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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.
...Hold up.
But what else is needed if both parties consent? Keeping it quiet? Right, after all dumb young men never brag about sexual conquests. Commitment? How do you imagine commitment in a gangbang?
You even acknowledge this in a way:
I would shift the focus here from the (sfw)corrupting power of cock to the incentives behind behavior, which you acknowledge for the woman but fail to apply to the men. The only person she can get away with after a gangbang is "crazy slut", but - extending this logic - what kind of person can you get away with being as a male participant? A healthy "aftermath" of sex is normally some measure of commitment to the woman, but can you imagine doing the "responsible" thing here, committing, to however small extent, to a woman you and your buddies have liberally taken turns on? Defending the honor of the nice, sweet girl who made a mistake, at the direct cost to your own status? Can you in your heart of hearts see such a man in this case as anything else but a mark, who's chosen to pay an upkeep everyone else has handily refused? Can the woman? Is the shadow of the gangbang not going to influence every joke and conversation (both with the woman and with the buddies) for years after? Remember we're talking about meatheaded fratboys here, sophisticated high-decouplers they ain't, stupid monkey neuron-activation shit absolutely can and does rule the status dynamics among those.
It would seem to me that the only winning move for a man here (insofar as the obviously superior "not to play" is not anymore an option) to preserve his status is to put on his best yes_chad.jpg face, mentally write the woman off, and proceed with business as usual. The cad-ness of the fuckboys here is largely in the gall of the initial offer (to which the woman has apparently consented); their behavior afterwards (as is hers) is entirely the result of incentives. A gangbang pretty obviously precludes any possibility of "healthy" commitment; if the woman was misled by
yaoithe culture to expect otherwise, I extend my sincere condolences, but shrug play stupid games, win stupid prizes.Uh... turn? I thought that "someone who sleeps around" is basically the definition of "slut". Sleeping around requires having sex, and sex is a 2 (uh, 2+) players game. Bit of a chicken-egg problem, but once again I don't think the almighty power of cock is the sole answer here.
I mean... why not? Does it have to be more complicated than that? My experience with horny university-age women is that they are, well, horny, and frequently think/talk about sex and sex-adjacent things even if
we assume female hypoagencythey're sane enough to not brazenly act on it (same as university-age men, incidentally!). One girl I knew pretty well confided to me that on her graduation party, she stumbled on the timeless Prom Classic (i.e two coeds having sex in a toilet stall) and her immediate gut reaction was along the lines of "I wish that was me...?" even as she hastily shut the door, bolted in inexplicable embarrassment, and refrained from having impulsive sexual relations that night. This is the Motte aka galaxy-brain central, so I genuinely don't mean to disparage you for positing that ackchyually the real issue is traditions and society-wide troubles three OoMs removed from the particular happening and something something incentives (hell, I literally just did the latter), but at the same time I really don't think we have to dig very deep here.Right, and that is "the corrupting power of cock": men's faith that any woman (not dudes, though) has irretrievably lost status, even social existence, once a bro has stuck his dick inside her.
Scoot into the parallel universe of gay interactions, and penetration somehow doesn't seem to work that way. Eight dudes hooking up in various configurations, younger one plied with drugs by the others, and nobody would be surprised to hear that two of them ended up dating afterwards. I believe that's the way Sam Altman met his husband!
So women read yaoi to fantasize about being the kind of a person whom a man could have sex with, and not hate afterwards.
What must it be like to interact with a female peer, knowing that you and your friends desperately want to do something to her that you fully intend will diminish her as a person in your eyes? "This will destroy and disinvite you, please please pretty please can we do it?"
That scammer's mindset, all fake friendly warmth to the mark beforehand and cold contempt after?
I'll caveat that there's probably more selection effect than just orientation in this hypothetical. Gay orgy guys are not the only preference point, and there's some strong if not perfect barriers between the two. There's also some people where the orgy would be a fun weekend, and mixing alcohol and pot wouldn't be noteworthy, or 'vhs head cleaner', but ketamine would be a nope right out situation.
((And, conversely, there's a pretty nontrivial excluded middle the other direction: there's folk who are tied into the gay drug orgy hookup situation that wouldn't turn down a woman for a long-term relationship because she was, too. I'm not going to say every bi guy thinks the spuydjeks solution is desirable, but if it's a literal fantasy for me even as a monogamous bi guy, and no small number of less monogamous bi guys are more openly willing to chase it. That might be a 1% of male population thing, but we're not exactly talking a supermajority of yaoi fangirls out there, either.))
This is fascinating stuff, I always love getting little windows into other groups' relationship politics.
Curious if the non-orgy gay guys have that sentiment of postcoital sexual disgust and contempt for a partner who's been penetrated, or what @rayon calls "the corrupting power of cock"?
Like, maybe some guys wouldn't marry another dude who was actively sleeping around, sure. But in the gay community do you see men suggesting that friends are impure or vile or undateable because of contact with a single-digit number of other men's cocks? In a parallel situation to this frat party, does the drugged ketamine novice get ostracized, deemed forever gross and undateable, disinvited from parties for not having put up more resistance to the other guys?
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You'll have to forgive me for not knowing the background: what exactly is this?
Sorry. It's a MMF romantic relationship.
To be fair to the yaoi fangirl hypothesis, the artist is a woman. To be slightly more descriptive, the comment section has an absolute ton of guys wishing for one of the two slots.
Ah, ok, I think I see it now. I thought that was MMM at first and simply missed the context clues from the post.
I do notice that the pairing appears to be highly masc/androgynous masc/actual girl, though, which is interesting. Seems like it's really convenient to have both a physical rock of the relationship, and then one who's more 'aligned' with the girl's other interests, yet also have them not be the same person.
It makes me suspect that there are a couple of possible attraction modes for the modal woman: one for physical dominance where it would be unattractive for them to worry about the alignment/feels stuff, and one for alignment/feels where it would be unattractive for them to worry about the physical stuff, where one man also serves as a stabilizing force for the other, or rather, isn't going to be turned off by the attribute that's unattractive to the woman. I get the distinct impression that trying to do both ends poorly.
And I see no indication why that wouldn't hold sexually as well, or even necessarily be unworkable in practice- though it does mode-lock the more andro male into a role that might not necessarily have been the most productive thing for them to do.
(And really, if there's only one objection I have to being in/trying to start a gay relationship with someone, it's this. Sure, I could lock myself into the physically dominant role, which is what he clearly requires of me to bother flirting back, but that's not where I get most of the joy out of a relationship... and so inevitably I'd end up doing the exact same threesome thing to do the emotion/build-up things I couldn't do with that partner, which from other experience is inevitably going to feel like cheating, because in truth it kind of is.)
My read on yaoi fangirls is that they're more aware of this dynamic than the general populace. Which, if it's written by more-aware-than-average women, seems correct, but falls short on productive ways to deal with that (other than explicitly form a polycule, which seems like a hyper-autistic solution to both recognize and resolve the cognitive dissonance about 'cheating' I described earlier... and evidence bears that out).
(As an aside, I notice that there are some women who sometimes aren't always aware of this, and get kind of confused when this 'threesome' dynamic asserts itself under certain conditions, because [if you only consider the existence of the physical dom position] the andro man is by that definition malfunctioning because there is no 'andro' role, so what is [in full context] male co-operation can only [from the first perspective] be observed as 2 doms fighting over the single position. Maybe men instinctively understand this dynamic better, but good luck getting them to tell you it exists.)
I don't know if this effect is symmetric or mirrored across to yuri fanboys or by extension MFF couplings. More research is clearly required.
This either/or thinking doesn't check out to me. Scan women's romance literature and you'll find countless instances of the ideal being a strong and physically protective male partner who's also tender and emotionally attentive, something like having a guard dog who's tough to other people but a sweetie to you.
I suspect some women don't have a lot of experience meeting this type IRL, so it's likely that the splitting into tender partner + strong partner is a workaround for someone who's been traumatically convinced that strong + tender (or, as Sabrina Carpenter says, "jacked and kind") combo doesn't exist in a single man. You see something similar in the many romance heroes who are constructed as dashing and brash while also having some kind of physical handicap or emotional wound, which is perceived as making them safer to be around.
Then, too, there are a lot of people who falsely believe they display unappreciated "tenderness" when actually they're just passive or defensively/anxiously polite, neither of which is especially attractive.
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