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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.
This is, by far, the biggest problem with pop-feminism right now. We are living in a culture that has transformed rapidly. In a matter of two or three generations, our entire sexual and gender ethic has been revolutionized. There are still many vestiges of the old guard, including communities that maintain "old-school" sexual standards wholesale. The spectre of chivalry remains, and it's a difficult thing to part with. Women read stories about esteemed ladies and depraved sexcapades in equal measure. Women want both, and I don't blame them. It's hard to part with things.
The more sophisticated feminists have rectified this contradiction long ago - women and men ought to be socio-legally "equal", but they are not running identical scripts. The natural asymmetry of men and women in aggregate, both physiologically and throughout history, suggests that treating the parties with a hint of différance remains prudent. However, a message like that, with nuance, is quite challenging to transmit across the culture. When men hear feminist refrains, it's usually in the form of quick slogans, brief seminars, and the highly reductive: "men and women are equal, full stop." You could call this "naive feminism." In practice, this amounts to men treating women like they treat men. This can be functional in some contexts, but not in others, especially in the romantic/sexual realm, where the influences of past interpellation remain strong.
Case in point: imagine if the participants in this situation were all men. It might have still produced university attention, but it would have been nary a blip in the media landscape - just a drug-fueled gay orgy. Gay men are sexually forward, adventurous, and relatively unpretentious/unprecious about their bodies. However, there was a woman involved at Cornell. The frat brothers should have known better than to treat her like a man. Whether they like it or not, women's sexuality, for a myriad reasons, still has a precious quality to it that we have not culturally disposed of in its entirety. Rape or not, they took an extreme risk by indulging their depravity. I (flippantly) agree with the @georgioz below - the boys should be lashed in the street and then allowed to continue their lives as normal. That would be far more efficient than the circus we have right now, and probably satisfy most parties. ESH.
The unresolvable contradiction is that sociopolitical equality can't be built on biological inequality unless one explains away or minimizes those biological differences enough that the law doesn't have to actually distinguish between men and women as groups.
You can't have both men and women with equal social authority when society calls upon men to go forth and kill and/or die to protect the tribe, whilst the women are expected to bear the children to maintain the tribe. Literally unresolvable: send your women forth to fight, even alongside the men (which implies training them and equipping them for the task, a massive resource investment!), and you risk no children being born to maintain the tribe, the tribe dies, even if they do successfully fight off the invaders.
The law (formal or informal) must therefore say that only men (with perhaps narrow exceptions) are allowed to be warriors! And once the law recognizes at least that one distinction, all sorts of consequences inherently result as warriors will necessarily have a heightened prestige in that society (lest who would bother to join up?).
Were that the ONLY meaningful distinction (men fight and die, women live and birth life) we could probably keep things in balance but nature did a LOT more work on the distinct psychology and physiology of men and women than that.
Right...? I'm not sure if we're disagreeing here, lol. That's basically a huge chunk of The Second Sex.
I suppose we differ in that I don't think it's an unresolvable contradiction. There is a technological component to feminism. The division of labor in a primitive, undeveloped economy cannot as easily support women's equality due to the vast amount of resources required to meditate the "biological functions" you identify, breeding, fighting, feeding, and so on. Luckily, in our society, male bodies do not necessarily fight (drones and guns do) and male bodies do not necessarily work (computers and robot arms do). There's nuance to be had, but largely, maleness as a biological necessity for certain social functions has become fungible. Thus, women can make choices that are counter to their historical roles. If it wasn't already clear, I believe this is an overall positive development for human liberty and self-actualization. At this point, the only non-fungible biological difference between men and women that retains its original importance is that of the womb, and transhumanists are seeking to "equalize" that eventually, as well.
Yeah.
But the deeper I get into understanding technology, the more I think technology is inherently a result of male specialization that most women can't comprehend on the same level.
Remember that infamous water glass test. If (most) women don't have an intuition for how gravity and fluid dynamics work on a basic level... how could they invent, e.g., sailing tech?
Men produce new tech, maintain old tech, and, ultimately, make that tech comprehensible enough that women can use it in their everyday lives. The whole edifice requires male psychology to operate.
So you can say "men don't fight, drones do." But men build the drones, maintain the drones, mostly fly the drones, and innovate new drone tech and tactics.
And, who fights if the tech fails? If we have mech suits that bring combat capacity about equal, we're still reverting back to sticks and stones if the mech suits break down.
I think the triumph of technology in the 20th-21st century is making war and combat less central to the average person's life. The warrior is less critical now than before, so fewer people will specialize as warriors, and we can elevate other classes up.
It did not erase the distinctions that make men better warriors, and, critically, has not erased the core, basic problem that makes warriors necessary, as Ukraine has discovered.
Off-topic, but what the fuck? How did they get into college? I thought the catch was you had to grok that the tilted cylinder has less volume at the bottom and draw the new water level slightly higher than the old one, but fifteen percent of men didn't draw a horizontal line?!
Oh, that goes into my OTHER rant, the one about 1993:
That's the year it was made an explicit policy to get more women in college and they made it easier to get loans to get in.
Not just them, how did these men who don't understand how water works get admitted?
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Sure, technological developments will not de facto equalize sex distributions among all careers. As you say, men are likely to remain the predominant sex working in drone technology, for example, due to many psychosocial factors. However, the fact that particular women are now allowed to work in aerospace engineering and are recognized as being capable of it, even if you believe the median woman is too female-brained for the field, is a tremendous advance.
If we are living in a society where tech fails, we will obviously re-organize how society is run. Thankfully, we are not in that world, and our women do not need to live doomed, constrained lives.
As someone with high risk aversion, I think it behooves us not to build a society that depends heavily on female labor when we know full well that this isn't sustainable without the relatively fragile technological base we've built up.
The time of relative peace and prosperity we have known for the past 80 years is not a historical norm, and could revert without much notice (with the caveat of AGI making this impossible to predict).
The society that optimized towards giving women full parity with men will find it much, much harder to adapt to such a reversion than one that kept the basic gender role ideals in place.
If society reverts back '100 years' then we don't have to re-establish slavery or anything, but we better have a sufficiently large labor pool (and high birthrate) to keep from falling back much further.
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