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I've started to notice a recurring pattern:
The first example that comes to mind is Harvey Weinstein. The second example, smaller-scale but closer to home, is the MeToo moment that Effective Altruism went through in late 2022, weeks after the FTX scandal broke. (It's not that Sam Bankman-Fried and the other FTX magnates were themselves accused of sexual impropriety, but rather other figures prominent in EA, who had previously served as indirect conduits to that juicy billion-dollar slush fund, but then that was no longer on the table.)
Skeptical eyebrows will immediately crook. "If Jane Doe was really raped at the frat house, why would she want to go back there for their Halloween party, much less be offended at not being invited?" - to which we can offer one of two explanations, one uncharitable towards her, one charitable:
Explanation A (uncharitable): There was no rape; Jane Doe is maliciously accusing them of rape as vastly disproportionate payback for being disinvited from Halloween. She should be laughed out of the room; nobody is entitled to a party invitation, after all, much less entitled to weaponize the justice system in the name of securing one.
Explanation B (charitable): There was in fact rape, but Jane Doe felt trapped because she was dealing with powerful men, men who could make or break her fortunes on a whim. Staying in their good graces was a matter of existential importance for her - it's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and you need high-status patronage just to survive. So after the rape, she put on a happy face and pretended to be excited about the Halloween party. But then when she was disinvited, she realized it had all been for nothing. If she was going to be socially ruined anyway, there was no reason to keep quiet any more. Finally the truth could come out, and justice could be done.
(Replace "Halloween" with "acting gigs" "FTX Futures grants" etc. as appropriate.)
But now the theory-of-mind challenge I'll pose is this: Can you put yourself in a headspace where A and B are literally the same scenario? Not just that the distinction rests on facts which are epistemically inaccessible, but where it is not even a meaningful question to ask which scenario we're in. (Superposition, not hidden variables.)
This is difficult for me, because my default background assumption is that everyone is acting freely, not under duress, and are therefore responsible for behaving morally and speaking truthfully. If a situation of coercion exists, such that someone is compelled into immorality/dishonesty, then this is an alarming abnormality that should be remedied, but once it is, we can all go back to being virtuous again.
I have come to realize that many people (especially women) live in a very different world.
Explanation A is uncharitable to Jane Doe but charitable to the accused. Explanation B is charitable to Doe but uncharitable to the accused. Charity provides no answers here, only a political preference for one sex or the other does.
No. Rashomon is misleading; there is an objective truth and objective reality, even if inaccessible.
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Another possibility (which doesn't seem to apply in the Cornell situation) is that the accuser might wait until other accusations have been made for fear of not being believed.
In any event, I think I'm with @dailydogma on this one. This person's desire to return to the fraternity house bears not only on her credibility but also on the severity of the crime she is alleging.
That's horseshit in #currentYear, and every woman over the age of 10 knows that.
And yes, I do give intentionality to not going to the authorities right away- you can't gather evidence 50 years after the fact and I do not for a second buy "it would be traumatizing to have another person touch my [pp]" (it's just hiding behind Privilege and reserving the ability to do this for later). You either want it prosecuted (and signs of assault will be present only at that time as well), or you don't.
The "bunch of angry women claim a crime was committed 50 years ex post facto" is exhibit A for why a reasonable statute of limitations, especially for matters involving a negotiation between two or more parties (sex being the oldest example of this) is a requirement for a well-regulated society.
(And yes, it's kind of obvious that the gender, for who stability is by nature for granted, seeks to undermine that for everyone else whenever they enjoy the privilege to do so. When men have that privilege, they tend to front-load excessive punishments for similar reasons, which makes sense considering that stability is what men are in charge of providing.)
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Is it established that she wanted to go to the party (and not e.g., the sorority requested the disinvitation preemptively even though she probably wouldn’t have gone anyway)? Not saying you’re wrong, I just haven’t followed this whole thing closely and don’t know what is established fact, what is reasonable inference, and what is speculation.
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My gestalt in any story where there’s supposedly a non consensual event is to look carefully at the behavior of the accusers in the immediate aftermath of the event. If they’re not acting like something negative happened, then there’s a problem. The story likely is at best exaggerated and at worst fictional.
You’d think so but the standard feminist line is women are so brainwashed by Patriarchy it could be months, years or even decades before a woman could understand that she was raped.
It’s all unfalsifiable “heads I win, tails you lose.” Beliefs all the way down as far as I can tell.
I’ve always held it as a given that it’s someone’s civic duty to report a serious violent crime and by not reporting you’re skirting your duty, and are enabling criminals to continue to victimize others.
Apparently that’s a quaint attitude, and it’s offensive to even consider that in the context of rape, something generally considered one of the vile crimes there are.
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Neither A nor B actually flow from whether a 'rape' happened, I'd say. Both flow from the social humiliation, but A attributes that social humiliation to, I guess, the general social environment, whilst explanation B attributes it to the influence of these frat guys being powerful enough to threaten consequences irrespective of the general social environment.
Which is to say, Explanation B is exceptionally uncharitable to the men. Because it seems apparent that they disinvited her due to the possibility of social humiliation of various parties... not to induce social humiliation.
SO I can find both 'true' simultaneously: nobody was 'raped' but everyone realized that social consequences were impending and tried to situate themselves to minimize the damage... but they had leverage in the form of the Halloween party and she had leverage in the form of a rape accusation.
The whole thing about #metoo was the implication that the power imbalance itself is enough to convert a facially consensual encounter into rape, but when the imbalance is "immature frat dudes with local social clout" and not "literal Hollywood magnate with the ability to nuke ones' career path" I suspect the average onlooker isn't as sympathetic.
This is certainly true from an objective standpoint, but I think women are a lot more attuned to "local status" than global status, and men act accordingly. E.g. when we look at the typical "male cult leader who's banging all his female followers", it's easy for us on the outside to say "lmao, this guy isn't even attractive or high-status, he's just some random schlub, you can just walk away and nothing bad would happen to you." But what the cult leader has done is construct a tiny snowglobe world of which he is king, and this world is what the cult followers live and breathe every day. The idea that there is some broader context in which the cult and its leader are considered low-status is at best just an abstract concept that doesn't register emotionally, much like the abstract knowledge that there are starving children in some random African village.
Oh absolutely, the human brain with its dunbar's number limits is probably not thinking "oh but what if this becomes a national controversy?"
I'm just saying, the relative power imbalance here is pretty slim. If it was some homeless teen runaway that they had pulled in and dosed with drugs, the disparity would be broader and possible noteworthy.
But the combination of the similarity of ages, basically similar social standing, basically similar economic strata... any power differential was mostly in their minds if any.
So despite how the emotional experience might have been intense, an actress turning down Harvey Weinstein and having her career instantly and irrevocably nuked is certainly in a less tenable position than a sorority sister trying to, I dunno, either climb the status ladder or lock down a Frat guy as a partner and being forced to change schools.
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Power and status are highly contextual, and I've found general attempts to rate "privilege" don't map well to the full gamut of situations.
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Explanation B still implies the penalty for rape of this kind should be misdemeanor level. Objectively it shows that the tort of it is equal to the tort of being dis-invited to a Halloween party, because it is worth staying in friendly terms with Your Rapist so you can have the privilege of a college social life. As in yes they made her feel bad and she might have overlooked it, so she is not lying about feeling bad, but we can measure that she specifically felt a level of bad that being invited to a party would make up for. Making someone feel that level of bad should not be a Severe Felony Offense.
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