 of their male friends. They respect her consent every step of the way and still wound up with a frivolous false allegation because their behavior sounds more rapey on the surface than a one on one.

One element at play here as well is that under the law, only non-consent is illegal, but maybe many people think this behavior was immoral nonetheless. But I don't agree. On what rational basis can that be justified? The only downsides to sex that I see are the risk of pregnancy, STDs, and unwanted pairbonding effects. The former two are well under control in modernity. The latter is largely controlled by the legal consent framework, although strangely the people who buy in to that framework the most tend to justify it on far weaker grounds than this. Hopefully this case will go down as a pretty big hoax like the Mattress Girl.

There are a lot of violent rapists, but women do not seem to care about them, and they don’t care about preventing that crime. They don’t advocate for harsher sentences and they don’t want to prevent the rape-inclined from migrating here. Neither do they want to introduce norms which prevent violent rape, like you find among the Gulf Arabs with 1/300th the rape per capita as us. It’s questionable whether women even care about justice as a concept: you don’t typically hear about a woman torrenting a book on judicial philosophy or discussing the merits and demerits of retributive justice online. They may occasionally discuss penal theories with their girlfriends but hardly of the judicial sort. It does not appear to me that they want “more justice” as evidenced by their complete and total disinterest in anything approaching an inquiry into matters of justice. I am exaggerating somewhat; there are of course women who pursue these fields in academia and produce important research. But the women yapping about the Cornell 7 are Not These Women but their opposite. They have probably never read the Wikipedia article on Blackstone’s Ratio.

I think what they care about is something more primitive and reflexive. I do not presume to understand them. But it appears that they enjoy attacking those whom they sense are the weaker coalition in power. Fraternity Bros have lost social capital in the West ever since they started being depicted as the villians of our culture in the 80s and earlier. That makes them an easy target: they are both disreputable and evil. But there is more to the story. Because the disreputable and evil hardly inspire passionate hatred among womenfolk. (They are not up in arms over Boko Haram, but Rho Chi’s harem). Perhaps the missing link in the explanation of their primitive reflexive hatred is that there is a weaker, losing coalition of men involved. This they hate, just as female chimpanzees hate such things. Among chimps, “a high proportion of coalitions involving female aggressors overall targeted males and occurred in the context of protecting a prior victim”, and in contrast to all-male or mixed gender chimp coalitions, the all-female coalitions typically attack a lower-ranked male: “among the coalitions involving only female adult [who] aggressed a male, [the victims were] mostly the lowest‐ranking adult males”. To me this makes perfect sense, because I just cannot imagine women responding in this fashion to an all-Native American or all-black fraternity. Those coalitions have more social capital in the sense that they possess the ability to destroy the reputation of any woman who goes against them. But predominately White fraternities, although they may have some abstract notion of value measured in Martha’s Vineyard acreage, have simply no social value in the grand scheme of mainstream American social life (particularly online, which is the new default social life). Consider also that the fraternity is the last vestige of the männerbund which is the last vestige of the traditional male tribal unit; this is all very elementary evolutionary.

Somewhat more speculatively: it’s possible that these women enjoy hating on the out-group while at the same time they are jealous of the accuser. A plurality of women have fantasized about gangbangs; don’t hate me, I did not make the rules and I did not design them. The fraternity brothers are pretty good looking, and are a veritable Disney TV show worth of diversity; you could almost imagine one of them in a wheelchair. So perhaps this also plays a role. Was it Orpheus who was torn limb by limb by frenzied spurned redheaded Thracian women after the death of Eurydice? No, wait, was it Pentheus after the Dionysian orgy? I’m sensing a theme here…

the Gulf Arabs with 1/300th the rape per capita as us

I have no faith in foreign crime stats. I have no reason to think they count almost all rape as rape. Islam in particular has norms of rejecting rape allegations. So those women know better than to complain when raped.