Some famous quotes by frat guys: “Free pussy in alum pu” and “Shop still open?” and the classic “Like you can walk in and whip it out.” Now some quotes from Ann Coulter: “colleges may have abandoned their parietal rules, but for any universities lucky enough to have them, fraternities and sororities have not” and “contrary to all the venomous denunciations of fraternities, it was the Greek system that stoutly rejected the depraved, sexually-liberated, free love ethos of Hollywood, academia and the media.”
Coulter’s evidence is the disapproving buzz with which “the Greek system” supposedly greeted the notorious gangbang at Cornell University’s now defunct Chi Phi branch. But if frat boys set up a threesome and then made it a gangbang by messaging their buddies, how does that show us a frat system that rejects depraved free love, etc.? Easy, those guys were just “a few lowlifes.” Except that the boys in the room accounted for more than 10 percent of Chi Phi’s Cornell membership, and there were all the others who saw the messages and let the advertised depravity go right ahead. Also, it appears the disapproving gossip was all about the girl, not about the boys. They’re lowlifes only when Coulter has to wave them away. It’s fine by her if the rumor mill chews up the girl and leaves everyone else alone.
Obviously I take Coulter’s argument much more seriously than she does. She’s going for a rhetorical grand coup. You grab the other side, the people who think they’re so right, and you slam them all the way over into the wrong. You take their great shibboleths and demonstrate you’ll do with that crap whatever you want. “Slut-Shaming FTW At Cornell,” Coulter headlined her piece. If you care very much about not having kids get into sexual tangles, you’ll want the boys called to account and not just the single, solitary girl. If you just want to do a wrestling move, to turn the situation upside down so you can climb on top it and bow for applause, you’ll write “Slut-Shaming FTW At Cornell.”
I don’t know if Jane Doe has a legally viable case. Sounds like a stretch, given what we’ve heard about her police statement. But there’s a big, specific obstacle to sizing up matters, since Jane’s dossier also includes a police interview. The interview, given at the start of the police process, reportedly says she was raped. The statement, signed at the end of the process, reportedly has nothing about rape, and we don’t know how one version became the other. There’s another obstacle, even bigger but less specific. Most of us don’t know about complicated sexual situations, by which I mean situations that involve multiple bodies and possibly some alcohol and substances. Seriously, it’s hard to get a sense of the room.
An example. Helen Lewis, far from a Bluesky type, writes: “The right has spent the past few years mocking the left for not understanding—in the context of, say, competitive sports—that sex differences exist. Now some conservatives are reflexively defending the Cornell 7 by playing cute and pretending that a sexual situation involving one woman and multiple men is a meeting of equals.” I guess it wouldn’t be, given the relative sizes and sex drives involved. But my point is that I’m guessing. Lewis can make her assessment as a woman who’s been in a subway car or an elevator that was filled with men; even so, it appears there are other women who disagree with her. For my part I’m at sea and I expect other people are too.
Coulter’s piece is red meat for her usual dog pound of followers. I came across it because I still get Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish as an email. Sullivan linked to “Slut-Shaming” with a plummy “Ann Coulter sinks her teeth into the Cornell case and the NYT. Yum.” So maybe that’s why I’ve responded at length to what’s really some ordinary right-wing nastiness. I expected a dismantling of New York Times coverage; what I got was the usual crap. Coulter’s piece points to nothing wrong with the articles except that they’re there. No errors are presented; they’re as absent as the famous quotes cited above, the ones where the frat boys reflect on their moral duties. Coulter settles for listing headlines of libertine-sounding Times articles, five of them in the past 10 years. The list positions the Times upstream from the kids at Cornell and their choices, or that’s the idea. Conservatives used to joke about “Society is to blame.” But you can act like The New York Times is to blame and that goes over. Really, five pieces in 10 years and one of them’s entitled “The Joys of Frivolous Sex.” I like frivolous sex!
I suppose there’s some added significance in that Andrew Sullivan, Mr. Courageous Freethinker, is passing the column along like it was fit for consumption. But his judgment’s always been erratic, so no. I’ve got to say “Slut-Shaming FTW At Cornell” is nothing special. It’s ordinary as an infected toe. I poke at it because I’m against the infection and poking’s the only medicine I’ve got.
