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In many of the conversations I’m having this week, and in my girls group chats and on my social media feeds, it seems like we’re all swirling around one story: the Cornell Seven.
I wrote about the case for Slate and thought I said most of what I wanted to say. That piece is about the limits of the law to tell us much about ethics and morals; how the perils of vigilante justice live alongside the necessity of drawing social rules and enforcing them with social penalties; what might have been going on in the brains of the young men who made up the Cornell Seven. I hope you read it; it was hard to write, but cathartic to write, even if I didn’t get to any answers.
What I’m thinking about now, though, is the rest of us. All of the women (and some men, but let’s be honest mostly women) for whom this case is bringing up… everything.
You know the statistics: One in three women will be sexually assaulted in her life. More than 99 percent of rapes never result in a felony conviction. Most rapists walk free. Most women never report. Of course all of those facts are animating the response to this case.
But there’s something deeper at play here, too, and I think it’s the text messages — the young man who invited his fraternity brothers over for “free pussy,” by which he meant a young woman who was drunk and high on ketamine. Most women who are sexually assaulted have no idea what was going on in their assailants’ minds. For the many women who are assaulted by men they knew or trusted, and especially when the assaults are not sudden violent attacks but rather the result of minutes or hours or days or years of ignoring “no” and overriding your own sense of agency, it’s possible and perhaps tempting to construct a more palatable story: He didn’t know what he was doing; he didn’t read my cues; I wasn’t loud enough; I wasn’t clear enough; perhaps this was a misunderstanding. These texts offer an insight into what was actually happening in the minds of these seven men who stand accused of rape, and what was actually happening was not misunderstanding — it was a belief that the young naked woman was not a real person, but was an object, a thing over which they could bond by engaging in a collective sadistic desire.
The texts pull back the curtain. They reframe the night as less about what she did and more about what the men did. What they were thinking. How little they thought about her. How she became just a body part.
To be clear, no crime has been determined by a court of law, and the truth of what happened may never be litigated in one. Here is what we know, though: A girl who was 19 or 20 years old, drunk, encouraged to take ketamine. A guy she thought was her friend, who encouraged her to have sex with him and his friend, and maybe she thought that was ok at first. A text message that went out to more than 50 young men, advertising her as “free pussy.” Several additional men who show up. A girl who says she hides under the covers, swats the men’s hands away, says no, is pushed and pressured. She says she was physically assaulted, too, that the men slapped her and verbally insulted her. And eventually, she says, she was so out of it she was unable to say yes or no at all — and young men who at the very baseline least knew they were having sex with a young woman who was heavily intoxicated, and who I suspect understood perfectly well that she would not have consented to a group sex scenario in the sober light of day. It’s hard not to read the texts and understand that they saw her as a thing, and that demeaning her was fun for them, and that it felt like a way to bond in their shared dominant status — the presence of a drunk naked girl who could be used as “free pussy” made their fraternity, and by extension them, cool (“I fucking love chi phi,” one man wrote in the text chain).
I don’t know if the facts of this case meet New York State’s high legal bar for proving rape occurred. I don’t know if the facts of this case meet the lower bar for proving civil damages, which wouldn’t put the men in jail but could mean they owe the woman in question some restitution. I have been tempted — so tempted — to dig into the legal questions involved here. But I haven’t. Because that may be what it’s about for Jane Doe’s lawyers. But that’s not why so many women I know are thinking about this case so much.
For some women, the interest is clear: Something very much like this happened to them. For many others, it’s related if not as direct: This didn’t happen, but the story behind the story — that’s familiar. Feeling de-personed, reduced to a sexualized thing, to a collection of body parts. Feeling profoundly betrayed because you thought a man was worthy of your trust and you learned the hard way he saw you as less than a human and more of an orifice with a brain inconveniently attached. Feeling the sheer terror of realizing your physical safely is contingent on the whims of a larger, stronger man (or a group of them). Watching a man you trusted or loved or respected or simply thought was fundamentally decent go along with the degradation of a woman, or realizing he watched that degradation happen and said nothing, or hearing him deny that the actions were degrading at all. Understanding that objecting makes you the bad guy, the un-fun one.
Fifty-seven men were in the Cornell group chat where their friends were advertising “free pussy” and promising you could just “whip it out” and asking “shop still open?” Some of them showed up to partake. Most said and did nothing.
It is a very strange thing to move through the world understanding that the one half of the population that never had their humanity doubted on the basis of their genitalia, that enjoys the privilege of being the default category of human, remains the primary arbiter of your physical safety and, sometimes, your personhood. The gleeful misogynists of the manosphere have made misogynist subtext text (midway through writing this newsletter I went back and re-read the New Yorker exposé on the Tate brothers, and if you haven’t read it, you should). That’s not to say that every man in the world is a secret Tate-addled ultra-misogynist. It is to say that we are reading about this case in the context of a political moment infused with the most unabashed and virulent misogyny I’ve ever seen and experienced in my life. This case, for so many women, is a reminder of the flesh-and-blood costs that misogyny extracts, whether it’s men laughing online about how women are hoes who need to be abused and controlled, a president laughing about how he grabs women by the pussy, or men laughing in a group chat about a woman whose personhood they stripped away — who to them was “free pussy” and nothing else.
Nothing about that night was “free” — not for her. And not for the millions of women today who cannot stop thinking about this case.
xx Jill
