Sanctify yourself and you will sanctify society.
St. Francis of Assisi
Chi Phi (ΧΦ) house at Cornell.
Every once and a while I publish something here which I know, if anyone reads it, will offer offense.
This will offer massive offense. It can't help but do so.1
It's also one of those posts which involves a lot of synchronicity.
The details.
I felt like bait.
Cornell rape victim.
Caption to lawsuit, entire suit visible here:
Suit.
Recently the news of a gang rape of a young woman at Cornell University has been much in the news. I actually didn't pay a lot of attention to it at first as, oddly enough, I'd just read an article in the New York Times magazine supplement of a young woman who was gang raped at a university and the details, to the minor extent I was aware of them, were much the same. Turns out that it was actually a different event, and frankly the one I read about first was significantly more horrific in some fashions. After that, I looked on the net a bit, and as I'll explain below, I read of a young woman who had, almost successfully, but apparently not quite, achieved the removal of her self posted nude images from the net, and then following that, due my Twitter feed, saw a Catholic young woman commenting in horror to the comments by one of a contemporary comedian regarding sexual conduct.
Eh? Are these all related?
Yes, they are.
Let's start with Cornell.
The way the story is more or less reported is that the young woman. age 20, went to the fraternity room of a male friend she was interested in, after having become heavily intoxicated earlier in the evening. At the fraternity, she drank more and consumed at least ketamine and then was gang raped by members of the Chi Phi (ΧΦ). In a 50,000 foot sort of way, all that's correct. But when you did into the details the story is quite a bit different.
Rather, what happened, is the young woman in a sorority had an interest, both romantic and sexual, in a young man in a fraternity. Now, frankly, in any romantic interest there's always a sexual element, which will explore below, so the two are not necessarily completely separated. But what picks up from there grossly departs from what standards had been only fairly recently. She spoke to him on the phone and was invited out for the evening, starting off at a bar. They adjourned to the frat house, and when she got there, he included a friend and proposed a sexual threesom, i.e., that she consent to being screwed by him and by his buddy, and she agreed. The complaint alleges she was too drunk to say no, but frankly that seems incorrect. She also agreed to take ketamine, and consumed more alcohol. This didn't render her unconscious, but it did render her sexually pliable and various frat members came in to screw her and the word got around that you could have sex just by stopping in. At least at some point in this horrific series of events, one male member of the fraternity stopped in just out of concern, and found the first two men there and the woman under the covers. Satisfied, I guess, that things were okay, he left. Ultimately, several men penetrated her, including the first two.
The next day the one guy she liked and the girl started exchanging texts and she wanted, at first, to develop a romantic relationship with him still. She confessed awkwardice at what hat happened, but admitted at least some of the actions were consensual. And as gross as it was, she was an underaged drinker, the first gross act was. As time went on she convinced herself she'd been raped, and indeed she had been, and reported it, which at the same time was coincident with news of the event getting around campus and the girl feeling her reputation was ruined.2 It was not prosecuted in part as the Cornell police did not report the full details to the prosecutor. Apparently New York retains a very antiquated view of the law in this area, although it's not historically unique, that if a person starts consenting and passes out (which she didn't) they've consented.
Again, that view of this topic is antiquated, but it's not unique. The concept that if a girl starts down the road to sex, even if she didn't get very far down the road, which this girl clearly did, and passes out due to alcohol, has still consented, used to be a cultural norm and that tended to reflect itself in the law.
The cultural view is still there to a significant degree.
Which takes us there to the next horror.
In the second instance, a young woman went away to college. She was an adoptee raised by loving parents but it's pretty clear that when she got there she used it as an opportunity to "party". Indeed, she was drinking like crazy. She had some male friends she trusted, and went to a bar with them. While there, she drank very heavily and passed out. They raped her and used their phones to video themselves raping her. They then posted it on social media, which is how she learned she'd been raped.
This story is frankly more horrific. The young woman's error here was in getting drunk. She thought the men were her friends. When she was vulnerable, they flat out raped her. But they were so debased they shared the images of the rape on social media. The event was too much for her, and she dropped out of school.
Which takes us to social media.
While looking into this I ran across a story of another young woman. Looking at it, she appears to be a fairly nice if highly naive young woman who graduated with a fairly common but somewhat difficult four year degree. While in school, she participated in activities of a collegic nature, being a cheerleader.
She is also massively endowed, which even her "clean" photos make plain. She apparently picked up on that being a real attractant and started posting images of herself on social media, showing offer her clothed assets, which then linked to an "Only Fans" account where she could be seen nude. At some point the danger or stupidity of this must have occurred to someone (she graduated and I wonder if it was employment related) and she mounted a vigorous campaign to wipe out all the nude images. Apparently she was mostly successful, which is impressive, and which also suggest that she probably had to resort to legal help. In spite of all this, she still posts TikTok streams, clothed, which are clearly designed to show off her boobs and which frequently involve heavy drinking. She's trying to be an "influencer".
Well, it's sure not a good influence.
And finally to our last item.
A comedy clip, which appears to have started off as a "reel", showed up on my Twitter feeds as a comment by a horrified Catholic young woman. In it, the comedian is doing the engagement with the audience routine.
There are piles of such reels around by female comedians right now, and quite a few (but not all) like to engage in sex as a topic. I'm not sure, but I think it has to do with sort of the Lenny Bruce Effect, which is basically that to say something shocking when its not expected draws attention. It also expand the boundaries of what's considered shocking in a culture. Bruce was crude and vulgar and used the topic of sex in his routine. His personality trod close to his topics, he married a stripper. He died at age 40 of a drug overdose.
He also opened up the door to acts like Richard Pryor's. Today vulgarity is common.
Anyhow, the comedienne called out a couple and asked them if they were married, which they were, and how old she was when they met. 16. She then asked how many men she had engaged in sex with, something that in an earlier era would have resulted in immediate rebuke. That's become a big female edgy topic recently, with women boasting of their "body counts", as if it's all that hard for any woman who wants to have sex, to have it (more on that in a moment). She'd only had sex with her husband, which was then lampooned.
That's worthy of praise, not lampooning, and that was the American, and the European, norm up until the Sexual Revolution. Multiple sex partners were not admired in anyone, and for women that resulted in their being regarded as a "slut", which we'll discuss in more depth below.
Okay, where do we go with all of this? There is a lot to consider, and a lot of it isn't being considered.
Let's take the low hanging fruit first.
Fraternities, and sororities, need to be abolished.
A student movement at Cornell realized this before this assault. It wasn't the first assault alleged to have occurred in this frat house, and they tried to ban fraternities, unsuccessfully.
There is really no reason for fraternities any longer. They reflect the nature of education that existed before World War Two, and really well before World War Two. In the US, at least, they have their start in the late 18th Century.
While there are exceptions, for the most part university dormitories, "the dorms", did not become common in university settings until after World War Two at which point there was a massive expansion in the student population due to the GI Bill. The first purpose built drom at the University of Wyoming, which is of course a land grant institution, was considerably older than that, however, being Merica Hall, which opened as a women's dorm in 1908. It was originally called "Women's Hall." There was early housing for male students at UW before that, but in what is now called "Old Main", which also held all of the classrooms. It was built in 1886. This shows, perhaps, some of the awkward nature of the original housing arrangements. Combined classrooms and living quarters in buildings was a common early solution to student's residential needs. Hoyt Hall, which was a drom and a education building, was started in 1915. Knight Hall and the the Student Union were built as a part of a late 1940s Depression era construction project. Wyoming Hall was completed in 1951.
The first fraternity at UW, Sigma Beta Phi, opened in 1903. The oldest sorority in 1905.
That might seem to cut against my argument here, but it really does not. Upper education was mostly for the well to do. Land grant universities were not. There were some early school housing buildings in various locations, but they tended to be in buildings that were otherwise used for classes. Early dormitories at coeducational institutions tended to be built for women first. There were no such things as "coed" dorms.
Casper College, in Casper Wyoming, opened as Casper Junior College on September 17, 1945, a date we failed to note on this site. It was originally in the upper floor of hte high school, but moved onto its own campus in 1955. It did not have a dormitory until 1965.
So, then, what did a student do if there wasn't a dormitory, or wasn't room in one?
A person might think this is an easy question to answer, "rent an apartment", but it's not as easy as it sounds. As we've already discussed, lodging was more complicated for single people before refrigerators and modern stoves came into existence. Sure, you could rent an apartment, but it wasn't until the mid 20th Century that it was really relatively easy to live on your own in one. Students tend not to have a lot of money, and therefore its not like eating out every day was an option for a lot of them. "Starving student" had a meaning then that it doesn't now.
An option therefore was living in a boarding or "rooming" house, which a lot of single people did in general. We've already discussed that. Privately owned, they provided room and board but often under fairly strict supervision. A good example of this is given in the movie Brooklyn, which depicts a boarding house in the 1950s for young single women.
Student apartments did exist in some areas where the student population was fairly high. For large private schools, like Harvard, these tended to be multiple room, say with bedrooms for about four students, and a small room for a servant. That person took care of the cooking and cleaning for the students. Clearly this is long gone.
Cornell, we'll note, is a private university.
And then there were fraternities and ultimately sororities.
Housing and food was the main advantage of fraternities. A person needed a place to live, and like student apartments, fraternities had and still have a person who cooks and cleans. Indeed, I recall some students claiming they were joining fraternities just as the food was better than at the dorms.
Early on, with upper education being very exclusive, fraternities tended to function as literary societies. In the 19th Century, however, they were part of the large Protestant fraternal organization movement, and they began to incorporate secret rituals, some of them which were outright bizarre. I don't know about Chi Phi, but it does have an initiation ritual, which interestingly enough emphasizes integrity and honesty. This is interesting in that at the same time clubs that focused on dinner with dinging halls also started to exist, giving another food option to students, but also functioning sort of like fraternal organizations do today. Having said that, dining clubs never became enormously common in the US.
The GI Bill flooded universities after World War Two and they responded by creating dorms. Fraternities and Sororities also expanded, but by the 1960s their real purpose had passed. There was no longer a real need to join one as there was no real living advantage to doing so. Given that, their main purpose became social.
Social clubs with significant numbers of people who range from 18 to 22 years of age are a bad idea in general, unless they have massive supervision. A lot of returning World War Two veterans were, of course, over that age, and the real impact of things didn't begin to settle in until the 1950s and 1960s.
In the 50s and 60s the US was hit with the combined impact of a massive demographic influx, the Baby Boomers, a huge boost in the wealth of the country, and an assault on morals and image of women in the form of the views espoused by Playboy magazine. The impact was society wide but it had a particular impact on college and university campuses. Nowhere was that more felt than in fraternities.
The classic depiction of this is, of course, National Lampoon's Animal House. That's an exaggeration, like most comedy, but National Lampoon, an expression of Harvard Lampoon, was depicting what it knew, including really vulgar and immoral treatment of women. A central depiction in the plot of the film is a fraternity member wheeling a drunk underaged girl home in a shopping cart, after she passes out while they're about to have sex, from a "toga party" . Raping her was a bridge too far for the Lampoon, but it's depicted in such a fashion that it's implied that the chivalrous character, if you will, could have legitimately done that if he wanted to.
When I was at UW in the early 1980s, fraternities actually had "toga parties", although my guess is that they were inspired in that by the film. One fraternity that was familiar with, as a friend was in it, annually had the "Baby Ball" in which the members and invited sorority girls dressed in sheets, like babies, and slid down the stairs, which were supposed to be fallopian tubes. They also drank really heavily at this event.
By the time I was in law school, which would be the late 80s, fraternities were on the decline. That probably reflected a generational change, and a technological one. You could just as easily live on your own, and if you didn't want to, you could get a really nice dorm room. They've been declining ever since.
But, as we can see, they are still around.
They ought to be extinguished, as the Cornell student movement tried to do.
Let's start off with a statement that states the obvious, but apparently it isn't.
College students in the 18th Century are not the same as college students in the 21st.
This isn't to suggest that they were perfectly behaved. The 19th Century US was awash in alcohol all the time and there were some huge alcohol fueled student riots in the 19th Century, including one at West Point (the Eggnog Riot). And all sorts of weird harassment of underclassmen was common. In some ways, the abuse of younger students which remains common in some fraternities, occured on a wide scale. That wide scale abuse of younger students has pretty much stopped in the general student body (not in all fraternities, however), but that came with a broader student body.
What was not as common was the outright abuse of women in this fashion, save for one odd but instructive instance. Prior to 1865, some university students had enslaved women as servants, and they were subject to sexual abuse, not surprisingly.3
And up until the 1970s, seemingly, society appreciated that young men without supervision and young women without the same would get into all sorts of trouble. Kipling noted that "single men in barracks don't grow into plaster saints", a line he wrote about the peacetime British Army, but which applies equally to any group of warehoused young men. Along the lines of our topic, sexual abuse of female service members has become widespread and nearly incapable of being eradicated. Given the atmosphere of fraternities, which has been libertine at least in the popular imagination since the 70s, rapes are going to be a feature of them.
Whatever function fraternities, and sororities, served, is pretty much over. Any benefit they provided, can be provided in other ways. There are going to be campus rapes no matter what, but keeping fraternities around is encouraging them.4
Which takes us to the next thing.
Failing young men and women. The battlefield casualties of the sexual revolution.
When this topic broke the week before last, it ended up on the weekend news programs, not too surprisingly. One of the people who commented on it was Republican 2028 Presidential hopeful, Chris Christie, in his role as a This Week commentator. Christe noted, albeit only briefly, that young men needed to be better educated that such conduct as was exhibited here is appalling.
That's a given, but how did we even get here, and what do we need to do?
And, frankly, young women need to be better educated in these areas.
And so do adults.
One thing that society in general needs to be better educated on is that university isn't for partying. As noted above, this sort of view has been around forever, I think you can even find Medieval examples, but starting in the 70s it became pretty bad in some quarters. In my view, this was part of the post war largess of the Baby Boom era.
Students going to university in the 60s and 70s that if they got through university they were getting a white collar job. That frankly, in many disciplines, built in a real slack attitude. Set from from home with parents that held real values but who had been damaged by the horror of the Second World War and the Great Depression, college was a chance to live it up, often on somebody else's money. Much of this has passed as the economy has changed from what it formerly was to one in which its much more difficult to get by in, but some of that attitude still exists, good examples of which, or perhaps more accurately bad ones, above. All of the examples except for the last one feature examples of this sort of behavior, and the "influences" example may actually be the worst.
This needs to end.
How to end it is another matter, although as noted the economy is ending some of it. Something that impacted it a bit when I was in university was raising the drinking age from 19 to 21, but that's already been done. In the Cornell example the problem of admitting teenagers to bars legally is highlighted That should end. If it were me, I'd just make counties that feature educational institutions dry. That's a severe approach, of course, but I'd take it. Studies show, fwiw, that almost all rapes of this type and of the service member type are accompanied by overconsumption of alcohol.
Beyond that, however, putting the bullet in the Sexual Revolution needs to happen, and frankly it's starting to. This helps explain the Trad Movement, in part, in the Catholic and Lutheran laity. When I go to Mass on Sunday and find a young married woman, often not much over 20 years old, in a matilla with her husband and a baby, I'm looking at the foot soldiers of the counter revolution. Same thing when I go to work and see the young men and women of Luther Classical College walking to school.
This We'll Defend.5
This emphasizes that the reaction ot the the Sexual Revolution has to be all inclusive and organic. You can't have a "Me Too" movement that doesn't recognize that. Adopting and teaching a standard, has to adopt it and that's adopting the entire smash. As Yeoman's laws of human behavior note:
It's interesting how often people try to evade this principal. All people fail in it, as we're fallen and we don't grasp the correctness of various things, but there are those who make a dedicated effort to avoid it. In a minor way I'm reminded of a couple I know that lived without the benefit of marriage for years, even having a child, who have gone hardcore into the MAGA world, and who are sending their child to Hillsdale school. They can't quite make it sync as while their instincts are good, they really have to work around to the origin of things to make what they're doing, make sense.
Indeed, while this goes off topic, this particularly American trait is one of hte fundamental flaws of MAGA. Many of the MAGA faithful, or former faithful, are in it as they have a sense that American society has gone off the rails. But what they're doing is leaning out of the wreckage of the train car they are in looking back at other toppled cars not realizing that theirs tipped over too. I.e., they're holding the Car Transgender and Car Homosexual in contempt while wanting to get back to the party in the Car Cheating On Spouse or the Car Divorce which tipped the train over in the first place.
Drilling down on this, what this means is that American society, if it doesn't want college age boys raping college girls, needs to dump the pornographic lifestyle its living in. Put a bit more bluntly, you can't have a naked Sydney Sweeney advertising a sports website and not expect rape to result.
Also drilling down, the old standard here, which was never perfectly applied, needs to be reapplied. Young men living in groups didn't generally rape young women as it had been emphasized that it was indescribably wrong. Moreover, they were taught, and again things happened, that sex was for marriage, not just their own selfish entertainment.6 They were taught was decency was. Decent people don't post "free pussy in alum pu".
A lot of work needs to be done in this area, but it can start right now by holding those men in this in contempt. Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris, Scott Kretzschmar. Yes, they're innocent until proven guilty, but unless proven to be disconnected with these events, and to have acted to prevent them. Ingalls and Newell not only deserve contempt, they deserve to be branded as perverts, which is what they are.7
And assuming, which we are taught not to do, that this meets the New York definition of rape at some point, they shoudl be convicted and sentenced.
But what about Jane Doe? Indeed, what about all the Jane Does mentioned in this thread?
One of the really disturbing aspects of this is that we now have a society where a 20 year old girl at a prestigious university not only agrees to sex on a sort of first date, she agreed to group sex. That's perverse. Granted, there are people who are perverse, but now we have been taught not to say such things.
A girl who would have engaged in this conduct when I was young would flat out have been branded a "slut". That's not to be done now, and is termed "slut shaming", and perhaps the collapse in moral standards make the shaming obsolete. And it's worth noting that Jane Doe's conviction that everything was morally tainted here grew as the news of what she'd done was spread around. She was specifically taking heat from two sorority sisters over her role in the whole matter. That doesn't mean she wasn't raped. So much was going on in terms of drugs and alcohol in this story that if she wasn't impaired at the onset, at some point she most likely was, and she took the position right from the onset that most of it wasn't consensual. But what we have here is a really gross sex act with two young men she did consent to becoming a sort of orgy in a way, which she didn't consent to. This isn't the same at all as the Red Army showing up to a village in eastern Germany in 1945.
We need to avoid making this worse that it already is, but frankly we need to get back to a point at which that sort of conduct is shameful. Which brings me to the last two young women mentioned in this post. The influencer and couple mocked by the comedienne.
Regarding the influencer, somebody in her orbit, and may she herself, woke up to the fact that posting naked photographs of yourself was shameful, and they were yanked after quite an effort. Good for whomever woke up that fact.
But bad that her "influencing" is depicing the same sort of conduct that got the second young woman in this story in trouble. Her failure, if we are to deem it that, was not being sexually immoral, but in allowing herself to get into a drunken stupor in the presence of young men.
Which leads me to a comment that was made on the Facebook feed for the author of the article mentioned above. A commenter noted as the asnwer to the article entitled; Caitlin Flanagan: What Was Jane Doe Looking For?:
So basically… it’s dangerous to be around men?
I understand the argument about risk, judgment, alcohol, and putting yourself in vulnerable situations. Those are conversations worth having.
But there’s something deeply unsettling about telling young women: You know what men are like. You know these places are dangerous. Why did you go?
Women go to fraternity parties because they want to socialize. They want to flirt. They want to meet men. They may even want to have consensual sex.
None of those things should require accepting sexual assault as a foreseeable consequence of being around men.
At some point, “women need to make better choices” becomes an extraordinarily damning statement about men.
So the feminist position is “not all men,” but the anti-feminist position is apparently, “Ladies, you knew there would be men there”?
Well, she's correct in everything she said, the commenter, but she's wrong. Large groups of young men have fallen off the rails in this way since we have been a species. So, yes, "it's dangerous to be around men".
It is.
Not all men all the time, but this gets back to standards of the past. It's not that dangerous to be around a bunch of young men. . . who are near older men. . .and better yet if some of them are relatives. I've seen young men begin to act improperly towards young women where older men were present and intervened, sometimes forcibly.8 In other words, being at the Sheepherders' Fair is one thing, being at Moonies, apparently, quite another.
And, influencer, having a wardrobe made entirely of overly tight halter tops is dangerous. That does, in the real world, one thing. It advertises your boobs, and advertises that your boobs are available for the taking, along with things located elsewhere on your female body.
We'll loop back around here to the Flanagan article, which is drawing flak. Flanagan condemns franternitis solidly in the article. She notes that fraternities were dangerous when she was in college, and that a boyfriend she was breaking up with warned her never to go upstairs in one, which she never did.
Then she asked this question:
That’s the saddest thing about these old rituals. What attracts women to those parties—late at night, like Jane Doe—to walk alone to a fraternity house and take her chances?
She answers:
What she’s really looking for is a man. And she has no idea how to find a good one.
Footnotes:
1. On offering offense, Caitlin Flanagan, a journalist, has already written two articles on this and the second one, which will be noted above, has really drawn criticism.
2. We've left out a lot of details in our first summation of this, but her concern for her reputation isn't surprising. She consented to getting screwed by one man while performing oral sex on another, and then was screwed by multiple other men. One of the two original men actually texted her not to worry as things like this were becoming more a societal norm, which is complete bullshit.
3. Having said that, the practice of "wenching" was common amongst certain men, which involved picking up young women in bars of a certain class, that being the desperate underclass. This pretty clearly crosses over towards the topic of prostitution pretty quickly. Having said that, this definitely occurred.
4. On another note, not one of the very few men I knew who were in fraternities at the University of Wyoming graduated with a degree. This caused me to be surprised when I learned that a long time partner of mine had been a member of the same fraternity that two individuals I knew, who did not graduate, hate been.
I should note that one of those two fellows, while he did not graduate, didn't live in the frat house the entire four years either, and later went on to become a millionaire.
5. Motto of the U.S. Army, first adopted in 1778.
6. The topic of birth control has not come up here.
7. Ingalls actually has claimed that Jane Does sodomized him, and he's a sexual assault survivor. Oh please. At any rate, their joint actions on the girl were perverted, but frankly, her acceptance of being engaged in sex with both at the same time is also perverted.
Kretzschmar maintains that he was not part of the rape at all, and what he did was to go into the room and check on things. This seems to be more or less correct. His sin, here, is one of omission. He knew that something was going on and did nothing.
8. Contrary to what people might expect, middle aged men are often way stronger and more adopt in a fight than young men are.
