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Notes -
I'm bringing back the Cornell incident from last week, because I think I have something to add to the topic (albeit that it took a little while rolling around in my head). For those who have already said it outside of my notice, please accept my apologies for the terrible crime of being dull.
Most discourse around the Cornell incident is about whether it was rape. From a fact-finding perspective, I find the first account submitted to the police most plausible, and that does not sound like rape to me. But what I notice is that we, the audience, have been forced to accept the form of the question. As in, is the relevant question about this event whether or not it was rape? (If you are one of the defendants or are on the jury, obviously it is, but I don't think any of us are.) What question has been suppressed by the overpowering presence of the rape question?
Again, I believe that the first account given to the police is most likely true. If so, what happened here? Seven men, one women, and a substantial amount of alcohol and ketamine spent an evening experimenting with different configurations of which was inside, outside, or on top of which. The events seem to have been broadly consensual but severely underinhibited and quite inadvisable. After this, the human participants went their separate hungover ways, and their relationship swiftly deteriorated. This apparently reached a tipping point after the men's fraternity's president disinvited the woman from a Halloween party, at which point she started accusing them of rape. What are we to make of this?
The natural direction to look is in the direction of the woman. Was she sober enough? Was she just some crazy slut? Was she vindictive, hell hath no fury yadda yadda? I don't see a need to. Obviously I disapprove of the actions she took and would be appalled if my daughter were to do anything like it (and, of course, wondering how I raised her so). But she's not my daughter, she's in no way involved with my life, and being free means being free to make bad choices. But overall, prior to the rape accusations (again, obviously a big deal, but only after the fact), her only crime was that she "loved too much," as it were. She did not hurt anyone with her frankly wildly out of control actions, except possibly herself. What I'm interested in here is the men. What do I note from them, what do I see? How did they treat her?
They treated her like a piece of meat. Sure, they had a couple of consensual if intoxicated threesomes with her, and that much is fine if fairly gross. But after that, they started texting each other about "free pussy." The latecomers wandered in awkwardly looking for action, and the original parties just let whoever come in, what's the matter? They barely knew her at this point. After the event, they seem only to have been involved with her as far as making sure the event wouldn't reflect badly on them, no interest in her whatsoever. (I think the slant most people draw from this is that they were worried about being accused of rape; I'm wondering if they were actually worried about everyone knowing how much they loved having sex with their bros.) "Wow, that was a wild night, huh? Well, good knowing you." And under mysterious circumstances, general knowledge of this wild night starts getting around, so the fraternity president now knows enough about this one chick to disinvite her specifically from a party.
Listen, I get that people are gonna have wild and crazy and frankly stupid sex sometimes, stuff that I look down on. But this chick was putting out for them, putting herself out for them, and a man has at least some obligations in response to that. These guys just tried to get laid and then drop her like a hot potato, and while it's not absolutely clear to me that it was them spreading the knowledge that she'd been fuckin', it seems a little more plausible than that her sorority sisters wanted it common knowledge that they harbored sluts. They felt entitled to her body at face-value terms, that "consent" was the only thing needed, and they weren't even obliged to provide the "thank you ma'am." In short, they disrespected her severely, and by disrespecting her so severely, transmuted her essence from "fun woman" or even "nice, sweet girl who made a mistake" into "crazy slut," because the only person you can get away with doing that to is "crazy slut." So, in her rage, she decided to become "victim of sexual violence" so that they would have to stop being "lucky horndogs" and start being "frat bro rapists." But once she does that, it's not just those men who become "rapists," it puts people like the DA and the school into that category, so now it becomes a much larger problem. And now everyone starts fighting over whether that last move was legal or not, whether she has to do a takeback or get issued a game loss, and nobody looks at the earlier move. Were they allowed to turn her into a slut just because she slept around?
This is what I think is supercharging the debate. The seven young men, individually and as a group, acted like total fucking cads, and they were getting away with it. There's no law against acting like a cad, and worse, there's not even a real social punishment. My own personal feelings and standards aside (where yes, I'd probably ice a boy like that out without very strong evidence he'd reformed), the general attitude is that all they needed to do was get consent, and that's the end of their obligations. After that, they just "got lucky" and who cares what's up with her, she can take care of herself, she's got equal rights. They got to go to the Halloween party and she didn't. Excuse me? Then why did she have all that sex? Just for the love of the game? I'm not going to accuse every swipe-addicted TikTok drone of having such deep thoughts about it, but the zeitgeist WILL make itself known. She was mistreated by those men, who allowed her to have sex with them even though they had no intention of returning any of that favor. Her sex was taken for granted, taken advantage of, but we do not punish that, not when it's Cornell frat bros, not when it's fuckboy ghosters, not when it's long-term live-in boyfriends who won't fucking propose. The only thing we do punish is rape, and so it had to be rape.
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I know this has been a long and meandering post, and expect it will be appreciated if I lay out a pretty explicit thesis. If you like rhetoric as an art, sorry, pretend this doesn't exist.
The rape accusations are born out of women's rage as a collective. Not all women individually, and individual women are not here obligated to avow or disavow this rage, but as a group it suffuses them. The rage is over men's, as a collective, perceived ability to dodge consequences for sex. Again, not all men individually, etc. The rage does not have to be proportionate. It does not have to be satisfied in the ways it demands; indeed this is a poor way to handle rage. But it is aggravated by any incident where a woman is forced to pay for sex while a man is not. The only way out I personally see is to deny that asking her consent is sufficient repayment for a woman's sex, and look down on men who attempt that. But that is a stance I was already happy to take.
The message that people, especially women, have sent in the last 70? years is that love is transactional, divorce for any reason whatsoever is OK and the sexual marketplace is to essentially function as a anarcho-capitalistic matching market where you are entitled to nothing and everything goes. We title partners as "low" and "high" value, assign numbers to people, commoditize them on dating apps.
If you work extremely hard to commoditise and devalue things like love, then why would you be surprised that things turn into a zero-sum anything goes amoral all-against-all?
People respond to incentives. The incentive for men is to defect in the face of the defection of women. Why propose if you will get divorced in 10 years and half your stuff taken? Why stick around when you have a roster? Because of religion? Women don't believe in that either? Because you worship women as a thing, as a concept? Well most don't.
If you want to bring back chivalry, you either have to bring back the moral system that produced it or engineer men to be subservient and un-self interested. Which women then wouldn't want to have sex with in the first place.
If she wanted altruistic, value-driven men she would have shopped around at an orphanage, volunteered at a homeless shelter or gone to church. She chose an environment where she'd be treated like a piece of meat and well that's what she got.
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Admittedly a lazy question but here it goes anyway: in the earlier discussion on this incident that took place here one highlight/moment that was mentioned was that this woman, supposedly already drunk and drugged out of her mind at that point, accepted a proposal from two guys to have a threesome, apparently under the assumption that this will actually entail her getting to watch homo sex happening. I imagine her disappointment contributed to her regretful recollection of that night’s events afterwards. One one hand I think this should be cause for a conversation on the brain-rotting effects of prevalent literary porn consumption among college-educated single women. On the other hand, is this even getting commented on?
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These incidents aren’t even about feminism. It’s really trad male-female relations based on evolutionary biology trying to interact with a rules based legal system. Different religions all had different ways of dealing with this. Muslims not letting females leave the house. Christian’s heavy social shame.
The issue is feminism claims women are free to make their own decisions and make adult decisions while females instinctively know sperm is cheap/eggs are expensive so they have a lot of social norms to deal with that in various cultures.
Obviously pretty much every society had girls who would get gangbanged. They were prostitutes. Usually poor and/or foreigners.
In this case the gang bangee thought she was living in a rationalist free women world but that her sorority shamed her and got her uninvited from future parties…..until she like lived a monastic life for 6 months and wouldn’t give her pussy out for free. Social interactions within communities are still mostly governed by ancient norms locally. It’s not until your an adult in a major city where everyone doesn’t know everyone that you can go get gang banged without social repercussions.
The one annoying thing is how many “enlightened leftist” end up saying this wasn’t rape…….but I still don’t approve of this behavior and these were bad men. I’ve got to respect Aella here because when she’s getting gangbanged thru her personal taste she doesn’t expect society to call the guys banging her out degenerates.
It’s funny we had a rave posts the other day. But there’s ton of people doing drugs that stimulate sexual interests. Sometimes people who are not bad people choose to do drugs to lower inhibition.
Let's not get carried away here. If this woman wanted to get gangbanged by men outside her immediate social circle at college so that her reputation doesn't suffer it was well within hear means to make that happen.
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Sigh. Is feminism back? I know it's a bit "boo outgroup", but I really honestly and truly did really enjoy the past couple of years. I felt much less on edge, no longer walking on eggshells all the time, and like we could all mutually start to look at reality and see the same thing again, laugh at jokes about sex, appreciate scantily dressed women, understand that the sexes actually do behave differently from one another for reasons other than "privilege".
At any rate, the only thing that actually matters to me in this case is the question of: did they specifically give her ketamine beyond what she actually "wanted"? I suppose a secondary question may then be: if they did, did they do that maliciously or unknowingly?
I'm afraid I haven't heard too much discussion about the question of the ketamine on the Motte so far, it's been more about the social mores of having sex, and whether she was lying about not wanting to have sex. But to me, the only thing that really determines whether I think any actual wrongdoing took place is whether she deliberately took the drugs or not. I suppose we will never really know - she probably doesn't even remember whether she actually wanted to take that ketamine at the time. And the whole world has now decided that "no, she didn't want the ketamine and it was forcibly given to her to make her have sex against her will".
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If you don't want to risk being thought a slut, don't have a drug-addled gangbang, it's really not that hard.
Nobody's going to bail me out if I blow up my account by abusing leverage recklessly. I won't be a 'rich guy who made a mistake', I'll be poor because the value of my wealth has declined. It won't be unjust, it wasn't as if I got robbed. I made a risky decision and it went poorly. If I made that decision while drunk or drug-addled, that doesn't change the outcome, I still have to own it.
How can the bad element here be 'disinviting her from a Halloween party' or 'being considered a slut by her sorority'? Who cares, it's just a party. Not getting invited to a party does not remotely justify a rape case.
It's not like she was an 11 year old being groomed over a period of time into performing these sex acts, with an implicit threat of violence if she refused. If it were actual grooming and actual rape, then it would be a really serious matter.
How can the collective/zeitgeist of women possibly be appeased of these frustrations? How does she force a fuckboy to commit without taking away his ability to consent? Is he to be a male sex slave? A virgin until he chooses his forever wife? I appreciate that it might be frustrating to have a live-in boyfriend who won't propose but what's the problem with that? As long as he loves her, what does marriage matter? He hasn't gotten down on his knees to give her a ring he paid for, he hasn't legally shared half his stuff with her if they break up. He might just decide to leave and upend her life, damn, imagine how that would feel...
The state doesn't punish cuckoldry, it doesn't punish women belittling men, it doesn't punish e-girls extracting huge founts of cash from lonely loser men... Should it? Do we need thot police regulating how female streamers act online, as a criminal offence, rather than purely platform-based codes of conduct? Put them in a burkha perhaps, so they can show their personalities rather than their bodies? There are endless male complaints about women that women sure wouldn't enjoy if they were enforced by weaponizing the legal system.
The messy grey areas of sexual relations are unsuitable for law, they should be dealt with by shaming and rumours and informal methods. Same with sluts or cads for that matter. Law shouldn't be used as a mallet to hammer every problem humans face in life, it's already grossly overused.
I don't mean to be aggressive against you personally, you're making a light-shedding descriptive argument about how some feel frustrated. But the descriptive argument if true seems pretty ugly.
Unfortunately the social reality is that 'being considered a slut by her sorority' is a fatal tragedy in the eyes of the average female college student who, on the other hand, has been indoctrinated from her youth, as have been her parents, that trying to sexually shame women for anything is absolutely taboo.
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I subscribe to the idea that literally everyone involved was degenerate (the girl and the guys alike). But:
I really just think progs and trads alike would only be satisfied with the reintroduction of The Patriarchy (and probably not even then). They are literally stating that women do not have the capacity to regulate their own sexuality and cannot take full responsibility like adults when they get themselves into situations that make them feel shame or do not yield the outcomes they want, and that the responsibility should be displaced onto men collectively, who must regulate their sexuality for them by preemptively stopping them from making stupid decisions and putting out in a way that won’t yield results. They are all just babes in the woods who cannot be expected to assess risk or bear the consequences when their gambits fail.
Of course, you can’t expect every single man on earth to take responsibility for a woman’s Honour and Dignity, so the practical implementation of this is to provide her father and brothers and other male relatives who would naturally care about her the most with the authority to make sure it is preserved. Frankly the discourse surrounding this is some Islam Is Right About Women-tier shit, and I struggle with not believing that women’s lib was a horrible mistake when women en masse seem intent on demonstrating that they are unsuited for the “empowerment” they so value. If I didn’t know better I would think this was a conspiracy to turn people misogynist; it’s just so farcical that I could not have dreamed up better ammunition if I tried.
In a hyper individuated world, women can't control their sexuality. Neither can men. That's why, in every society in history sexuality has been heavily regulated by custom and law.
Maybe libertarian sexuality works really well for some subset of hyper-rational economically privileged people living in a co-op in Berkeley. Maybe. But for the large majority of people, men and women, that leads to ruin. Predictably, and we as a society have to bear the costs. Descriptively, they can't assess risk or bear consequences when their gambit fails, which calls for external regulation.
Yes, and presumably in the system you’re imagining men and women alike are to be heavily punished and held accountable for breaches of the sexual code, not this fucked-up one way system where all agency and responsibility is placed on the man to Know Better. That line of thinking naturally lends itself to a guardianship system, which most people making this argument would feel very uncomfortable with. They are not taking their ideas to the logical conclusion; in my experience they would like women to be sexually liberated while at the same time believing that liberation should still come with the ability to displace responsibility for the sullying of your honour onto the nearest man because you were just such a poor little exploited damsel. It is untenable to let women freely put out without policing from society or men and to let them still go crying for redress, sympathy and a shotgun wedding when they don’t get what they want out of their investment. Nobody can control a woman, yet everyone must avenge her nevertheless.
I’m not a sexual libertine (as I said, everyone here is degenerate). I really just want it to be consistent.
To clarify, in a world where you are afforded the right to assess risk for yourself and freely make decisions as a liberated individual, you should also be expected to accept the consequences of these actions. People who gamble or invest in a highly leveraged crypto ETF that ends up losing them money might not be the best judges of risk, but as an adult they are judged to be able to make these decisions and suffer the consequences, without having the ability to point to the nearest person and displace all accountability.
We live in a sexually liberated world, and perhaps that is not the world we should live in, but it is. “Your standards applied consistently” and all that. Frankly I am also very perturbed by how trads seem to try and agree with feminists on things like these, instead of forcing them to adhere to the sexual liberation many of them claim to want for themselves. In carrying water for them trads are not actually achieving the trad system they claim to want, they’re just pushing the Overton Window in the direction of Sexual Liberation Plus, which is just sexual liberation with the ability to blame men every time something goes wrong.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that "full adulthood" isn't something that should happen automatically but something that should instead be available to everyone and needs to be actively sought out.
My wife would almost certainly prefer to not have the right to do plenty of things she technically has the right to do. She knows she is vulnerable to scams and would prefer to not be able to enter contracts on her own, except in some limited capacity like buying groceries.
I don't think she is alone. I think a shitton of people would like to have more limited "rights", like not being able to receive phone calls from anyone, enter into contracts over the phone, only being able to enter into contracts over the internet with third-party white-listed vendors, etc.
It kind of works a bit like this with some investments and bank services, you can't just stumble into making some types of transactions.
I'm not sure this extends to sexual or romantic stuff but it follows the same principle.
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I think this is missing a very critical aspect of this situation: she probably got what she wanted out of the investment and wouldn't have "gone crying for redress and sympathy" absent another necessary ingredient. Others saw an opportunity to exploit her experience for their own gain, and pushed her to "reinterpret" the situation to advance their agendas. She and the men directly involved are not the only degenerates in this story.
What do you mean?
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One thing to note is that only four of the men involved are accused of sexual acts. The "Cornell 7" is certainly a more attention-grabbing headline than the "Cornell 4" I suppose.
Ironically the frat president uninviting her from the Halloween party was probably an attempt at damage control. They had nasty rumors of a drug-fueled orgy floating around involving this woman already, they would have to be insane to invite her back (for one of the wildest parties of the year) and risk it happening again. And obviously it's a lot harder to uninvite the people who live there.
Right up until the rape accusation it looked like social shaming was mostly working as intended. Everyone involved made bad decisions and were getting mildly punished for them. The woman's social life was negatively impacted and rumors were going around about the frat being rapey. The issue is that the woman exercised a unilateral option to absolve herself of blame and dump 100x the consequences on the men.
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It hasn’t been mentioned much but the earliest published work to include the phrase “free pussy” is Valerie Solana’ anti-male SCUD Manifesto, 1967, maybe the most anti-male book ever written. Bolding the relevant parts:
Solanas’ experience with men in her life failing her developed into an ardent misandry and culminated in, of all things, a murder attempt on Andy Warhol. It’s interesting that the oldest source of this term also includes consensual gangbanging within a fraternity-like organization of men, though here she critiques them for whisking the woman into the burbs rather than dropping her for reputational reasons.
Isn't there someone you forgot to ask?
Eh, must've been the wind.
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Saddam Hussein's inspiration!
For those unfamiliar with Solanas, it's the SCUM Manifesto, with SCUM standing for "Society for Cutting Up Men".
Lmao yes you’re right. She was not a Baathist.
Honestly, I'd guess Valerie Solanas being a Baathist wouldn't even be top 5 in the strangest links between American progressive activists and third world postcolonial regimes.
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She recorded a phone call with the first guy where he claims that the only reason a bunch of other guys came into the room was that the house was full, when he sent a text to the groupchat inviting them in. So at least that guy comes off as extra dickish, and he was one of the students expelled.
https://abcnews.com/US/damage-control-phone-calls-records-suggest-cornell-frat/story?id=136987960
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What I make of it is she felt like elements of it were non-consensual but didn't want to escalate it since it would just be making a big messy deal out of it and she just wanted to put it behind her and forget about it.
But instead word got out, and it started affecting her academic and social life and now that it's already in the toilet, there isn't much to lose by escalating it.
There should be. False rape accusations cause approximately equal harm as actual violent rape. Therefore, punishments for false rape accusations (if proven beyond a reasonable doubt) should be approximately equal to punishments for violent rape (if proven beyond a reasonable doubt). The fact that they are not is precisely why she feels safe escalating this way as a petty, vindictive, uncostly form of revenge in a social battle. Legal threats like this should not be casually thrown about against innocent people.
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Well, no.
I get that it's kind of a meme for angry men (hereafter referred to as "traditionalists") to state this, because men (and especially the more trad ones) don't actually understand that a good chunk of the benefit for women is that they don't have to be in control to have the sex. "Vampired billionairely across the room" is a meme for a reason- it's someone you don't want to be in control of because the symbols that you're going to have a good time with this guy are already there.
(It doesn't need to be a stable time, it just needs to be sufficiently good. Employers hire this way all the time- they have the money, but no agency outside of their employees, so it's in effect the employees that dictate the direction the employer takes. The same dynamic applies to the statistically-average woman "hiring" the statistically-average man to give the prizes of labor in exchange for that sex, in this case drugs/a party/an invitation to what was understood to be basically a sex show at said party.)
"Consent" simply doesn't work the same way for doms/men as it does for subs/women; subs/women only really have the one option of "fuck this, I'm out" (for the same reason they can't send open-ended rejections as it's still a signal that they might be open to further pursuit with suitable improvement- it has to be completely unambiguous rejection and even that doesn't work all of the time.).
Doms have a much broader array of tools simply because the mating dance has "be able to be talked into, and then it just happening" as a primary feature of the selection on the part of the sub. That is the appeal of it; if the fanfics are to be believed, the lead-up to the sex is the overwhelming majority of the sexual pleasure.
This, of course, creates some unique liabilities (disease, pregnancy, being shamed by progressives for undermining their collective sexual bargaining) that it is perfectly reasonable on the side of the
bottomwoman to believe they weren't appropriately priced in at the time. And men that don't intentionally place themselves in that situation will never really realize that (generally because it's against their nature to do so).The woman is now allowed to cry that this was rape, so she does, and the consequences after that are generally uninteresting power politics that have more to do with privilege of group actors than they do the woman herself.
I mean, thanks for acting as exhibit A for why a social conservative/traditionalist and a progressive are exactly the same, I guess? Though the irony there is that both of them treat women's sexuality as a tool and not as an end, though in truth both pretend as if they're on the side of women. (Much like classical liberalism and the sexual revolution do for men, at least when using a traditionalist/progressive lens.)
Again, something on which trads and progs agree; trads because they don't understand women, progs because they are paid a salary to intentionally misunderstand women.
The woman paid for the drugs and the party with sex; the men paid for the sex with the drugs and the party. The woman is now trying to renegotiate that contract because she doesn't think those things served as sufficient payment even though she clearly believed they were at the time (and further text messages apparently corroborate this, which is why more progressive countries, like Canada, intentionally exclude those as exculpatory evidence).
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Was there more than just the one guy saying that in one text?
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Polite society has been adding epicycles to the consent-alone (solus consensus?) model of sexual ethics for decades: People under 18 cannot consent. People under the influence of drugs cannot consent. People who are subordinate in a power hierarchy cannot consent. None of these really made any sense in the solus consensus framework, but jettisoning consent as the one true guiding light of sexual ethics would open up LGBT relationships to scrutiny, and that would be considered unconsionable.
Given the reaction to the Cornell incident, I think society is finally ready to start looking for alternative ethical models. Everyone has now seen the moons of Jupiter so to speak.
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I think what you're getting at is pretty simple- they treated her like a whore, except they didn't pay her.
That's what everyone has got grasping at straws. It's a status distinction- having sex with a lady you're supposed to be cuddly afterwards and make her tea and give her breakfast the next morning and the like. But society doesn't want to acknowledge that; this was a sorority sister(and thus some sort of lower gentry background), and society doesn't want to acknowledge that that is a relevant variable to their outrage. We're supposed to be beyond status distinctions, or seeing consensual sex as gross.
There was no lady in the room.
There was a good-time gal. She wanted a casual acquaintance to find a 3rd to Eiffel tower her and take turns pounding her out, but not a 4th because that probably meant anal.
Maybe she hopes they guys will mess around with each other and she'll get to watch, not an uncommon fantasy.
She's unhappy that cooler heads prevail and she dis-invited from Halloween. The dis-invitation (rejection) is the proximate cause of her unhappiness but it was always going to end unhappily. You don't marry the good-time gal.
Feeling unhappy couldn't be the result of anything she did it must be because some external force (the boys) did something to her.
There was a high status woman. By prevailing morality she can't be used as a 'good time girl', not openly.
In times past she'd get the blame and have to marry someone a bit lower than her. But today, that's taboo, so we have to pretend the boys are rapey. But the gods of copybook heading are returning; treating a girl from a wealthy family that way was always banned. The difference is, in times past, she would be sent to 'help her aunt' in another state. That's how my great grandparents met. Today that part's not happening. I mean it will, slowly but surely- she's already banned from the frat parties(which exist primarily to make sure upper class women marry upper class men). But it's not yet, we have seduction charges but not the other side. History repeats, it rhymes, it does all those things at once- and cultural universals will always resurface. Yeah, she's being punished. So are they. The gods of copybook heading go nuclear on everyone.
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If you are a man, there's a good chance you haven't received a lot of actual positive attention in life from anyone but your mom.
I saw something on Twitter to the effect that sluts are great because they actually really like men.
There are women out there who like sex, like men, and are comfortable around them. You knew they aren't yours to keep, but they do show you a good time. Maybe you even learn a thing or two. And you get to feel valued, feel sexually desirable, feel visible. Most men have been with someone like that. I have. Looking back on my young life, I wonder what those women even saw in me.
Essentially, sluts are doing men a great service.
Treating them shabbily is in very poor taste.
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True but if she actively wants demeaning group sex whilst proactively consenting to it, what can you do? Also 'You must act like a gentleman to best satisfy women in bed/post-bed' runs so hard against observed tendencies in mate selection.
'Satisfaction' and 'pleasure' are besides the point. It's about 'dignity' and 'status', not those other things.
The outrage is about upholding a social hierarchy, and part of that is that upper class women are supposed to be treated a certain way. Of course it can't be put in those terms, hence all the rape-that-isn't.
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ESH is a perfectly valid conclusion.
She's gross, the men are gross (seriously, consent or not, who thinks it's not gross to put your dick in the same place a dozen other guys just put their dicks?), and social shame and disgust should befall all of them regardless of criminality. But most people are lining up on Team Woman or Team Bitches Ain't Shit. And so it goes.
"regardless of criminality."
I generally agree that ESH, but the matter if criminality is central to the discussion, as there is a strong faction that believes a crime happened here (and wants to leverage that example into a greater debate on sexual ethics and "rape culture"). So even though these guys suck, it's still virtuous to defend them against an accusation they're innocent of. Something something most of the time you'll be defending scoundrel.
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Even though neither of us think it was rape, my wife and I have been quoting the Norm MacDonald meme at each other for a week: "Now this may strike some viewers as harsh, but I think everyone involved in this story should die".
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It's a central issue in the consent framework. Is sex behind closed doors between consenting adults ever wrong? The actual answer is yes, because consent is insufficient. But because the only way people can criticize the morality of a sexual act is by shoving it into a consent framework, you end up with convoluted, unsatisfying (to everyone!) arguments about whether the exact scenario constituted legal consent.
The men are the parties that did the greater wrong, here, and it has nothing to do with the details of her consent or non-consent. The very limited defense I have of them is that they are confused in believing that consent is the moral line, and that's what media and various bureaucracies have told them since birth; but that doesn't change that the act is well-over the actual line.
If every institution from cradle to frat house in their lives has told them the line is consent, and the actual line is such a secret that even posters on The Motte shy away from saying what the line is, how is it conceivably their fault in any way? Quite literally, how could they possibly know, or indeed, how could they possibly have known that they didn't know?
Fault is a tool we use to create better outcomes, by justifying legal and social punishments. Assigning fault to them allows us to channel energy into creating new norms and expectations that would otherwise be dissipated in questions of "how much ketamine can a girl snort off a guy's cock before the guy can't have sex with her."
She's at fault, too, but gotta choose your battles.
If your position is that the consent framework is bad, then neither the boys nor the girl is at fault. They are simply products of the system. The correct people to assign fault to in that scenario are the people who created, advertised, and enforced the consent framework. This is true both in a moral sense and in a "how do we create better outcomes" sense. Skewering a bunch of boys who literally could not have known to do anything else does nothing to effect the change you want because those boys have no power to change the system. To change the system, you must influence the people who actually have power, who are neither the boys nor the girl, but the horde of faceless teachers, activists, and bureaucrats who actually set the rules.
Going after the boys is just going after the weakest party in the case. Sure, it's "choosing your battles", but you're only choosing that battle because you can win it and feel good, not because winning that battle does anything.
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"Tomorrow morning, is she going to wish she didn't do this?" I think is the question they should have asked themselves, and I think it was foreseeable that this would be a wise question to consider.
That's the problem with everyone involved being drunk and high... Of the two men in the initial threesome, one fell asleep and couldn't perform, and the other started vomiting. No one had the mental capacity to consider the next morning.
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Good standard, but even in this case not good enough. She wished she didn't do it weeks later after rumors circulated around campus and she was disinvited from the Halloween party.
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People are going to occasionally regret the most milquetoast inoffensive sexual encounters for a myriad of reasons, some of which are impossible for the other party to reasonably predict. Is it potential rape if I have sex on the third date, then learn something afterwards that makes me unwilling to pursue a further relationship?
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Imagine that it's the night before the events in the story and you are tasked with arguing the case for "the line is the woman not having regretted last night's activities" against someone who is arguing "the line is consent". What evidence would you be able to bring to bear compared to the evidence that your debate opponent would be able to bring to bear? Remember, the debate is not what the line should be, but what the line is.
Would you be able to produce evidence that outweighs the legions of institutions who loudly proclaim consent being the line?
The line here is "don't be an idiot; the vast majority of women will regret having a train run on them, even if they say they're cool with it in the moment." If someone starts bringing in legalese about consent, you repeat. Ideally you've earned the respect of your frat brothers, and they'll listen: it's most likely they're just naive, not malicious.
At the time of the event, what was the publicly available evidence that the line was what you say it is? Imagine you're debating a sex-negative feminist whose position is "at Cornell, the line is consent and that's a bad thing -- we should change it". What would you say to convince onlookers that she's wrong and that she already has her preferred policy in place? Heck, there are plenty of people in this thread who are arguing that the current line is consent and that's a bad thing -- are they wrong about the current line being consent?
I think you are just factually wrong about what the line is. The line is consent. You can wish it was something else, but it's not. Until you change it, you (or the rest of the lynch mob) shouldn't get to enforce your desired line.
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Foreseeable to you, the adult, worldly motte-poster. To a 20 year old raised in an environment of sex-positive, "sex is just about feeling good and nothing else" consent feminism? The girl herself seems to have thought she was doing something brave and good.
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I liked your post, but this is the issue. Is sex transactional or performative? If anything, the transactional understanding of sex made the Seven treat Doe the way they did: if sex is a way of transferring value from one participant to the other(s, in this case), then Doe is a sucker who was led around.
The way you defeat this is by treating sex as something that produces value for all participants. You don't have sex to get your boyfriend to commit, you don't have sex to get invited to the next party, you don't have sex to gain status.
Yes! Don't have sex for a reason, have it for the sake of it. You don't bring a homemade frozen lasagna to a new mother because you want her to owe you a favor or because you want others to speak well of you or because it's your duty as another woman. You do it because it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling inside. If it doesn't - you don't have to bake anything, she can DoorDash whatever she wants.
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It seems to me that these statements indicate that you are buying into the traditional notions that see men as defilers.
I mean, if a man is intoxicated and a woman (not his girlfriend or wife) performs oral sex on him, is it so outrageous to see the man as having been defiled?
To be clear, I don't have a huge problem with the "men as defilers" double standard, my bigger issue is what could be called the meta-double-standard. Double-standards which are perceived as favoring men over women are constantly attacked in the mainstream; the reverse is not true.
ETA:
I think this is pretty reasonable. It's alarming when the criminal justice system is turned into an instrument of mass hysterics and weaponized against people who belong to disfavored groups. That seems to be what's happening here.
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How confident are you that the facts of the case support your thesis?
Reliable information is obviously difficult to get right now, but one narrative I've seen, supposedly supported by texts between the girl and one of the main boys involved, is that in the immediate aftermath, all parties involved were perfectly content with the situation, and it was only when the girl's sorority sisters heard about what happened and slut-shamed her that she experienced negative effects (including the disinviting from the Halloween party, done at the request of the sisters). In this telling, it's very much a "is there anyone you forgot to ask" situation, where third parties are inserting themselves into something that they have no business inserting themselves into.
I'm personally skeptical that the frat bros acted like the cartoon villains you describe because my experience with UMC Gen Z men is that they are respectful of women to a fault, and the descriptions of their behavior in the initial police report seem to support that these particular Gen Z men are no different. It seems more like the feminist mob having an idea of what an evil frat bro would do and ascribing that behavior to the boys in this case.
The implication behind this statement is that there ought to be consequences for sex beyond what is negotiated up front. If you asked the collective of women raging at these men what those consequences should be, what would they say? Would they agree with each other? Could they even bear to say it out loud?
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I haven't been following this too closely, but I feel like I'm misunderstanding something here. In what way did she "pay" for the sex other than regretting it later? Are you counting not getting invited back to the frat as "paying" for it? If so, that's like 5 orders of magnitude less than the risk men take for having casual sex with a stranger.
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I don’t think the boys turned her into a crazy slut. I think she was a crazy slut. And the boys were fucking cads as well. Both sides suck. But the woman has agency.
There are purportedly videos of her, now that her name and socials have leaked, showing that she looked pretty jacked for a woman. One of the fun speculations I've heard is that she was on T supplements for athletic/training reasons, and that's why she had a sex drive to fuck multiple frat boys into dry-heaving catatonia.
Curious do you have a link
Allegedly this is her
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Sorry. I didn't save anything and I don't know how to slip past search enslopification anymore. If I stumble across it again, I'll share.
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