The Toxic Logic Behind the Shaming of Cornell’s Jane Doe
On September 16th, a woman identified only as Jane Doe filed a civil lawsuit alleging that she had been gang-raped nearly two years earlier, in October, 2024, in the alumni room at the Chi Phi fraternity house at Cornell University. According to the suit, Jane Doe was beset by seven men while she was incapacitated by drugs and alcohol. Some raped her as others snorted ketamine off her body. The Chi Phi brothers also used the instant-messaging app Snapchat to comment on what was happening, in real time. It was via Snapchat that one of those seven men offered the more than fifty others in his fraternity “free pussy” in the alumni room. “Boys come whip it out,” goes one message. “Shop still open?” another asks. Counter to this bravado is Jane Doe’s statement to police, where she describes one of the men losing his erection and another dry heaving, after which he intermittently “reached for the area” of her vagina.
It is hard to believe that the men in the alumni room were having a good time; if they had an objective, sexual pleasure was not it. What Jane Doe reported they did—forcing vaginal and oral sex on a “dizzy” and “extremely high” woman, in front of a drunken audience—resembles one of those humiliating initiation rituals fraternity pledges often undertake during recruitment season. The point of the alleged assault, like the point of hazing, seems to have been to bond the men together using the superglue of degradation—not just Jane Doe’s but also theirs. (Of course, the difference between gang rape and hazing is that gang rape has an external victim, someone outside the brotherly circle, for whom there is no compensatory reward.) As the writer Elizabeth Schambelan put it in a 2019 essay in n+1, frat culture upholds the belief that “sex is something you do to a woman, with your friends,” specifically for the purpose of building intimacy with other men through shared acts of transgression. When asked by police why the Chi Phi brothers had discussed the incident during a house meeting afterward, one young man denied that the group was coördinating a response or trying to do damage control. Rather, they were sharing a tale of mildly distasteful adventure: “We’re very open,” he said, “about doing this kind of gross thing.”
Last month, Wired ran a report by Ej Dickson about the “burnerverse,” an online community where anonymous members sometimes share explicit images and videos of young women, often college students, taken without their consent. “There’s a sense that the health and vibrancy of the community is contingent on the sexual humiliation of women,” Dickson writes, in particular those who have “transgressed sexual norms in some way.” One of the burnerverse’s victims, Maddie Kowalski, then a sophomore at the University of Florida, said she was filmed without her knowledge or consent while having sex with two men and, on a separate occasion, touching herself while flanked by a group of guys she’d hung out with earlier that day. The videos, edited into a short compilation, were posted online by one @SteveCumfull, who offered them to his audience with a carnival barker’s fanfaronade: “Meet Maddie Kowalski,” he wrote, “queen of Delta Zeta.” (Delta Zeta was Kowalski’s sorority.)
Like Dominique Pelicot, the French man who used the online chat platform Coco to recruit men to rape his drugged and unconscious wife, the @SteveCumfulls of the world thrive on the internet’s reach and de-facto anonymity. But there is reason to be skeptical of the argument that, to quote the headline of a recent article by Emma Camp in the Wall Street Journal, the internet—and specifically internet porn— “helps explain the Cornell sexual assault case.” It is true that Gen Z was exposed to pornography at an alarmingly young age. A 2023 study by Common Sense Media found that seventy-three per cent of respondents between the ages of thirteen and seventeen had watched porn online, and that more than half of them had done so by the age of thirteen. But studies suggest that Gen Z is having less sex than previous generations. If this is true, it would seem to indicate that, far from churning up a tsunami of libidinous adolescents, exposure to porn may have an inhibiting effect on young people’s sexuality. (Of course, Gen Z’s rumored sex strike may have as much to do with the steady migration of social life to online platforms, and other ills of the present.)
There has long been a vocal faction within the feminist movement insisting, in the absence of serious evidence, that porn encourages sexual violence toward women. The numbers suggest a more complicated reality. In the U.S., incidents of reported rapes were higher in the early nineteen-nineties than they are today, as part of a national surge in violent crime, long before the internet made porn ubiquitous and freely available. That has not stopped commentators from suggesting that the Cornell attack was somehow the result of the men’s heads being filled with smut. “Watch enough porn, and you’ll think it’s perfectly normal for a woman to want group sex with strange men,” Camp cautions in the Journal. The “free pussy” Snapchat could be read as an “invitation to rape,” she argues, but it could also be read as: “We found a girl who’s willing to act like a porn star.”
Camp’s logic turns on the conviction that no woman wants to have group sex, when it should turn on the conviction that no woman wants to be raped. When Jane Doe filed her initial police report, in November, 2024, she stated that she had initially agreed and was “excited” to have a threesome with two of the men in the fraternity. It’s a part of her story that has been variously twisted or discounted in the media, by commentators operating both within and well outside the bounds of good faith. The conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly floated “the possibility that this woman made a decision to get it on” with a group of men because she wanted the attention—a line of thought echoed by the essayist Caitlin Flanagan, who wrote, in The Free Press, that Jane Doe went to Chi Phi “looking for . . . a man” but had “no idea how to find a good one.” In a Times roundtable about the case, the political columnist Michelle Cottle proffered the assessment that we have “fetishized consent just by itself.” She went on: “The extreme version of ‘no slut-shaming’ ” and sex positivity common among “progressives,” Cottle said, has made it unfashionable “to call anything out of bounds as long as everybody has said, ‘Oh, no, I’m O.K. with this.’ ”
I would venture that sex between adults to which everybody has said, “Oh, no, I’m O.K. with this,” is, in fact, O.K., and that people who want to have a threesome should be able to have a threesome without being gang-raped. I find myself disappointed by liberal feminists such as Kate Manne, a Cornell professor who has, like Cottle, expressed concern that “sex positivity is in danger of becoming a license for thoughtlessness” and who has also proposed banning (or, in her words, taking “off the table”) not just sex acts like consensual choking but also fantasies such as those involving “the trope of the ‘sexy school girl.’ ” In her recap of the police report, in New York magazine, Manne tellingly omits the statement about wanting to have the threesome—the prospect of which, Jane Doe said, was intriguing to her in part because she thought it meant that the frat boys who suggested it were gay.
Despite such concerns about excessive sex positivity, there has been no shortage of sex-shaming surrounding these events. “This is fucking RUINING my life temporarily,” Jane Doe texted Matthew Ingalls, one of the accused, four days after her alleged assault. “My reputation is destroyed and I’m utterly ashamed.” To one of her sorority sisters she wrote, “You may hear some rumors about me, and unfortunately they are true.” Winston Lee, another Chi Phi brother who allegedly participated in the assault, reportedly told Jane Doe that he was “so sorry about all, like, the backlash.” Who were the people spreading these rumors? Presumably fellow-students who felt that Jane Doe had jumped what Cottle calls the “cultural guardrails” that ought to separate licit from illicit sex and good girls from bad. Even Jane Doe’s pacifying messages to one of the men who invited her to have the threesome—in which she tries to minimize her ordeal by invoking the phrase “our body, our choice” and telling him she wouldn’t mind spending time with him again as long as they “leave out the extra 5 billion men and ketamine”—have been used to manufacture a retroactive consent that she consistently states she did not give. “Let’s be clear,” she texted another of the men on November 3rd, five days before she went to the police, “90% of what happened that night was not consensual.”
Anyone who implies that Jane Doe was assaulted because she was already doing something slutty or immodest is complicit in the harm that’s been done to her. That harm also includes the subversion of her sexual agency, and it is compounded by those who want to turn a rape case into a parable about how women don’t know their own minds, how they have been so manipulated—by the patriarchy, the maxims of sex positivity, or both—that they can’t tell the difference between sex they want to have and sex they don’t. One of the biggest failures of the post-#MeToo moment is our collective inability to provide a confident, humane account of sex as a basic good as opposed to a disaster waiting to happen. I cannot help but think that this sort of pessimism draws, however unwittingly, very close to the rapist’s conviction that sex is something bad and therefore can be used as a tool to demean and devalue others; this is why we have to protect vulnerable people from it, even at the expense of their own desire.
“Whenever there’s a sex scandal,” the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant once wrote, “I feel sorry for sex.” What allegedly happened at Cornell was much worse than a sex scandal. It was a sex crime, an outrageous violation of a person’s right to bodily autonomy. It should make us feel even sorrier for sex, because cases like these tempt us to think that sex itself is the problem, a “gross thing” so fundamentally toxic that it can be easily weaponized as an instrument of damage or disgrace. But to think this way is to capitulate to the rapist’s logic. Everyone has a right to sexual safety, and that includes the right to consensual activity and experimentation that does not end in violence or in public shaming. We could teach young people that sex is a fun, gratifying activity that, like driving a car, comes with significant risks, which is why we reserve it for adults who have received a lot of information and training about how to do it right. Instead, we fill their heads with fear and shame, and leave them to act in a void. This is a tragedy, and tragedy is what it begets. ♦