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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.
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).
I wouldn't have guessed that. With what explanation? Was there a recent case around that?
Angry feminist regime butthurt they couldn't convict a semi-high-profile public figure for rape in a very similar case to this one. There's really no other charitable explanation other than Believe Wimminz.
Just look up Jian Ghomeshi, you'll find it pretty quick.
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