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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.
I've talked before about how a lot of rape-culture controversies arise because under a consent-only view of rape, and a criminal legal standard of intent mens rea, you can run into the scenario in which there is a rape, but there is no rapist. A woman feels that she did not give consent, or that she was coerced into giving consent; but the man feels that she did give consent, had no intent whatsoever to have sex with her against her consent or to coerce her consent, and would have stopped within a reasonable interval after consent was withdrawn. This is a common disjuncture.
Cornell, in the spirit of an elite research university, has developed the inverse: rapists, but no rape.
This case feels quite opposite of most. Speaking as one of our resident perverts: I both find the actions of the men disgusting, and it sure feels like some of them were at best neutral on the question of consent; and I think the girl pretty much consented tow hat happened. At any rate, while I understand the idea that consenting to a threesome or even a foursome does not constitute consent to the other three or four comers; it does feel like once you've entered the group sex with relative strangers arena, an additional man or two slipping in is at worst a contact foul rather than a felony. The mindset of the man who wants "free pussy" without caring much for consent is blameworthy, but I have trouble seeing "I had sex with 5 men rather than 4" or "I did a bit more ket than I had planned to" as life ruiningly traumatic rather than mildly unfortunate.
It's tough to imagine that she would find the incident particularly noteworthy at all, but for the propaganda about trauma that she had been fed by the culture.
Yes but this is true for a lot, maybe most, of famous cases over the last 10 years. The standard seems to be that a mild tort against a woman warrants decades in prison. For example if you read the Ghislaine Maxwell trial transcripts the accusations are about consensual sex/massages in exchange for a lot of rewards. The same with Harvey Weinstein. Those women were rewarded for their sex while this one was spurned so surely the former must have suffered less trauma than this one.
Idk, I'm pretty comfortable saying that pimping is a crime, aggravated by those pimped being even mildly underaged, regardless of the degree of "trauma" we think was suffered by the whore in question.
This is why in debates like those around Deshaun Watson, I keep trying to bring back the anachronism "whoremonger" as an insult specific to a man. The best you can say is that they were engaged in prostitution, even if you leave the consent questions alone it's still not a good thing for a man to be doing.
He was not a pimp, read Michael Tracey. The only semblance of prostitution that occurred was him buying massages from female procurers. He did not pimp girls out to other men.
I would rather give a massage for $300 than be gang banged on ketamine in exchange for a rejection from a party I want to go to. Come on.
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That is because the consent based criteria such as FRIES is absolutely stupid and make rapists out of people who would not be such under any rational standard. Whenever your wife wakes you up with her hand on your dick, she technically raped you. Whenever you have glass of wine during dinner with your GF and then hop on it, you are raping each other. Under this definition millions of people commit rape every single day.
I am not sure what people want. We have a society where Aella can write succesful blogpost about birthday gangbang with detailed flowchart of how many men did what to herself and fluffers she hired. And we pretend that not only is that a normal thing, but she and Scott Alexander and rest of their depraved butt magic sex cult then promptly rage against "conservatives" and prudes who are disgusted by such practices, which I think includes majority of the population.
We live in this crazy world where people have "rights" do do such depravities, which in practice means that you actually have duty to defend such a behavior. And yet somehow you are supposed to be selectively upset based on some technicality. Imagine that Aella was in some manic episode, she was given some drugs beforehand and in fact those dozens of men she invited actually raped her. Or even vice versa - that any of those men had some drink before and thus did not have full capacity to withdraw consent and were raped by Aella or whatever. In fact I am absolutely sure that something like that happened in practice, that is the way this depraved game is played. The same goes with porn which is at the same time protected by 1st amendment, widely consumed and yet from time to time we have some story about how this whole industry is one huge meatgrinder of souls where all participants numb their senses with copious amount of drugs, psychiatric medication and alcohol. So again, at the same time you should be on the side of Larry Flynt against People, and also at the same time you should be outraged on command whenever some sob story comes from a porn actress. It is just stupid and unworkable position.
In the end I don't care. If I was absolute monarch, I would line everybody involved in that Cornell shit including Jane Doe on local plaza and gave them punishment of 30 lashes as a form of justice. I would also fine each of them $50k for inflicting this stupid shit on unsuspecting public, who all collectively lost uncounted quintillions of brain cells by being forced to witness all that stupidity. Case closed.
Power. The power to destroy one's enemies with the approval of social consensus.
To many people (perhaps sociopaths) the benefit of rules is that they create rule-breakers. They give you the opportunity to destroy your rival, not with crude and blunt open aggression that would make you a horrid bully, but by catching them in the breaking of some rule. You blow your whistle: they broke a rule! They're out! They lose! You win! They get reduced to a stain on the floor - not through any agency of yours, of course, but by the inexorable workings of absolute justice. Such a hero you are!
This is a form that feminine aggression often takes. See, for example, the whole Last Ditch lesbian bar implosion: witness how the most fragile and vulnerable people in the world moved with such strength and speed and rage to spear each other to the wall as having broken some rule. See how the romance-novel subreddits scarcely pass a day without engaging in a purge or cancellation against somebody or other. (Is there something going on now? Oh!)
There are, of course, chumps like me think that e.g. traffic laws are supposed to facilitate safe driving rather than generate revenue. But that's often not how things really work.
Sure, that is one way to look at it, although I would not say it is just female mode of power. This is a classic techne of power: create byzantine rules and then apply them selectively whenever you want to arbitrarily punish somebody. There is the classic quote by Lavrentiy Beria, the chief of Joseph Stalin's NKVD: "Show me the man, and I'll find you the crime."
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You know, this is an interesting take, because if your desired end state is that everyone involved is punished horribly and made an example of, you seem the most likely of anyone involved to get your wish. The boys have been plastered everywhere, in a way that should give future fraternity men pause before engaging in this kind of thing. Jane Doe may have been doxxed already, she surely will be by the time this has run its course. If she chooses, she may be able to scratch some kind of positive living out of it as a professional rape victim, but this is going to end up the defining event of her life, in a way that will give future women pause before engaging in this kind of thing. All 8, or however many of them there are exactly, all of their lives have been irreparably altered negatively by this event. This will haunt them on the internet for the rest of their existence, it's probably not even possible to disappear as one used to and run away to the great north woods where no one knows your past.
Don't forget the Marine unlucky enough to have the same name as one of the 7 and his mother whose address was incorrectly listed in the docket.
I feel bad for Jane Doe, but those two didn't even do anything!
Why, particularly?
She is the one who made the affirmative choice to make this her whole personality, rather than quietly transfer to a state school where no one knew her and reconstruct her life. Even assuming that she did experience a traumatic sense of violation after the fact, I still can't get my head around just how awful her behavior after the fact has been.
She has given multiple versions of the events, and most of the citations here are to the least favorable of those. The DA's summary is probably technically correct, but I doubt it's the most flattering version of the original tale. The more recent version is viscerally unpleasant and I can imagine she feels today like it was exploitative, at least in hindsight. I'm not sure advertising her to the whole fraternity without her knowledge wasn't.
It seems quite possible to me she was sold a "modern, libertine, anything-consensual-goes sexuality" by the culture, only to run headlong into "lol, but not actually" in how the rest of campus reacted. It's unclear how she went to all the trouble of making a victim statement to the police without seemingly including the facts to make it a crime. I am really confused by that one, actually: is reading comprehension and general knowledge that bad among Ivy League undergraduates and police departments?
But it seems to me now she's been taken for a ride by the lawyers, and promised financial compensation, criminal charges, and
fameanonymity by her lawyers with this highly-public strategy, who I suspect know deep down she'd be lucky to get at most one. I don't see anyone but the lawyers winning this even if she does settle with the university. Is settlement even an option with the other parties? The facts, even only her accounts, don't seem friendly at trial (not a lawyer, interested in opinions), and there doesn't seem a case for reputational recovery worth a settlement for the guys even if they had money.She explicitly contradicts the facts that would have to be true to make this a crime. She is now doing something called lying, by changing her story to something else.
The lipstick feminist counterargument I’ve seen is that they claim abuse victims often don’t realize they’ve been abused, or are in denial of it, so Lucy’s initial statements reinforcing consensuality don’t count.
So it appears #BelieveWomen is applied selectively and the mental constitution of women is infallible one moment and fragile the next.
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Yeah, it's a weird case. All of the guys were trying to get as far as they can with her and initiate making out and groping, but generally respected when she said no, backed away, or swatted their hands away.
If the DA's summary of her statement is accurate, then for the most part it seems like she verbally consented to a lot of it, and somatically consented to basically everything else. If anything, the part that comes off as most scummy is the final threesome. Males 3, 5 and 6 seem to have already been trying to wind things down, and then Males 1 and 4 usher her to a different room, convince her to do more ketamine and have the final threesome of the night before she taps out. It definitely reads like Male 1 caring more about his ego than her well-being, even if he was also high on ketamine and probably drunk as well.
Some time, as an experiment, try to dirty talk with a partner about great sexual experiences you had. It's like Rashomon, she's going to remember it completely differently than you do. Not necessarily in terms of "consent" or whether something was good, but in terms of what happened, in what order, who initiated what. Eyewitness accounts are unreliable at the best of times, when trying to minutely reconstruct the play-by-play of a drunk orgy from eight different sources is practically useless.
Hence why filming everything in high definition from five different angles is a simple expedient to prevent issues arising due to poor recollection later, but the rules around when its appropriate to film, and especially keep or publish the records of the encounter are extra convoluted.
IIRC NY is a one-party consent state for audio recording. Such a recording showing up here might be the biggest surprise evidence since Kavanaugh writing down all his social interactions starting in his teens.
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Oh man we're on our way to one of my favorite college urban myths: the friend of a friend cocksman (often a lawyer or law student) who required a written or filmed consent contract prior to hookups.
One of the basic precautions I've taken is having a very obvious camera that overlooks my living room (which, upon request, I will unplug) that can at least show that I didn't drag her through the door and carry her off to the bedroom kicking and screaming and that she had adequate opportunity to leave.
Hidden cameras can save you in a pinch but carry their own reputational risk if she finds them. "Oh the creepy perv who films women without their knowledge." Mine has a little light on it and an prominent cable running down to the power supply and isn't shaped like anything but an obvious little camera.
Its also useful for watching my dog when I'm away.
I've split the difference. If she noticed the camera and tells me to unplug it, I will do so happily because now she's well aware that I've taken that precaution, at least, and she can of course wonder if I've taken other precautions. There are no such cameras in the bedroom, bathroom, or elsewhere.
I feel like that might more be the old "move" of putting an slr with a tripod in your dorm, allowing the easy transition when you bring her back to a "photoshoot" which no drunk girl can resist。
Seems outdated given the quality of cell phone cameras these days.
I dunno, I'm just extremely well prepared to avoid and/or combat any false rape accusations. Law Degree, experience with criminal defense, and a psych degree, so I've got a comprehensive legal, philosophical, and psychological understanding of 'consent.' I have experience handling domestic violence matters and I've seen the 'failure' modes that result when it comes down to only he-said, she-said and circumstantial evidence.
Likewise, I teach self defense, including to women. If I am a closeted rapist, I'm working somewhat against my own interest by teaching women how to fend off attackers.
And being very clear and specific in my text communications to make sure anyone reading it later (like a Judge or Jury) isn't going to interpret it the worst possible way. i.e., never put something like "Free pussy in room 205" in text, because that could end up in a court record later.
And I have on a couple occasions over the years turned down liaisons with seemingly willing women because they either struck me as the type who could flip and make such accusations on a whim, or I was not sufficiently in control of the circumstances that an accusation would be tougher to rebut. So much of it just comes down to "don't take a woman somewhere private unless you've vetted her." I'd much rather risk a public indecency charge because I got too handsy with her around witnesses than a sexual assault charge because I got handsy in private, all else equal. Both can get you put on the sex offender list, but the former is, funny enough, harder to prove since pleading the fifth can actually help you there.
That's the judgment call most guys aren't prepared to make because they don't know what to look for until AFTER it happens.
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