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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.
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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