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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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Given the facts of the matter up to the morning after, which I think you would agree ought to be the cut-off point, I do not think you or others can define a clear standard of behavior that would a) keep one on the correct side of the dirtbag line, and b) be even roughly compatible with the sex-positive liberalism that has ruled us all since the 60s.

The working definition of "slut" is one question. Whether this particular woman is a slut is a second question. A third question is whether we collectively are capable of object-permanence. We have been here before. Jackie's story, Mattress Girl, the Dear Colleague Letter, Believe All Women, TeamHarpies, Duke Lacrosse, the decade-plus abuse of Title IX, affirmative consent baked into state law... This isn't a conversation we could potentially have in advance, it's a conversation we as a society already had, in exhaustive detail. What the fuck are we doing here?

...I would rather this not be a tribal thing, but how is it not a tribal thing? "Woke 1 was so crazy, lol," so what is this?

Can you argue that even now, there's anything resembling a legible public consensus that group sex or gangbangs or whatever label we're applying here makes one "a dirtbag", such that these guys should have known going in how their behavior would be perceived? I'm not opposed to shaming everyone involved, hell, I'm all for it! But notably, that isn't happening, and I don't believe even now that any sort of actual standard is being set here. People are calling these guys rapists, and I see no reason to believe that they could have anticipated that label being applied to them given the choices they made. No one of any prominence is actually out there saying publicly that if you participate in a gangbang, society will collectively coordinate the ruin of your career and prospects. I think that would be a pretty good rule, but it needs to actually be a rule that people have a chance to internalize, not an ad-hoc result arrived at by lying about the particulars of a given incident!

As-is, the woman in this case appears to me to have the worst behavior, by far. She appears to have been a willing participant in the activities from beginning to end, and then tried to convert it into rape charges when she was shamed to a limited degree for her behavior. That is wildly unjust. I would prefer not to join either of the teams you mentioned, but I do not think there is a reasonable way to engage with the facts and the general social consensus without either endorsing injustice or coming down hard on this woman's behavior. If the answer is "Men need to be at permanent, severe, unilateral legal risk in all sexual encounters, and also we need to lie about this fact and its consequences forever", well, I don't think that's going to be a winning pitch going forward, but it would at least be honest, and therefore preferable to what I'm currently seeing.

At some point, some women in some situations are going to need to take an L, and the rest of us need to be okay with that.

I'm sorry to, uh, throw a wrench into a fine rant, but I'm not a sex-positive liberal so you seem to be addressing it to me on the assumption that I believe things I don't.

I mean, I guess I am a "sex-positive liberal" in a literal sense, or in the sense that a lot of behavior I consider shameful and disgusting shouldn't necessarily be illegal. But if you see me defending Jane Doe or Mattress Girl or Jackie, et al, then you have been operating on a very poor understanding of my liberalism.