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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?
To paraphrase Scott since I don't remember the source, don't hate the player, hate the lazy millions-of-years-old evolutionary meme generator that optimizes for stupid things. Sexual exclusivity was ~always the deal in heterosexual relationships, and seems likely to remain the deal; I too have my gripes with certain "faiths" and behaviors of women w/r/t dating and sex, but that's the table stakes.
Can't speak for the meatheads in question, but I imagine that nobody thought this through and (as with the woman) the idea sounded pretty exciting to the men beforehand, the immediate aftermath was pretty cordial from circumstantial evidence, and it wasn't until the inevitable rumor mill and social consequences kicked in that there was any destruction taking place. (Another strike against the social media panopticon.)
Make no mistake, I defend the men here only insofar as they are slaves to sexual/social incentives they can't unilaterally change. I am however also against promoting female hypoagency, and think that normalizing making certain choices like not getting into what sounds highly similar to a gangbang with drugs and men you barely know involved, as suggested downthread, would be a good start.
Implausible that you'd find a sexual instinct so strong as to be irresistible in straight men, but not appearing at all in gay male sexuality. But it's irrelevant because the central issue here is not just male preference for women's sexual exclusivity; it's male gang-bang/promiscuous seduction instinct in combination with male preference for female sexual exclusivity. That is, it's not just sexual disgust, it's sexual disgust in the context of prior sexual aggression. Not just "sex defiles you," but "sex defiles you, AND we get to use everything in our power, including lies, drugs, false promises, intimidation, gossip to manipulate you into having sex so you can be defiled."
(For the second half, given that the male gangbang instinct is empirically observed to apply to old women, ugly women, corpses of dead women, children and babies, women who are visibly being raped to death by this act, I don't buy the universal "hey guys this thing is incapacitated, everybody come over and fuck it!" impulse as part of any kind of procreation program; seems much likelier to be an an accidental transfer from group hunting or prey-drive behaviors.)
Still more broadly, though, evolution has optimized us for many incentive-driven instinctive behaviors that Mottizens nonetheless expect others to control via reason - including theft and robbery, gang violence, gambling, child abuse, binging McDonalds and avoiding the gym. There are people who make a living by blackmailing old folks with AI-spoofed ransom pleas from their grandchildren, they technically have "consent" to take that money and it makes good evolutionary sense to do so: would you sigh and cite "don't hate the player, hate evolution" if you found a son of yours running that con? If the idea is that young men are just trousered apes (brain so small balls so big), that would have some serious downstream implications for Cornell grads' job prospects.
I don't think "not appearing at all" is valid here (I imagine gay men would also like their partners to be faithful to them, for one, though "gay relationships are just ✿better✿ without all this dumb het monkey-neuron baggage" is a common headcanon among fujos in my experience), but even assuming arguendo - really? Even without leaving the topic of gay porn, it's plainly observable that gay porn for straights, gay porn for gays, and gay porn for women are three radically different categories. Straights and gays are indeed attracted to different things. Do you think it's a coincidence that traps/femboys tend to look like young women (hint: it's in the name)?
In any case, you've missed my main point:
We are actually in agreement that the former produces ungood results and is overall uncouth and bad; the difference is that you also condemn the latter, whereas I point out the impossibility of being rid of it, as "the corrupting power of cock", ie sexual exclusivity, is more or less the core of male heterosexuality. You expect your gf to not fuck around, or vice versa, only elevate a woman who doesn't fuck around to the position of "gf". Visible disregard for fidelity is disqualifying.
Hence, the men's initial offer and the whole "free pussy" part were straightforwardly unsavory (and are what's actually contemptible about them, here), but the gradual dissociation from the woman after the fact, especially once the rumors started getting out, is at the very least unsurprising considering the nature of a gangbang. Again, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. This ain't Manacled, she wasn't getting adopted by a gaggle of
vampire billionaireshandsome strong men as some kind of honorary gf, and the first guy to step up and defend m'lady would've instantly made himself the scapegoat hate-sink and designated loser (and I heard women happen to not like socially-shunned losers much, so everyone loses anyway). Absent airtight privacy, which I don't think you ever have at a frat house, this could only ever end in catastrophe; as mentioned somewhere downthread, in the current_year there isn't a word for "woman regrets a sexual encounter". In the grim darkness of the literal present, there is only rape.To reiterate, much of this could have been avoided by the woman by simply uh, controlling via reason some of her baser impulses, like that to attend a drug-fueled gangbang. Even if the gentlemen in a sudden show of cojones managed to coordinate and close ranks around m'lady, with seven impulsive men and one easily-swayed woman vs. literally the entire zeitgeist hankering for a good ol' rape scandal, not to mention frat/sor heads covering their own asses, the odds are pretty grim.
I would never condemn a monogamous male's preference for a similarly faithful girlfriend, but we should be clear that by male sexual disgust we're not talking "not wanting to marry a poly person," we're talking about men with the sadistic conviction that because they themselves drugged a girl then gang-banged her as she slipped in and out of consciousness, they can then (by your account) spread rumors about her, ridicule any friend who'd want to date her or even speak up in her defense, "dissociate themselves from her," disinvite her from their parties. That's not visceral sexual preference, it's just pure irrational bullying/pack-hunting drive toward someone who now seems like a vulnerable target. It's extremely feasible to not act like a sociopathic bully to a girl you took advantage of, and I think as a society that we should support people in this endeavor.
This is why I brought up the phone scammer earlier, because there are plenty of similar cases where an evil person can take advantage of asymmetrical information to fuck over somebody gullible. We may regard the victim as foolish, but we don't usually argue that the scammers should go unpunished because the victim ought to have expected that literally everyone they meet would be trying to lie, cheat and steal from them.
In this case, I'd be curious as to what "base impulse" the woman voluntarily followed, other than being prior friends with the boys there, trusting them enough to attend their party and believing they wouldn't voluntarily harm her? There's certainly no indication she thought she was attending a "drug-fueled gangbang," and everything else plays out more like her being a gullible mark with poor self-defense skills than a voluntary participant. The fratbros were very experienced with ketamine; she had never taken it before. They were on their home turf with the strength of numbers; she was smaller and physically vulnerable, which would make most people nervous and placating. I'm sure they pitched the first dose as just a fun party drug (if they didn't straight-up spike her drink, since she says she doesn't remember taking the first time). The drug they forced on her was a dissociative anaesthetic commonly used to tranquilize large animals through treatment they'd normally resist, and it seems to have worked to incapacitate her exactly as intended, even they proceeded to pressure her to take a whole bunch more. By the time the bros stepped things up from hangout to invited gangbang, she was too far gone to speak clearly, much less handle the delicate social work of extricating herself safely from a roomful of big, strong, horny young men.
I would never set foot in a frat house, but I've accepted drinks from male friends at parties, and as far as I can see, anyone who ever accepts a drink from a guy at a party could end up slippery-sloping into this situation. Absent some general principle like "never trust any man however friendly he may seem, know that they are all sadistic liars and manipulators, choose the bear instead" (which folks hereabout tend to also frown on), what would you propose she should have done to avoid your moral opprobrium?
I commend the smooth slide into cataclysmic gender-wide implications, "delicate social work of extricating herself safely from a roomful of big, strong, horny young men" is especially evocative. Still, this is highly overwrought, I don't particularly care for this kind of argument.
No matter how you embellish the literal descriptors, the core issue remains that the initial offer was straightforwardly unsavory, and the woman, holding highly unrealistic expectations (inb4 "what, to not be treated like a piece of meat?", to which my answer begins with "play stupid games"), decides in sound mind to take it. Afterwards rumors get out, as rumors do in their kind of environment (do we even have evidence that the guys started them?), the woman discovers she doesn't like the label that her social circle assigns to women that voluntarily participate in gangbangs, and (only at that point, not before!) reaches straight for a superweapon and outsources her problem to the public court. Judging from cordial text exchanges, she evidently didn't regret the sex she had in the short term - only the reputation it has eventually wrought her. Such oopsies are usually avoided by thinking through the things you want to do, and considering risks wherever you take them beforehand (and you vividly describe how great the risk is, here); neither the men nor the woman have done this here, and now female hypoagency dictates that she is blameless.
My issue is mostly with the last part.
Would you say the fratboys are going unpunished, here? Haven't there been expulsions already? Nothing is ever enough in culture war I guess, but irregardless of that, I haven't even argued they should go unpunished - only that they don't have the entirety of the blame here, and even that seems too much to stomach. You're too comfortable putting words in my mouth.
As mentioned above, not getting into group sex with drugs and men you barely know involved would be a good start. Not hurling spurious rape accusations as soon as her reputation came under threat would also be nice, but given that "there is only rape" I suppose the, ahem, incentives made it inevitable.
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.
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