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OK, I had a whole thing typed out about how even I, an extremely square and boring coed, have in the past been guilty of visiting a guy I had a crush on, at his all-male residence, or being tipsy around men, or even trustingly accepting some kind of intoxicant from a male friend that they knew the effect of far better than me; and asking, which I'd genuinely like to know, whether your claim is that this constituted my consent "in sound mind" for said friend to horse-tranquilizer me, call his buddies to gang-rape me, then brag and make fun of me after.
But let's try a different tack. Suppose you get an email that contains a link saying "Please click here for important information about safeguarding your tax rebate." You click the link and it instead takes you to a site that steals your bank information and drains your account.
Put the case that the email is:
Obviously you decided to click. And now you regret having clicked. But it's not a question of changing your mind, it's a question of deception by a malicious party. Also, in all of these cases you could have exercised due diligence to protect yourself from what was obviously a negative-utility outcome, but you let social trust make you complacent. In which of these would you say you are culpable to any degree, or have "played a stupid game" so you deserve to "win stupid prizes"?
I'm processing this case as Doe thinking she was in #2 and was willing to forgive/comfort the offenders for the harm of that night; then found she was actually in #3 and got mad. It sounds like you might think it was #1 and that she was an absolute idiot to click the link, but then isn't the conclusion "Girls, treat all men like Nigerian scammers, even the ones you think are your friends"?
Rephrase as "offer me a party drug and ask if I want to have group sex with some guys whom I've already had group sex with".
Let me ask a slightly different question. Let's say a friend invites me to Gay Halloween. Imagine I go and get shitfaced. At someone point someone asks me if I want to try a fun party drug. Sometime after that, some real gay shit happens.
I honestly don't think anyone in the world would have any sympathy for me. I think most of the women who are outraged about Cornell would laugh and call me a suppressed faggot.
Many of the scams these days involve a high degree of investment and emotional manipulation. I have a friend whose mother keeps trying to send money to her boyfriend, Keanu Reeves, who she regularly meets and falls in love with online. I know another guy who met and fell in love (online) with the daughter of a Congolese mining magnate, and he only needed to send her $10k to cover the customs fees so she could ship back a trunk of gold for them to build their lives together.
As a person in the real world, you do in fact have an obligation to be wary about who you trust. It sucks. It's life. My own daughter is going to college soon, and I've tried to arm her with a mix of fun and horror stories. "Drinking with friends is fun. I've also seen people make terrible, humiliating, and/or life-ruining decisions while drunk at college. Be smart, be wise, know your limits, and don't trust anyone telling you that all that matters is that something feels good."
Trying the thought experiment now, and nope, I feel pretty much equivalent horror and outrage for hypothetical-you in this scenario. I truly can't imagine a woman IRL (not random outrage accounts on social media) making light of any 19-year-old of either gender getting gang-raped by text invite while incapacitated by veterinary tranquilizers, much less getting ridiculed/blamed/judged afterward. Have you tried asking any real women about this?
Indeed, it's a wild world out there. What's different in this case is that the liars were part of the victim's insular, high-status professional community and that her perception of a high-trust social environment made her more vulnerable (would she have taken equivalent risks visiting a crush if she were touring Nairobi or Bogota? Seems unlikely).
Hence the young men deserve extra censure for burning collective social trust and moving us closer to "responsible young women should treat all young men, however reputable, seemingly kind and friendly, like would-be gang rapists," just as it's true that responsible internet users should treat all cold-emailing foreign nationals like would-be scammers.
Hard agree, but what I think what some of the pornier-brained male commentary on this issue is missing is that the ask almost certainly didn't go "Hey relax, this will feel so good" - because, despite what the internet would have you believe, zero late-teenage women (absent major trauma history) are sexually aroused by the idea of taking 2 dicks at the same time. Instead, that pitch is likelier to lean on social approval and romantic attention: "Baby, you're so cool and adventurous! Wow, I'm lucky I got to know you, the other guys would be so jealous. I really love spending time with you. You know what I would find so hot, is there any chance we could try...?"
So the question is, what would be responsible advice to a young woman about when to trust her own judgment when a guy she really likes asks her for something she wouldn't normally want to do, whether that be taking an extra drink/hit or trying a new and somewhat disagreeable sex act (MMF threesome, anal, choking, blowjob, handjob...?) or relationship structure ("come on, if you really loved me you would quit your job and stay home.") I'm comfortable suggesting a dogmatic "no, fuck off" until the wedding night or in perpetuity for kinkier/more harmful stuff, but I suspect plenty of gents here would prefer a norm where women are encouraged to be more accommodating.
Based on Jane Doe's alleged pre-party text messages, there appears to be at least one into it.
Are there pre-party text messages explicitly about taking two dicks at the same time?
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I can't help but think this is you already being locked into a "forcible rape" mindset. See the "veterinary tranquilizers" wording. Ketamine is a party drug. The first time I ever heard it about it was from an emo girl I was flirting with in high school. To her, a K-hole was a fun Saturday night. My gay friends do it routinely at parties and raves. They talk about it like it's coke in the 80's.
Nothing I've seen of Jane Doe's descriptions sounds like a K-hole. It sounds like the fun pary drug levels.
So, reframe. It's not "Iconocham was raped, omg", it's "Iconochasm went to a gay bar, got trashed, did party drugs, and now he's trying to tell his wife he didn't consent to sucking off a glory-hole worth of men".
Lol. What a closet case, amirite?
Women do that often enough to serve as cautionary tales. Everyone in the world is just like her high trust community, right?
Are we counting Heated Rivalry in the viewing history as trauma? Some of the messages make it sound like that night wasn't her first threesome, and she was planning future ones. More generally, I think we have fundamentally different interpretations regarding what happened that night.
Seriously? An MMF threesome is very different from a handjob. And on the rare occasions when we talk about it, most men claim that women asked them to try choking.
That's the critical question, isn't it? Are young women adults able to make and own their decisions, or do they still need adult supervision? My personal advice is to secure a degree of commitment first. If you remember CanIHaveASong, she had a post about waiting until marriage, and then finding herself functionally incapable of finding fault with her husband for almost a year. Male and female bodies and sex acts have biochemical reactions on each other. Don't fuck a guy if sober you wouldn't be willing to get stuck on him for a year.
Beyond that, think carefully about what you want and what you can be proud of yourself for.
This is a thing everyone has to be responsible about, and why I stress knowing your limits. I was straight-edge until college, and then the first time I drank I probably should have gone to the hospital. I remind my (rather small) daughter routinely that she absolutely cannot hang with the boys, and I take a more European approach of letting her drink moderate amounts in safe environments, both to blunt the novelty and to make sure she knows what it feels like.
I'm late to this response, but it seems weird that the question of adult agency and responsibility is raised with respect to the young woman, but not the young men in this case. Cornell's student code of conduct is extremely explicit that:
So as regarded the university, anyone piling onto a limp drug-addled girl had every reason to expect investigation and expulsion. Less explicitly, but still pretty clearly, these rules are also the conventional baseline in the social class from which all of these wealthy students were drawn, with conspicuous precedent for violations being punished with public censure up to and including temporary exclusion from middle-class employment. Their only hope was that the girl would help them keep the secret.
So if we're talking about people who play obviously stupid games, as @rayon memorably said upthread, but then hypo-agentically expect to dodge the predictable consequences of their actions... it seems to me this pattern-matches much better to the boys in this instance?
I'm actually impressed that it sounds like the girl was going to be a good sport, assume the (considerably)damages and not tell on them, until they broke good-faith by bragging about it on forums. Why should she be the bigger man, if they weren't going to be?
So, in a culture where men are expected to "make a move", every single man at Cornell who has ever done so after having a beer is a rapist?
Assumes facts not in evidence. Per her original statement to the police and the context of messages sent about the event afterwards, the only person who performed a sex act on a "limp, drug-addled" person was her, when she performed fellatio on a man who was unconcious. AIUI, he actually filed a claim against her and was roundly ignored by the university.
She also purportedly told the men she was sober. One of the men says that in one of the text messages, something like "You told me you hadn't been drinking", and she does not appear to dispute the statement. Relatedly, the bar she is sueing for allowing her to drink irresponsibly claims she was not served alcohol at all that night.
There are also texts from her talking about how some of the men were "out of it", and her statement of providing care at the end of the night when they were passing out and dry-heaving.
I have not seen anything suggesting that, but I did stop reading the articles a while ago. AIUI, the "damages" were social in nature and coming from her own sorority and the breaking incident was when the fraternity president banned her from the Halloween party at the instigation of her sorority leader. That was when she flipped from "Nothing that happened was illegal, everyone else is jealous, our body our choice, love you kings" to "90% of what happened that night was non-consensual".
Each man at Cornell who's "made a move" on a woman who might appear visibly intoxicated to an ordinary person was in clear violation of the student code of conduct, yes. Perhaps some folks here think it should have been written differently, but that's irrelevant, because as matters stand, those are the stated rules. And even if the lowest-level violations weren't consistently enforced, what we're discussing here is l"100mph in a school zone" level versus "68mph on the highway."
Deliberately and repeatedly violating clear posted rules, then whining about the predictable institutional consequences because your penis/ evolution made you do it and the authorities should understand that boys will be boys, looks pretty hypo-agentic to me.
(As an aside w/r/t the rule itself, I know the objection to consent policies is "but but what about the beery makeout sessions?!", but I would suggest that if there was ever a world where beery making out was a harmless on-ramp to wholesome family-oriented romance, that is clearly not the world we're in now. If the boys are moving from "you're a cool girl wanna Netflix at my place" to "try this ketamine, it's fun I promise, here have some more" and "hey bros come to the alumni room for free pussy, you can just whip your dick out and stick it in her fr just like in the videos" in the space of a single month, then we're dealing with a whole other breed and it's a pretty obvious case of This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things.)
The details were very different in the sources I saw, but again, irrelevant: if the university failed to investigate the claim, then I'm not aware of anyone arguing that they were correct in that failure. AFAICT the whole point of the critique against the university is that the process was shitty and lax throughout. The woman left Cornell, so it's not clear what punishment could have been imposed; and I'd regard verbally exhorting someone to do something as clearly at least co-initiating the ensuing act. But yeah, I fully support a bright-line rule "ladies, no matter how many sweaty men are screaming at you to be cool and blow this guy, you should know that this is against the rules and that all of you could be punished."
Doesn't change the culpability or appropriate sanctions for what the men did, however.
Serious note, for a father: exploitative sexual experiences like this can seriously screw up someone of either gender for a very long time, leading to anxiety/ depression, substance abuse, sexual acting out and compulsion, suicidality and self-harm, etc. My unverified instinct is that Jane Doe's behavior pattern-matches to someone with some level of PTSD from some earlier incident, given the problem drinking before that evening and the fawning texts afterwards; but getting retraumatized like that would set you back quite a few years in recovery. Happy to suggest sources if you'd like to investigate farther.
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A sadly common failure mode that I've seen adult women fall prey to. No, madam, your 110-pound self cannot go 1-for-1 with a 190-pound man (especially not one who has a borderline drinking problem), and when you complain tomorrow that you think one of your drinks was spiked, I will roll my eyes.
Yep. I explained the thing where 98% of women who go to the hospital because they were slipped a roofie have no unknown drug elements in their tests. They just drank too much. At her body weight, 6 shots is enough to put my daughter into blackout territory. She absolutely cannot hang with her 200lb guy friends who drink much more often than she does.
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