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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her against her consent or to coerce her consent, and would have stopped within a reasonable interval after consent was withdrawn.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.
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.
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.
That's not a counterargument because it has no logical substance or basis in reality. Like, emotional abuse is defined as when you feel bad ... you can't not realize that you don't feel bad. That just means you don't feel bad and were not emotionally abused. There is no evidence for any other model. So it's just a noise they make to signal that they want to hurt men.
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