Cornell and Feminism’s New Normal. By Janice Fiamengo
The mobilization of political hatred accelerates
"Many men rape; many men giggle encouragingly, or shrug indifferently, when their friends rape. Many men rape, and few seem to think that it's a very big deal. If anything, cases like the alleged incident at Chi Phi – and many others – show that rape can be a bonding activity for men, a way they celebrate their shared status as men."
—Moira Donegan, "The horror of the Cornell rape case is how ordinary it is"
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"I am always angry, but this week my anger is a white-hot thing. I am furious that we keep arriving here and partly because we keep having the wrong conversation. We keep talking about monsters and men instead of talking about the monster that lives in every man. When you are born into a world that gives you everything, that is built for you, that is designed to fall at your feet, that fundamentally and consistently reinforces and validates your greatness, make no mistake, it breeds a monster in you."
—Selma El-Wardany, "7 men, 57 men, all the men"
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"When women are shut out of justice, many break and crumble, never come back from it. Seal it up forever. Give up and retreat as far as they can go. —Take their pain out on other women and girls.
And . . . some seek revenge. They are intent on extrajudicial justice.
The more university administrations and the fraternities dither in the current outrage, the higher this potential grows. This reality. Every time they vilify someone who's been assaulted and call her a slut and liar, they court their own disaster."
—Susie Bright, "Extrajudicial Justice"
Lynch Mob Redux
Poisonous generalizations, the encouragement to rage, exultant predictions of anti-male violence: these have now spread into every corner of our culture.
When it was announced on October 1 that New York Governor Kathy Hochul had appointed Attorney General Letitia James to pursue a criminal investigation into the alleged 2024 Chi Phi "gang rape," the machinery of anti-male fanaticism went into operation almost immediately. Both Hochul and James had already declared fervent solidarity with the accuser.
Feminist-compliant sources decried the indifference, ineptitude, misogyny, sexual objectification, and rape culture that supposedly led to Cornell's (and then the District Attorney's) failure to "protect" Jane Doe and properly punish her rapists.
A frenzy of online and public demonstrations of support erupted for Jane Doe, in which many women and men repeated blatant lies about the case. Feminist organizations began calling for changes to the law to favor accusers, especially in cases involving alcohol. Some women took the opportunity to write about their own rapes, projecting their remembered trauma onto Doe. The keynote throughout was "incandescent rage" and (as above) sweeping anti-male allegations, including calls to ruin the lives of the accused, have them castrated, or see them killed in acts of "extrajudicial justice" (see, for example, this compilation).
The case might almost have been scripted to show that, far from coasting into oblivion on the thinning fumes of its victimology bombast, the feminist juggernaut—pumped up from recent successes in defending a three-time child-murderer—continues to corrupt legal processes. At the very least, the Cornell furor demonstrates that few in positions of authority are interested in defending the presumption of innocence and the necessity for due process when young men's legal rights and physical safety are at stake.
The Unlikely Victim
None of what we know about the case so far—based largely on the accuser's after-the-fact recounting and text messages—supports the upwelling of fury.
New York law defines sexual assault as a sexual act in which consent is absent due to forcible compulsion (use of physical force or threats), incapacity (such as being under 17, physically helpless, or mentally incapacitated), or clear non-acquiescence. Jane Doe admits that she did not provide clear non-acquiescence and was acting of her own volition. …
It was only after rumors spread about her behavior and, particularly, after she was excluded from a Hallowe'en party at the Chi Phi fraternity house that she began to ruminate on what had happened, deciding to call it a gang rape.
We do not know what went on in Jane Doe's mind in the weeks following the incident, but it is quite possible, as my friend Alison Tieman speculated, that she was hurt and angry about being disinvited from the fraternity's Hallowe'en party. In that case, sexual rejection—not sexual abuse, as alleged—was what motivated the accusation. It is noteworthy that Doe strongly wished to attend a party with the same men she would later name as her rapists, and was eager to revisit the fraternity house she would, only a few days later, claim to have been the scene of a devastating crime.
In sum, rejection by the fraternity president seems to have constituted a wound to her sexual vanity, which she then—with the help of her sorority sisters—turned into a narrative of victimized helplessness.
The Mob
Whether that glaringly flawed narrative will ultimately be successful in prompting charges and a conviction against the men remains to be seen, but it has been stunningly successful in galvanizing thousands of students, vendors of merchandise, pundits, politicians, legal advocates, academics, influencers, Hollywood stars, and cultural commentators, many of whom show themselves unconcerned with the facts of the case and pleased to contribute to a climate of accelerating certainty and rage.
Many people and institutions charged with respecting and upholding the law have indicated their righteous faith in the guilt of the men and Doe's pure-as-snow innocence. The National Women's Law Center called for a show of support for "student survivors of sexual assault," alleging that "Cornell is what happens when people like Trump make the rules" (seeming to forget that Biden-era survivor-centered policies had been in place when Doe made her original complaint). The Boston Globe asked plaintively, "How many more Jane Does before Cornell acts on sexual assault?" Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer praised Doe for her "courage" as a "survivor." AOC declared her empathy with a "survivor" who was "lured into a fraternity house" where she was "drugged and raped" for seven hours.
The President of Cornell made a public statement in which he claimed that his heart ached over Jane Doe's "dehumanization." Former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges refused to use the word "alleged" in "Thoughts on the Mass Rape at Cornell University," in which he excoriated a "culture of sadism and abuse that runs like an electric current through all fraternities" and accused Cornell of "shielding students who commit rape."
Buzzfeed showcased various celebrities calling for immediate, harsh action, quoting Law and Order's Mariska Hargitay on the necessity to "believe survivors," Actor Josh Gad on how the accused men "lost the right to a future when they stole a future from a helpless young woman," English starlet Florence Pugh on how "We are not hard enough on those that want to damage human lives" and British actress and activist Jameela Jamil on "jail time, legal castration, … as the "bare minimum" of deserved punishment for the accused.Even those who don't agree that the men should be assumed criminally guilty are quick to denounce them, condemning their Snapchat messages as "hateful," their participation in the orgy as "reprehensible," and their treatment of Doe as "disgusting." Conservative commentator Rod Dreher, though finding the case a "travesty," still went out of his way to stress how "ashamed" he would be "if one of them were my son, behaving like such a dirtbag." He did not call Jane Doe a "dirtbag." Pundit Victor Davis Hanson was horrified that not a single frat brother had protected Doe from the "outrageous," "sick" experience they put her through. Robby Soave, writing in Reason to defend due process and decry a "deranged social media mob," still reserved his deepest sympathy for Doe's "genuinely traumatizing" experience, finding "the condemnation and shame she received from the people around her" "contemptible."
Almost no one will say that male sexuality—even in drunken, drug-fuelled orgy—is not fundamentally hateful or contemptuous. Both men and women do drink to excess and take drugs to lower their sexual inhibitions. To imagine that some portion of humanity should be imprisoned or morally shamed for that with the other portion enshrined as helpless victims beggars belief.
Of course, it has also been ruled out of order to recognize the power of youthful male sexual desire, especially in the presence of an attractive young woman who is enthusiastically consenting to sex.
The Mob Machinery
The nature of what feminism aims for has become clearer with each high-profile sexual assault case over the past decade, and it has little to do with the nuances of consent or the effects of alcohol: these are merely accessories in the feminist drive for the existential power to define reality.
Since at least the Jian Ghomeshi case in Canada and that of Brock Turner in the United States, feminists have invented more and more elaborate amendments to their doctrine of consent to make it more ridiculous and unworkable. These have included affirmative consent, in which the woman must agree not just to sex in general but to every stage of a sexual encounter at a level whose granularity no one could properly define in advance; incapacitation due to alcohol, in which a woman under the influence of alcohol cannot legally give consent to sex (which is why Kathy Hochul has indicated her interest in changing the New York law on voluntary intoxication); trauma theory, (used extensively in the Harvey Weinstein trials), which claims that a woman's actions or statements during and following a sexual encounter may not reflect her genuine, internal experience; and disassociation, in which the woman may become unable to speak or resist due to fear or anxiety. In all of these elaborations, even statements or acts of sexual initiative by the woman may be later reinterpreted as evidence of her confusion, stress, or terror, or of her (traumatized) need to "normalize" the event or "placate" her "aggressor(s)."
After the acquittal of the five NHL hockey players in the long-standing Hockey Canada allegation, a case in which the accuser was recorded on a phone camera not once but twice signaling her consent (with a smile, not seemingly inebriated), feminists began stressing the idea that consent cannot legally be given in cases where there is a power imbalance between the woman and the man (or men) she later accuses. What is a power imbalance? It is any case in which the woman has cause to say she felt intimidated, coerced, anxious about her safety, or unable to resist or say no.
Given most men's superior strength to women, it is hard to think of cases in which a woman could not make such a claim, particularly if more than one man is present. The accuser could also make the claim in cases where the man is socially powerful and well-connected; the man has influence over her life; she does not know the man well; the man has been violent in the past, even if not with the woman; and of course when the woman is inebriated, under the influence of drugs, not feeling well, sleepy, disoriented, or stressed. The possibilities are endless, and therefore extremely attractive to feminist advocates.
Any notion of rational female agency has been dispensed with in favor of the sweeping victim-victimizer postulates that feminism has been so successful in spreading.
The next move by feminists is clear: keep on stressing that women's allegations must be believed (as one feminist commentator put it, "An essay should never be the final consequence for allegations of this magnitude"), and work to change every law and sexual assault policy in every state and jurisdiction so that fewer and fewer men can defend themselves against any allegation of sexual assault. Proof of enthusiastic consent in the accuser's own words will not be sufficient. It won't matter whether the accuser is present on video saying that all is well. Her text messages after the fact—expressing love for her alleged rapist, wanting to see him again—will not abate her supporters' fury. Nothing will suffice if the woman merely alleges that she felt coerced or was acting in a traumatized state.
That framework will not actually protect women from sexual assault, or from feeling used, sleazy, embarrassed, or humiliated over bad sexual choices or rumors about bad sexual choices. It will not mitigate the likelihood of regret over a drunken threesome or a one-night stand. If feminists wanted to minimize sexual trauma, they would speak honestly about the emotional and psychological shadow-side of casual sex and the importance of knowing the consequences of 'Yes.' Most importantly, they would be honest about the moral peril of punishing the innocent to expunge one's own guilty conscience.
But feminists will almost never, of course, address these issues. The feminist agenda is not primarily interested in female well-being, and certainly not in aiding women to be morally accountable for their sexual choices.
The feminist agenda is centrally concerned with getting more feminist ideologues into positions of power in order to change laws and set college policy: the goal is to degrade women by evacuating moral character, replacing morality with victimology, and to make more men subordinate to women's volatile whims under threat of expulsion from college, incarceration, physical violence, or some other form of punishment. To that end, feminists will employ and dispense with various theories and doctrines, independent of facts and common sense, to frame men as sick predators and women as brave crusaders. The men whose freedom and lives are imperilled and the women whose self-respect is corroded are not only collateral damage for the agenda but the basis for its success.
The agenda is gaining ground. We have come to the point at which many politicians and thought leaders in the United States will not publicly defend the right of accused men to a fair trial. They will not publicly condemn the spreading of vile lies and calls for violence against these men. Feminist leaders in our society have been preparing the ground for this violence, and openly defending it, for decades, largely without censure. It is important to recognize that feminist rage is boundless. As we have seen recently, it can easily accommodate child murder. There will never come a time when impartial principles of justice matter more to feminist advocates than feminist power. There will never come a time when the suffering of boys and men will matter more than the satisfaction of their "incandescent rage." There will never come a time when their demand for retribution will at last be satisfied.
https://fiamengofile.substack.com/p/cornell-and-feminisms-new-normal
