THANKS, FEMINISTS.

"A Hypothesis Becomes Harder to Reject" concludes,

Fifty to sixty years ago the second-wave feminists, seeing only the upside potential of the Pill with abortion-on-demand as the backstop plan were all about those "casual sexual encounters," with or without "an ethic of care," and the "alternative lifestyles" fetish offers quite the diversity of sexual encounters.  And cracking down on the Greek letter organizations?  Sometimes that's all the rage, sometimes it's not.

Because culture is a type of shared consciousness, it is an emergent phenomenon, and it might be simpler to bet on emergence, and let the evolutionary dead-ends, whether of the rabbit culture or the Consciousness Revolution or of privilege-shaming, collapse of their own inconsistencies.

Nothing has changed in the eighteen months since that post, or in my evaluation of those fifty to sixty years of allegedly progressive social change.  The inconsistencies go on and on and on.  Combine an alternative lifestyle version of a casual sexual encounter in a Cornell fraternity house, and when the election cycle demands a new outrage to rile up the women of the fevered brow, the rage resumes.

You can be certain that nobody involved in the Cornell U fraternity gang-bang circus is going to come out looking good, not the frat boys, not the girl, not the county DA, not New York AG Letitia James, and not NY Governor Kathy Hochul. The latter two have decided to showboat what has become a rape case in an election year when both are up for another four-year term.

First, the incident itself: October 19, 2024, a Saturday night when upstate New York is at its fall color peak and the campus is jumpin’, 20-year-old “Jane Doe” starts drinking at her sorority, Delta Delta Delta (Δ Δ Δ, “Tri-Delt”) whose motto is Let Us Steadfastly Love One Another. Around eleven o’clock Jane goes into downtown Ithaca to do more drinking at a bar. She’s legally underage, but manages to get served.

Meanwhile, messages are zinging around on social media, Snapchat, etc. There’s a party going on at the Chi Phi fraternity (ΧΦ). Jane communicates with one of the members there. He cordially invites her over for “a threesome.” Jane apparently has a reputation as a lively girl around campus. She accepts and heads over to Chi Phi with a load on, “five out of ten” on the intoxication scale, she later writes in a nine-page statement she gave to campus police.

She arrives at Chi Phi around midnight. More drinks. Pretty soon she’s in that threesome in a bedroom. The frat boys are also pretty hammered. Things get even wilder. Four other frat boys enter the picture. On top of the alcohol, they start doing ketamine, known to produce a dissociative “floaty, out-of-the-body feeling.” One’s judgment is not too good on it, even worse when mixed with booze. The scene at Chi Phi is Animal House plus. Various shenanigans ensue. Eventually, Jane Doe gets home.

The story, sans the obligatory home videos you know 'phone owners are recording, and the ketamine, is one of long pedigree.  The cause years ago was "date rape," perhaps modified to "acquaintance rape" in order to portray the woman involved as being deprived of her agency, whether it was assisted by beer or booze or enhanced by other stimulants or perhaps sedatives, and thus a victim of circumstances.  Never mind that, as appears to be the case in this Cornell story, the lady had her evening of what she thought was fun, then, a day or so later thinks, ewwww, I shouldn't have done that.  Now there's a whole therapeutic bureaucracy for her to lay out her victimization case.  A colleague correctly described that situation as the complainant simply lacking any character: she could have dialed back the pregaming, turned down the invitation, or excused herself when the drinks and the pharmacopeia started to circulate at Chi Phi.

Instead, she has the campus grievance bureaucracy working on her behalf, to the mixed dismay and amusement of Heather MacDonald.

In a delicious historical irony, the baby boomers who dismantled the university’s intellectual architecture in favor of unbridled sex and protest have now bureaucratized both. While women’s studies professors bang pots and blow whistles at antirape rallies, in the dorm next door, freshman counselors and deans pass out tips for better orgasms and the use of sex toys. The academic bureaucracy is roomy enough to sponsor both the dour antimale feminism of the college rape movement and the promiscuous hookup culture of student life. The only thing that doesn’t fit into the university’s new commitments is serious scholarly purpose.

Her essay takes my colleague's "she simply has no character" further.

[W]hat reality does lie behind the campus rape industry? A booze-fueled hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands. Students in the sixties demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. “We’re adults,” the students shouted. “We can manage our own lives. If we want to have members of the opposite sex in our rooms at any hour of the day or night, that’s our right.” The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora’s box of boorish, sluttish behavior that gets cruder each year. Do the boys, riding the testosterone wave, act thuggishly toward the girls? You bet! Do the girls try to match their insensitivity? Indisputably.

College girls drink themselves into near or actual oblivion before and during parties. That drinking is often goal-oriented, suggests University of Virginia graduate Karin Agness: it frees the drinker from responsibility and “provides an excuse for engaging in behavior that she ordinarily wouldn’t.” A Columbia University security official marvels at the scene at homecomings: “The women are shit-faced, saying, ‘Let’s get as drunk as we can,’ while the men are hovering over them.” As anticipated, the night can include a meaningless sexual encounter with a guy whom the girl may not even know. This less-than-romantic denouement produces the “roll and scream: you roll over the next morning so horrified at what you find next to you that you scream,” a Duke coed reports in Laura Sessions Stepp’s recent book Unhooked. To the extent that they’re remembered at all, these are the couplings that are occasionally transformed into “rape”—though far less often than the campus rape industry wishes.

And away from campus, there isn't the sort of Student Affairs bureaucracy to convert that "Ooooh, I shouldn't have done that" into a cause of action against the guy, or guys, whose attentions a day or two previously she enthusiastically encouraged.  "Campuses have created a judicial infrastructure for responding to postcoital second thoughts more complex than that required to adjudicate maritime commerce claims in Renaissance Venice."  The difference being that Venetian maritime commerce, and its successors at Lloyd's coffee house in London, made possible a more broadly shared prosperity.