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Notes -
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
The second source largely agrees:
Unfortunately, this is where the sources diverge. The more popular, but less informative source continues:
The more informative source disagreeing:
The police's summary of Jane Doe's statements is where this comes from:
The popular source says:
But her statements say:
About being forced to go to 5:45 AM:
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.
I think that the interaction between drug use (including alcohol) and sex is generally a moral minefield.
The corner cases are clear enough: if A puts a roofie into B's to have sex with them, that is rape with a side dish of poisoning. If B is passed out and has given no prior indication of consent, then any sexual action A initiates with B is likewise rape. If B is conscious but unable to verbally or motorically signal non-consent, that is pretty much the same. And if A and B regularly have sex, then it seems unlikely to assume that they are in fact raping each other when they have similar sexual relations while on drugs.
But for everything in between, consent is kind of a nightmare to sort out. Having sex with someone who had a glass of wine over dinner is generally fine, taking advantage of someone who is on the verge of passing out is rape, so at some point in between, there has to be a border between non-rape and rape territory. It probably depends on the degree of impairment, the activeness of the various participants and possibly what a neutral observer would assume that the supposed victim would consent to if sober. But the last point is already contentious: by my observation, men are much more open to having sex than women generally. So this would effectively mean that it would be hard for a woman to PIV-rape a man no matter how high he was.
Relevant question: Can two people mutually rape each other at the same time? Like neither of them would want to fuck the other if they were sober, but somehow they get drunk or high, and mutually initiate sex. Personally, I would consider convicting both of them silly. Instead, they simply made bad life choices while drunk, not all that different from other non-criminal bad life choices people make while drunk.
My impression is that non-app hookup culture often involves booze and partying. De facto, the women gets to decide after the fact if she was a-ok with what happened or not (which seems a bit unfair to the guys participating). Of course, once she decides that her consent was violated, she needs to decide if she is pushing charges, which are probably not all that likely to lead to a conviction, because proving what happened and if consent was given and what state of mind you were in is all hard (which seems unfair to women who were clearly raped).
The correct way to do this would be consent armbands (or a high-tech version, like a LLM agent on your mobile which you picked and told your preferences who gets to confirm your consent while you are high), but the downside of that would be that people would need to come clean about their sexual preferences, instead of hiding behind "I was drunk, so whatever sex acts I did do not really define me as a person".
I don't think its as mine-fieldy as all that.
There used to be a time when resistance to the attempted assault was a precondition to criminal liability.
It was probably reasonable to revise this requirement for the reasons you point out: physical incapacitation can occur without needing an actual physical confrontation or restraint, drugs or other methods can be used.
BUT: the requirement that the victim resists physically has two handy features:
A) Removes ambiguity as to the attacker's 'knowledge.' If they were fighting back then they can't just say "well she seemed to be okay with it/didn't say no."
B) Creates evidence of the lack of consent in terms of injuries and DNA exchange and, if there happen to be any witnesses, they can hopefully describe what appeared to be a fight vs. voluntary public indecency.
But the mere fact that one becomes incapacitated on drugs or similar is probably not enough to prove consent was lacking. After all, you can consent to going into surgery even though you'll be under general anesthesia the whole time. Someone who is interested in sex with you can say, well in advance, "unless I tell you no directly I'm okay with us hooking up while I'm drunk." (most women will not do this, of course. They WILL hit a point of "teehee I'm going to order another drink even though I'm SOOOOOO drunk now...").
End of the day, even with your proposed high tech solutions, there will always be a 'mind reading' element b/c men are extremely motivated to seek out sexual contact and initiate the encounter whilst women, when their desire is inflamed, are ALSO motivated to seek sexual contact but to never, ever make that overt, or at least to rarely actually initiate it and always maintain some plausible deniability as to whether she wanted it or not right up until the event horizon is crossed.
Incidentally this is why I can't accept full consent-based morality without both a harm requirement and some social guardrails for individuals of 'reduced capacity.'
I've mentioned before about requiring young people to take actual tests that prove their comprehension of the activity they want to engage in (Note we already do this for driver's licenses) and any person who engages in an activity with another who lacks such a license is then strictly liable for any harms that result on that person.
I get increasingly convinced this is the only 'technological' solution that can replace the lost social fabric that might have patched over this problem. If you have a license that clearly states you know the actual consequences of using drugs and alcohol and you're aware of the risks of sexual contact of various types, someone can assume that when you agree to take drugs and do sex, you're legally (if not morally) down to clown and can't/won't come back later blaming them for the consequences/outcomes of the act.
And yes, that includes the reputational/social consequences.
Well yeah, this is why certain religious texts have "if it took place in an area where people could hear her resisting" as a pre-condition for prosecuting rape. Feminists hate that because it's fair to men (while at the same time intentionally ignoring the fact that, if the act doesn't take place in a place where anyone could reasonably hear, it's treated as having been resisted by default).
It's probably worth remembering that the people who came up with that in the first place were autistic/academic types (the same people who were advocating child sex 10 years prior, but that detail seems to have been conveniently forgotten). If you asked EA to be in charge of sexual morality, this is what they would do, because (as autists) they have no other workable protection from bad actors.
It doesn't escape my notice that the 'consent' framework (as originally designed, not the modern perversion) is the kind of thing a sufficiently-intelligent little kid would design (or a classical liberal, but I repeat myself). In fact, said demographic tends to approach sex this way; why would they do otherwise, considering that 'mating dance' is not the information-gathering approach they're trained on and sexual activity at that point is more opportunistic fact-finding than adult pair bonding (because the subsystem for that isn't ready yet).
Consent's meant for a type of fact-finding that happens to carry certain novel risks (that's kind of why it's the legal standard for every other activity of this nature), while normal sex uniquely runs on pair-bonding- feminists are correct that the act of sex in truth extends to the way the 'mating dance' is conducted right up to the request to initiate it (their conclusions being entirely selfish doesn't diminish that). The fact that the former framework is easily hijacked such that "unaware of certain risks" could be set up to exclude women entirely was probably not considered in the analysis.
95% of the problems could be fixed by returning this sort of 'consent violation' to being the civil matter that it is (theft should probably be treated that way too, though it already is in practice- but this is unambiguously a privilege fight since men treat petty consent violation as seriously as women treat petty theft, so punishing one yet exempting the other is what you'd expect when one or the other gender is privileged).
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