Is Rape a Crime?

Okay, ha ha. Wow, back in the saddle. Today's episode was brought to you by an interruption to Carol's maternity leave to talk about a really upsetting topic. Helen Andrews, again, somehow. Louise Perry, again, somehow. The male loneliness epidemic, again, somehow. The Cornell Sun, an issue we pretty much figured out roughly 40 years ago, but about which we insist on acting surprised every single time. And the fact that the free press published so much heroingly stupid material about this crime that I had no choice but to finally break down and hand over $10. So I could read it all. Oh, my God, you subscribed? I would have given you my subscription. That paywall got me. Oh, my God, I can't wait to read it. But it meant that I could read Tyler Cowan's piece, opinion, Elizabeth Holmes, should not be in prison, which was a treat. What was his argument? It was basically that like women shouldn't be incarcerated. Like let women do what color crime? I was like, "Hell, yeah, brother." Let women be awful. Seeing the free press publish something that's basically anti-carceral was not what I was expecting in 2026. That's amazing. The power of Nathan Fielder. Of course you theory at work. Mm-hmm. Caroline, how are you feeling that this is your first post-birth recording? And we're talking about this topic. Like, is this cruel of me? No, no, no. It feels right. I feel like if there is one thing that I have realized after giving birth, it's that the rage only increases as you get older as a woman. So I'm feeling grateful and humbled that you've given me this opportunity to channel it. Perfect. Well, I thought if there's one topic that Caroline can rip on for hours without any-- It's great rape. This is my poetry. I told her I was like, "Dude, I'm going to bring to you a carefully constructed chessboard of an outline." And you're going to walk up and just flip the table and be like, "Nope." Very briefly as an explainer for why I'm a gang rape aficionado. I have said before that I wrote numerous fiction manuscripts and went to grad school before I sold yesterday. My second manuscript was what I worked for for five years. And it was kind of a fictionalized retelling of an alleged incident of gang rape that was reported at the University of Virginia, my alma mater, and then kind of proven to be discredited in a very viral way. It was a rolling stone report called a rape on campus. And also at my master's, I wrote my thesis on depictions of sexual assault and consent or lack thereof in literature. And whether or not writers are reinforcing tropes or basically deconstructing them. And I kind of analyzed that. Oh. Yeah. Where'd you come down on that one? I didn't let it come down. I used examples of writers that basically deconstructed it really well and deconstructed these paradynamics. And writers who were essentially reinforcing false myths around rape and sexual assault within their writing. Oh, fun. Okay, well, I will look forward to areas. You call me out today if I'm inadvertently reinforcing tropes. That'll be a fun. I'll call you in. A fun metal layer for this conversation. Oh, man. Okay. So when I was trying to think about the scope of this conversation, which feminist scholars, so not podcasters, have been studying and discussing for centuries and not weeks as I have. I kept coming back to one central question, which is, is the cultural conversation or the debate that is playing out right now about this case, moving us closer to or further away from understanding rape and sexual assault. So my goal today is just to like move us a little bit closer. Carol, do you want to do the honors and just like give us the high points as you understand them? Sure. So we are a young woman claims that she experienced an incident of gang rape at one of the fraternities kayfai at Cornell. This happened, I believe a year ago, and the university allegedly didn't do much in response to her claims. She has since filed a lawsuit. Her identity, I think, has since been doxed their identities of the seven boys who are allegedly involved in the gang rape have been doxed. It has just become the latest cultural touchpoint for conversations around sexual assault and consent and Greek life and everything in between. Many such cases. So I want to highlight a few elements that I have seen kind of seized upon most to that have stuck out to me as like particularly relevant. Number one is the technology. This is kind of a rare one of the only rare elements of what happened actually is that we have group chat screenshots in which the men advertised free pussy asked whether the shop was still open. That's a direct quote suggested you could quote just walk in and whip it out and described participation in terms like Diego went seven minutes ago. You also have texts between Jane Doe and some of the men in the group chat in the days and weeks following the event, which are usually integral to the op-eds that argue that Jane Doe is lying that she is misrepresenting what happened. But one major piece of the snapshot group messages that I haven't really seen discussed much but feel really relevant to me in the conversation that we're going to be having today is that they were interspersed with messages from members saying things like I fucking love kayfai. And sending little hearts to one another that felt relevant. That leads me to number two, which is the fact that her understanding of what happened evolved in the days following this event and some have interpreted that as proof of deception and have kind of seized upon that as proof of deception. Any one familiar with the psychological effects of sexual trauma knows that this is really a textbook fawn response where your brain tries to protect you from the experience of what has happened. So you kind of have the same behavior being interpreted into radically different ways on either sides of this debate. Then there's number three, which is in some ways the largest focus in the media, which is the legal and the criminal components of this. So for example, her civil suit is arguing that her level of intoxication meant that she was not able to meet the consent standard at all, which is a particular interest in the state of New York where quote voluntary intoxication does not preclude you from consenting in criminal law. So there's a real argument happening around the question of legal consent in this case as well. When it comes to the criminal side of things, we know now that the statement that police sent to the DA left out what is any reasonable person, I think, would consider key context. And that the DA declined to investigate further when more evidence was provided. So this is something that does the attorney bringing her civil suit has since said in interviews that at first he thought the cops were incompetent and then the further he got into it, he was like, oh, they tried to give more evidence to the DA. Forgive me if I'm wrong, Katie, but didn't this young woman, Jane Doe come to the police and basically report this incident of alleged game rape relatively quickly in terms of like victim time frames. It was within a few weeks of the incident, right within weeks, which is quite quick. Yes, so the fact that she was there within weeks, some are like, why did she wait weeks like week weeks that's rapid. Yeah, people have pointed out as well that the DA's explanation seems very counterintuitive like he put in a report, you know, she said it was voluntary conscious and consensual. It's like, well, nobody really goes to the police to report consensual sex and it has since been revealed that in the original hours long interview with police, she said that she knew with 100% certainty she had been raped. So something is not adding up there. But as we know, the legal standard for proving rape is extraordinarily high and we're going to get into that today. So those three major focus areas in the media aside, I'm going to add my own fourth dimension here today, which I think is maybe my primary area of interest, which is, do we understand what happened to her as a violation and why or why not. So the public response has split into two very predictable camps with various degrees of decorum around their core position, which is either a, this is obviously a horrific violation. Which I think you kind of see like in the Kate man interview on caller daddy, they're talking about it as like the premise is agreed upon like what happened was fucked up. Now the question is like what should happen to the perpetrators, but I was kind of watching that being like it's funny because they're taking for granted a premise that like a not insignificant portion of society still is not convinced about right, which is this other side, which says essentially well, what did she expect when you get that fucked up and you agree to a three some. Yeah, things are going to happen to you essentially like it's not clear at all to those people that anything that happened her was a violation. We the public only know about this more widely now because doe filed a civil suit, which is public and to your point, the Cornell Sun published her story. It was reported that originally do wanted to use her real name in this lawsuit as a sort of like any also this is tying us back to the Jeffrey Epstein episode because once again local journalism is doing what like the legal system will not do and essentially forcing the matter. So shout out to these student journalists, diabolicalized subscriptions for life. I know that you guys are waiting for that. Yeah, I actually saw I was listening to I listened to a lot of different media covering this case like I listened to the Megan Kelly show I listened to like the crooked media empire. What did the pod save guys have to say about this? I listened to hysteria, which is the like the lady show on crooked. I want to know what Scott Galloway and the pod save guys have to say about this. Let's do a quick Google. OK, it does not look like they covered it hysteria covered it the women's. podcast. Well, that's worth noting ladies. This is a ladies issue, right? This is what ladies talk about. Not guys. Why would men talk about this? So I listened to hysteria about it. I listened to the Megan Kelly show about it. The whole range of like conservative to liberal media. And I thought that there was a really good point on the hysteria pod, which was essentially that like a lot of the cases that have these like viral. It wasn't true movements like the UVA case started at the national level. That was the first place the story broke, whereas this one broke on campus and then kind of bubbled up from there. And so they were sort of pointing out that like the comparisons between the two as like, this is just another duke lacrosse scandal or whatever. Oh my god, the duke lacrosse scandal. I'm realizing that we might have some younger listeners who don't know what the duke lacrosse scandal was. The TLDR is that it is one of the only examples in modern history where a woman has basically been proven to have fabricated or manipulated a situation in order to like quote unquote punishman for something they didn't do. And it is referenced ad nauseam in these situations like this one incident in a sea of other incidents that that clearly have happened. And so it is always the duke lacrosse case happened probably 20 years ago now. And it is still referenced with glee from people on the right. I saw somebody compare false accusations of that nature like big splashy false accusations to plain crashes where they were like, it's not that it never happens. But it's not like the rule by which you should be judging how you're going to get from point A to point B. It takes such an outsized role in our imaginations around this issue. There's a JFK connection there. But I don't know how to make it. I don't sleep. I don't sleep enough anymore. But there there's a joke there to be made with with the Kennedys. So if anyone wants to fill them in for me, this will fix it. The name, the allegation, the media spotlight, it's the most celebrated court case of the year, the William Kennedysmith trial, live coverage throughout the day today on CNN. Okay. So it was reported that originally Doe wanted to use her real name as a sort of like, I have nothing to be ashamed of. Like I'm not hiding anything. You can use my name. But her attorney convinced her this is going to get ugly. Good attorney. And using a pseudonym is in your best interests, they're going to find out who you are anyway. Her identity has been linked online. And she is constantly fielding threats. I believe within the last week her house was swatted. So there are real world consequences now for her having come forward with this. So as it stands, the legal status across the three major levels of liability is this. There's title nine, it's like the university level consequences. Those actually seem like the only consequences that have really come down. The fraternity was shut down in Bard from campus. Two of the students were expelled. Five more received like a range of sanctions. But all of this is confidential. Like title nine has confidentiality rules. So we don't actually really have specifics. But for my read, this is like one of the only areas where consequences followed. Criminally, no charges were brought. And Kathy Hogan has assigned Latisha James to reinvestigate. And I bet still remains to be seen, whether anything will come of this civil suit beyond like a national media firestorm. So I want to start today by looking at a particular strain of this discourse that I found particularly troubling and that I was surprised to see get so much play. Something I noticed was how much of the conversation has been siphoned off into questions about whether so-called sexual liberation or a sexually permissive culture is to blame for what happened to Jane Doe. So we're going to review three examples of how this has unfolded. This is our first one. This comes to you from the esteemed Louise Perry. Louise Perry watch your six. I'm working on an episode that is exclusively for you. So your migraine should be starting now and will probably reach its native at end of January. Louise Perry has a problem with caro, has a problem with Osama bin Laden has a problem with women. You're not supposed to tell that she's going to get a demand letter ready. I want her to get ready. I want her to bring her best outfit to the court hearing. So tell me what Louise had to say. What did Louise have to see? Cease and assist loading now. Okay. Louise Perry's article for the Wall Street Journal is called how the sexual revolution led to Cornell. Oh my god. She's such a fucking one trick pony. So pretty clear cause and effect. Here is how Perry describes the case. Do you will please read? When did we cover Perry? We covered Perry in the reactionary feminists episode. Yeah, so a while ago. So she's like basically made a name for herself because she's one of the gender traders who move to the right and will like bounce around podcasts on the right being like the pill is why women get raped or whatever. Let's see. Let's see if she brings us back to the pill. Clocking in as Louise Perry. So it is for the eight people at the center of a case that has attracted enormous international attention. A female student at Cornell alleges she was gangraped in 2024 by seven male students, all members of the Chi-Fi fraternity house. It is impossible at this stage to be sure of exactly what happened since the accounts are contradictory and confused. She's like the boys say they didn't and a lot of alcohol was involved as well as the drug ketamine. By her own account, the young woman known in court records as Jane Doe not only consented to but actively sought out a drunken sexual encounter with the first two men. The controversy surrounds the remainder of the night during which at least one of the men treated Jane Doe like an object, advertising her free availability to his buddies. She has now filed a civil lawsuit and the criminal investigation has been reopened. Jane Doe's real name and photographs are circulating online as are the real names and photographs of the Cornell seven. All of their lives will be permanently marred by that night, not because of the raping, but just because of their photos online. Okay, and here is her argument. Oh, I can't wait for this. The students of 1968 didn't understand what it was they were rebelling against. Oh, then once again, this is in reference to the sexual revolution. Once again, when does history start, Katie? When does the dawn of human history begin? Just the '50s or '60s. That's usually where we start. In the pre-conscious option era, yep, I knew. One trick pony and the trick is birth control. The community set restrictions on both male and female sexual behavior, not out of irrational prudishness or misogyny, but because unwise sexual encounters could very well lead to an unignorable outcome, the birth of a baby. Oh, so yeah, rapes didn't happen in the '60s. While the father of the child might be able to escape from his responsibilities, the hapless mother couldn't. And nor could her family or the witless bitch couldn't. My husband called me that this morning as a joke, and we have no husband. No, no, wait, he referenced himself as a witless bitch, and we are joking that it would be a great tavern name, a good tavern like in the UK. Okay, a new little person is everyone's business. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In this communist nation, we call America, we're all just raising each other's babies, everyone's business. That's why families used to pay very close attention to what their young relatives got up to. Universities used to operate along the same principles. Oh, do I have a story for her? The arrival of reliable contraception, yeah, and legal abortion in the modern era has allowed those in positions of parental authority to ignore the sexual behavior of the young people in their care in most cases. I'm just going to. I'm just going to. You want to say, sure, sure, sure, not a single citation has been offered for her. I was just going to ask because she linked anything. Has she linked anything? Or did she go to the Scott Galloway School of Research? Not a, not a hyperlink in sight, folks. Oh, and she just vibes, just vibes on what it felt like in the leave it to be for days. Okay, in most cases, both sides are amenable to this arrangement. Yep, since young people generally don't want to be subjected to restrictions on their sex lives and those in low co-parentists generally don't want to suffer the hassle and embarrassment of trying to injure fear. But there are instances where this goes badly wrong and the Cornell case is one of these. The only rule is that everyone must consent at all times, which sounds simple enough. But for a young man, this simple rule demands fine-tuned social judgment. Yes, it is a complex math equation to figure out if a woman is awake when you are fucking her. His libido urges him to seek out as much sex as possible. It's not in his control, as do his frat brothers, and the young male mind is adult when he is part of a pack. He must, this is the thing that they do. Basically, he's basically a hapless farm animal. He's a whittlest bitch. This is one of the things where I'm like, so are men geniuses who should hold all, all executive positions in society? Or are they so stupid that they cannot conceive of consent and sexual arrangements? Yeah, I just want to note, like, for all the times that we have been accused of being misandrists on diabolicalized, this shit is so sadalysts about men and they're being incapable of the most basic social interactions. It treats men as single-cell organisms. Okay, let me finish this. Clocking back in as Louise, he must seek out certain proof of consent from young women whose signals he can't reliably read again. I didn't know he didn't want me to put free pussy in the group chat. If you didn't want me to put it in the group chat. - You have to be specific. - You need to specifically tell me you don't want me to talk about you local farm animal. Is this woman he's never met before to drunk or just drunk enough? Oh my god. Does that body language indicated no even if she hasn't said as much? Yeah, okay. There is like a nugget of something interesting here about consent that we are going to talk about. And I think that like it is worthy of discussion, the fact that the consent standard is actually quite thin. However, my professional opinion is that this is fucking stupid. Would you like to share your thoughts? Yeah, my professional opinion. If Louise Perry can call herself an expert, then I'm a doctor and a lawyer. And what I have to say as both a doctor and a lawyer is that this woman is fucking tapped. And this is evidence. This is evidence of just how little you have to do to rise to the intellectual standards of the right. And this is like our whole podcast. It's like the one book theory for a book's could kill. I've got the one bitch theory for these people on the right. And these women always go back to birth control. They always claim the most outlandish claim in the series about landish claims is that sexual assault was not prevalent prior to contraception. That contraception indicated the dawn of sexual assault. It's so easily disprovable. I think is what's fascinating to me that it really it speaks to me to how much we don't care about women that we can have like New York Times podcasters interviewing Louise Perry and no one cares to bring that up like that. It doesn't blow my mind that people on the far right will peddle these claims. It's that like she will get laundered into like neoliberal mainstream legitimacy. I mean, she was on Ross douth. It's podcast. I'm pretty sure talking about me. And like the idea the idea that we can so easily disprove this, but people never take the time to is just an indication of like how it's like when we talk about late term abortions where it's like we know that this isn't a thing and we just don't care about women's issues. And we think rape is a women's issue. Well, we don't take the time today. Free press, your goat is washed. Hate to hate hate to tell you. Okay. This next one is in the New York Times. This is by a woman named Christine Emba. And the the headline is the Cornell case exposes what we can't say. Okay. What is Christine Emba's background? Do you know? So Christine Emba wrote a book called rethinking sex a provocation. She makes a similar but even more specific recommendation in that book. I'm going to just disclaim. I have not read the book. I've just read kind of like coverage of it. But she is essentially arguing for what she calls a new sexual ethics. So I think there's actually like again a version of this argument or components of it that I would agree with like we owe one another more than meeting some minimum legal definition of consent. What I find troubling about that argument is that I think it lends itself to some moralizing around sex that gets challenging very quickly. Though like I said, I have not read the book. I am actually more interested though in this particular article because of a corollary part of her argument, not that particular, not her like core beat. So this one is interesting because there is something about what she is raising here that I think is actually fairly similar to where I want to go today. But the reason that I'm using this piece as indicative of this, you know, broader trend in media about the case is because of her premise that this incident is somehow representative of uncharted territory, that it's reflective of how our sexual culture has gone awry. So I'm going to have you read this now. Campus sexual assault isn't new. Okay, I'm tracking. Something about this case, the coarseness, the extremity, the failure of trusted institutions to forcefully respond has triggered widespread revulsion, a sickening shared sense that a boundary no one thought to name has been broken. It has attracted a different kind of attention as well, with some observers defending the perpetrators, some interrogating the rush to judge them. There are discussions to be had about agency, responsibility and justice, but we don't have the shared language to talk about what exactly went wrong. Not that we aren't trying to talk about it, it's just that our public conversation feels quibbling and adequate to the outrage at hand and insensitive to the victim's humanity. Where does this fall under New York state laws? Don't some women like rough sex? Was it a rape or was it just a bad experience regretted after the fact? The last question is that the heart of our shrunken moral vocabulary. Consent has become the consensus standard of our time, a compromise between her body, her choice, sex positivity, and a societally necessary condemnation of sexual violence. The consent standard is meant to remove ambiguity without prescribing a larger framework, sex without consent is rape and rape is a crime. The certainty of those categories fits neatly into our existing accountability mechanisms, as defined by the legal system. Anything outside of rape is a personal affair. In a society that treats judging others as inappropriate or at least unfashionable, consent has the appeal of being values neutral. It defines harm without requiring anyone to make the case for the certain idea of the good. Our reliance on consent, as the ultimate arbiter of acceptability, has left us unable to recognize and critique bad behavior outside of its narrow definition of criminal sex. After all, consent here is a legal criterion, not an ethical one, a floor, not a ceiling. It defines the bare minimum, but it doesn't define the good. The gap between legal and decent is where moral criticism does its work, but a lack of a moral language strips us of the nuance needed to empathize with victims and to come up with a social, not just a juridical response. Without that vocabulary, it's difficult to express what we want our shared sexual culture to look like. Okay, when I read this, I took this to mean we don't have the shared language to describe what happened here. We are in somehow like an uncharted, unintended, unforeseen territory because of a libertine shift in the culture or one that refuses to set forth moral standards for what good sex is. And I think in some ways, both this article and the one we read previously, treat what happened here as like an out of bounds instance of sexual pleasure, or like what happens when pleasure seeking goes too far. I think that there are elements in this article that I find a lot of common ground with. I do think that the conversations around consent very often seem to ignore like the realities of human behavior, the complications of power dynamics, the strangeness of just like eroticism. There are elements of this that I actually do agree with. And I think the thing that frustrates me is, or the thing that to parse out is that we have the actual instance that everyone's talking about, which is this alleged case of gang rape at Cornell, which is to me, it's quite clear. Like, that's why I was joking about Louise Perry. I'm like, it's quite clear that these men to me knew what they were doing. I don't buy that these guys didn't know that they had crossed a line. And I think on the phone calls with Jane Doe, some of these men, I think are admitting to knowing that they crossed a line that like they invited another guy or whatever. But I do think when you cross over into the conversation that is being had around this case, which is a more broad conversation around consent and sexual assault, specifically, I do think that there is a conversation worth having here where it's like, yeah, a lot of instances of sexual assault, we don't currently have a clear language of consent or an awareness of the complications of sexual behavior. And I think we treat both men and women like idiots in the way that we talk about it. And we don't equip them. Yeah. Okay. I agree. On its face and contained in just the four corners of this article, I was like, there, there is a lot here that I think is worth discussing. But it doesn't feel relevant to the case that we are actually talking about. It's like we're using the most obvious example in the fucking world and we're still not clear what happened. Exactly. That was where I was like, we, we, we actually do have the shared language to describe what happened here. We actually know it's called gang rape. We actually know exactly what went wrong. And we're going to spend the next hour getting into the details of just how well we know that this is what went wrong. Okay. And on that note, we're going to move on to piece number three. This is the sexual revolution failed Jane Doe by Larissa Phillips in the free press. What's Larissa Phillips' background? I don't know. But I'm sorry to think that these are just like AI agents that have been trained by Barry White. This is the article that finally coaxed my $10. This is her bio. She's a contributing writer for the free press. She lives on a farm in upstate New York. Fuck yeah. That is her credibility. Love it. Other titles for the free press. Should I get a gun? Teaching immigrants the Bill of Rights, the death of the summer job, saving a lamb from the slaughter, homeschooling isn't for everyone. I thought my marriage was broken. Then I stayed in it. I was a gentle parent. Then my kids discovered the county fair politics almost ruined our friendship here. So we saved it. I'm finally hanging my American flag. I actually think we referenced that one in the very wise episode. So okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'm finally hanging my American flag because because it's so verboten in America today to hang an American flag. All right. Let's see what you have to say about the sexual revolution. The diabolicalized universe is just one overlapping Russian nesting doll. Fuck. I would say it's growing, but it's really not. It's the same AI agent over and over again. It's really not. It's quite incestuous. It's just one woman who lives in a farm in upstate New York. It's giving me a word for it. So okay. Okay. This piece really leans on and the text messages that we're talking about. were exchanged in the days following the event as much of the skeptical reporting does in which dose says quote none of the sexual stuff was illegal. Okay, I'm going to have you read Larissa Phillips, please clock in as Larissa Phillips. Clocking in as a woman who has proudly decided to hang her American flag once again. Brave courage. Courage. Who was bravely bought an American flag to hang outside of her front lawn. Okay, reactions have run the gamut ranging from those who think the girl was voluntarily if drunkenly engaging in a ribald sexual act to those who think she was gang right normally. Her inebriation would have been a staunch point in the legal proceedings, but a New York state voluntary intoxication is not considered the same as mental incapacitation. Legally, you can still consent even if you are very drunk. In response to the outrage, governor Kathy Hogle proposed closing the loophole. The conservative commentator Matt Walsh, oh, here he comes insane to cite him as if he's like just a guy. Is that conservative commentator? Would we call him? Is that what he's writing Matt Walsh? Yeah, right. Um, just a reasonable man, just a conservative commentator concerned father, really, just a concerned father. Cause yeah, I was going to say mild politicians to Dom Hussain has observed as a man with a daughter. I feel as a guy with a penis conservative commentator Matt Walsh has observed that if this were the way the law worked, quote, then she is a rapist. The men were drunk too. Got him iron cloud logic. Indeed, the New York Post has reported, okay, so this is her, her, her site so far she's citing Matt Walsh and the New York Post. I just want to keep track of that indeed, the New York Post has reported that when questioned by campus police, one of the Cornell seven claimed he was too drunk to consent to sex with Jane. Whether or not you think this incident was rape, I just love that it's like the girl said it was rape. And she's like gray area. The New York Post has come down against you. So I'm going to say it's a both side situation and what does it say about the, the, the women that we are quoting that this is the more evidentially supported argument, right? Right. Right. Okay. Whether or not you think this incident was rape, it seems clear that none of the people involved were in control. Jesus fucking Christ. It really does seem clear, Larissa, that is very clear. This sex happened in a fuzzy gray area. Yes. Writing free pussy in your Snapchat group chat and having the time in the were with all to walk down the stairs to another room to rape a young woman sure does seem like a fuzzy gray area. Consent seems to have existed in some form at some point, but in the cold light of the days that followed and seen through the eyes of the campus commentary it, the event came to feel questionable and then wrong. As we argue over who or what was to claim the men, the woman, the alcohol in their systems, I'm left wondering if this case is a natural consequence or perhaps the logical endpoint of the sexual revolution, which I once considered my generation to be so fortunate to be a part of this is so classic free press. This is so classic like, well, I'm a liberal, but like I used to like the sexual revolution but now I'm starting to wonder, I used to slot it up with the best of them for fries. I enjoyed my fair share of sex, but now that I can get paid 50 cents on the word from the free press, now I'm going to disagree. This is the clearest example to me of the way this style of article tries to walk a very thin line, not by blaming the victim directly, but by claiming that like, well, who can really know? Who knows? Who can say? Nobody blamed for what happened, nobody was in control and like nobody has any agency over what happened here. Nobody can be held responsible then, which is like very convenient. Now, Carol, you and I had talked offline about how this tidy little argument that like the sexual revolution is a straight line to gang rape is completely at odds. Actually. Incredible domino meme. The small domino is the woman wants to control when she has baby and big dominoes. Press a Phillips and Louise Perry just high-fiving at the free press. This is completely at odds though with how rape functions in like every other context. So when soldiers rape prisoners of war or when incarcerated people rape other incarcerated people or when guards guards and police rape prisoners, I say agents. It is conspicuous to me that the free press had so much to say about the causes of rape in this context. This is a very long article, we're going to read through a lot more of it. This is like thousands of words. And yet the only time that the IDF's well-documented rapes of Palestinian prisoners are covered at all in the free press is in a single piece that claims it's not happening, that it's a conspiracy. So like is the IDF to sexually liberated, are we going to get a think piece about that at some point? Like there is just, there is really no consideration of the fact that gang rape and everything that we know about it kind of fits a very similar psychological profile across these different contexts. And this is the only one that we that is really ever like focused on and it is typically used to argue that like women sexual liberation was was basically to their detriment. Well, and I think this is why the only conversations around gang rape that our society is willing to have are ones that are related to fraternities. This pops up every five or six years, we all claim we're having a revelatory conversation about it, but we can only ever talk about it in a context where we are basically arguing about, quote, unquote, what happens in a dark room with a bunch of white guys and a white girl. There is never any conversation about the black community, there's never any conversation about the fact that rape exists across numerous different power dynamics and that's intentional. Purple perpetrator rape, which is like how it's referenced in the research and, you know, in the more like academic settings, we know a lot about what causes this and why it happens. This piece is especially strange because the author begins by describing her youthful rebellion. She talks about drinking and making out with boys at 14, like embracing her sexuality freely before an assault by her classmate, which was physically aggressive in nature, but not sexual as like this guy like tackled her to the ground and like in front of a bunch of other kids in the auditorium, basically scared her into cautiousness. So she like describes viscerally understanding in that moment the physical difference between herself and her male classmates and essentially like instilled in her a fear of being harmed by these men that she went to school with. Then as an adult, she is raped by two strangers in a horrifying crime. Marissa Phillips is. Yes. She is walking down the street, like I think she's walking home from a movie is how she describes the only type of rape that we accept. It's like a burglar kicked her down it. Okay. She is yanked off the sidewalk. She is dragged into the woods and she is raped by two men terrifying. This is how she describes the event and like deploys it within the context of her broader argument. I just want to note really quickly. Number one, Larissa Phillips, I'm sorry that happened to you. You won't fight for your own rights, but I will certainly fight for yours. But number two, I genuinely think that there must be editorial standards at the free press where editors work to ensure that these stories all function in the exact same way, because this is the Louise Perry School of like right, but it was like I used to drink a lot and be free and then I realized that like I was putting myself in situations where I didn't understand a natural power dynamics. It's like how I talk about conservatism exactly and then it's like they have to pick like a situation which she now gains subjective experience so it's like, okay, this happened to her. I'm not denying that it happened to her, but it's the only form of rape that people on the right accept, right? Which is like a stranger kicks you down, drags you, pushes you away, you had no control over it. But like if it's someone you know, you could have avoided that. And then she gets into like why we should all know better and it's like, well, you can't go to a bar. You can't go to a fraternity. Like then you're just asking for it and I learn not to ask. Okay. I shouldn't read the rest of the article. No, I'll read it. I'll read it. Sorry. God, shut the fuck up. I could write for the free press. Maybe I should. I should do some ghost. You need to get a pseudonym. Yeah. I'm going to get a pseudonym right for the free press and donate it to Palestine action. Okay. Let's go. Where he bites. Okay. Clock in his Larissa one more time. This is her describing the crime. There is quote real rape like this, which by the way proportionally affects lower income women, far more than women who go to college often goes unproscuted and rarely incites the level of outrage and fascination as do murky cases like whatever, like whatever happened, like whatever happened at Cornell. That event is the other thing, which some of us call rape, but which Roefe and others. Oh, they're talking about Kate. Roefe, Katie Roefe. I don't know. I don't remember. She's a contrarian. But which Roefe and others, including me, would call predictable fallout from a culture that is torn down millennia old walls that often brutally regulated sexual activity and purported to safeguard both the bodies and virtue of women. But we replaced them with nothing. Okay. So just to be clear, the millennia old walls are ones that protected us. I'm pretty sure the millennia old walls were rape. I'm pretty sure that it was just like a capital R rape. There wasn't even a term, women didn't even have, like women just had to have sex. Their rape wasn't even a term. That's how common rape was. We didn't call it rape. It was sex. Husbands just owned you and got to have sex with you whenever they wanted. We didn't even develop the term until I'll see myself. Larissa. I'm not needed. Larissa. I'm really not needed. Larissa. I want to give you a hug, a hot chocolate, and then we just have a long cut talk. We need to talk for a really long talk because I feel like you're misunderstanding something. Our sexual culture has torn down the, quote, "millennia old walls that often brutally regulated sexual activity and purported to safeguard both the bodies and virtues of women." And quote, "What I can only assume, she is referring to here, and I did find this in the research, is the fact that rape did used to be prosecuted more aggressively. That is partly true." Because nothing counted as rape. When rape was considered a crime against a man's property, it was treated more seriously than when it became a violation of a woman's body. That is true. That is true. Someone else's wife, then he can bring the, yeah, exactly. Because your chastity as a white woman was a token of family honor, that another man was stealing from your family. That's why things were prosecuted more firmly. Not because we used to actually think that women had any inherent right to their physical form. That was not what was happening there. I'm going to have you read an excerpt from a book called "Redefining Rape" really quickly. By the 15th century, oh, Katie, this must be, is this before the 1950s? I'm not including it. Sorry. The 15th said that is that 500 years before the 1950s? I am not comfortable with that level of scope. I would like to bring it way closer to the present. Can you please start your research with like 1950, when we went to the moon, let's start our conversations around rape. Nothing happened before Ronald Reagan was president. Yeah, yeah. Let's start with like JFK's ascendance and go from there. I'm really not comfortable with historical broadness like this. Okay. By the 15th century, the legal definition of rape in England had narrowed to apply to the theft of a woman's virtue, either a daughter's virginity or a married woman's honor. Was the crime appropriated the sexual rights of a husband, his assurance of paternity and family honor, the father or husband of a raped woman pressed criminal charge? Okay. Can I also just note here really quickly? This is also noting something we went from when men reported rape of women to when women reported their own rape and isn't it interesting how once women started reporting it, we don't believe it because women don't matter and are liars. Don't you think she was probably lying liars? Don't you think? So the protection that Phillips sort of wistfully describing here was inextricable from the fact that women were thought of as property. The other factor that makes this only partially true is A, who was punished for rape and B, who was considered rapeable, which we will return to, but we're going to keep going because I don't want to get off track. You don't want to give away the good stuff too early? Yeah. Because I know you're going to do that for me, so fix it in post. I want to do a Charlie Kirk style, um, change my mind thing with free press contributors. And I want it, but I don't want to argue with them. I want to try to make their arguments faster than they can say them. And I want us to do a Jubilee style thing where we are trying to get out the argument as fast as possible. And I just speak more quickly than them and just guess what their arguments are from start to finish. Okay. All right. Clocking in. So Larissa, okay, years later, my feelings about that assault in Italy are uncomplicated even somewhat heroic. I survived a brutal test on a battlefield of sorts, and my virtue was never in doubt. Oh wait. So she was assaulted in Italy. Yes. Even better, it never happened by an American. In an ideal world, women can safely walk home alone in the middle of the night, but we do not live in that world. And so there is a risk. And that night in Italy, I took it. In the aftermath, I experienced one undeniable benefit of the sexual revolution. My life was not effectively ended because of the stigma of rape. My family and friends and the world at large, even my grandparents, didn't blame me. I fought and was overpowered. I am not ashamed of what happened to me. The bars and hell. Yeah. The risk of walking at night. The risk is walking home alone. That was the risk that she took. Okay. And then here is the closing paragraph. Jando will not be the last. The sexual revolution gave a little thought to what would come next when high on LSD or Academy in our alcohol go fuck yourself or partying with strangers or traveling the world. We encounter men who are stronger than we are and rooter or horner or bigger jerks than the men we know. Those good men who were taught or know instinctively not to rape. Okay. Flag. Flag that run on sentence. There will always be girls and women who are bold or adventurous or desperate or confused enough to go up to the edge of the cliff, to taunt the boundaries, but they should prepare for the dragons they might meet there and so should the boys who go there with them. Go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself. Insane to make a point that's so dumb with such a bad mixed metaphor too. Yeah. Go up to the edge of the cliff and meet dragons. I'm like, "Grow pick one." Pick one. The dragons aren't at the edge of the cliff. Although it is a good reference because you want to talk about cultural hysteria. It was all of us watching Game of Thrones, which was a glorified rape fantasy of a show for like five years in the 2010s. That was nuts. That was nuts. I'm not ready to deconstruct my Game of Thrones fandom. All right, all right. We'll talk about that in our bonus episode. So thoughts? I'm going to put my anger aside because I actually don't even think this argument is worth my anger. I think it's so unbelievably stupid and intellectually bankrupt that it's just embarrassing mostly that these people make money peddling. I understand a lot of people believe these arguments and we're taking time to deconstruct them. But I just need to say, just because an argument needs to be deconstructed, it doesn't mean it's a good argument. It just means we've been culturally brainwashed. This is not smart. She's going back and forth between saying like these men are so strong. You can't overpower them and then being like, "Well, you're taking LSD and ketamine and they don't even know." And it's like, you don't even know what's happening. You're mixing so many arguments. This is so incoherent. You're just saying it's women's fault. That's really what we're all doing is we're tapping into our cultural hatred of women and we're like giving us a nice little watering hole for it, but it's like not a coherent argument at all. A whole lot of words to say she's a hoe. Right. Lots of words for that. Okay. So we've just gone through three arguments. All of them locate that hinge point in history. Where we went astray. Where things went off track. Somewhere around the sexual revolution. Some of them are making that argument more explicitly than others. They're literally saying this led to this or this failed this victim. But this strain of argument relies on the idea that instances of rape have been increasing since the 1960s and 1970s that you can draw a line from sexual liberation as a concept to sexual violence in this very specific way that it is a woman's tendency to have risky sex that has inadvertently increased the rates of assault. It is important to note that this argument that the sexual revolution has increased confusion between the sexes on what isn't is not okay. This is echoed by people on the left. This is echoed by liberal thinkers. So this is not something that just exists on the right. This is an issue where sort of similar to birth. I think there is a real weird diagonalism happening between the left and the right because we hate women. I do think there are worthwhile conversations to be had about how then this is a different thing about how women sexual liberation is used as a cover for violating them by basically saying like it's plausible that there was a presumption of consent because like she would be allowed to consent to have sex with me so my position is that she did but before we get into that I think at bottom what we have here is a measurement problem. It is very difficult to measure rates of sexual violence over time in part because things that we understand as rape today were not considered rape like 50 to 100 years ago and would not have been reported as such it was just called sex. And for example, as we probably all know by now, spousal rape did not exist like legally until I think it wasn't outlawed in all 50 states until 1993. L-O-L-Most of the 20th century, you couldn't rape your wife it like literally wasn't possible. Where was Bill Clinton? I wouldn't know where Bill Clinton was by the time rape was fully outlawed. Love the idea of like every time there's a reported rape being like I knew there was Bill Clinton's exact whereabouts. Let me give you a reference point. Same goes for how narrowly gendered the definition for a victim was. So for most of American history the law ended its enforcement treated rape as a crime against white women. Men were excluded by the statute enslaved women had no legal protection black and native women after enslavement ended technically speaking were routinely denied it in practice. We will come back to this in more detail but the point is most of the rapes that have occurred over American history were not considered rape and like were never recorded. So like we it's very difficult to measure how this has changed over time. And I would add the sexual revolution coincides with a number of other civil rights movements. Women's voices weren't present in the record. I feel like a lot of these people on the right are misunderstanding silence to noise as like rates of actual sexual assault rising and it's like no no no women just weren't not only were the laws not there but the voices weren't there either women were not allowed to speak about what was happening. Yeah there's like the reporting phenomenon which will get into a little bit how like we start to see rise after 2012 which is mostly attributed to the fact that people had a better understanding of sexual violation and were perceiving things now like oh wait I was violated like that. was not okay. What happened to me? Today, about nine and ten rape victims are women, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey or NCVS, though it's entirely possible that men are experiencing the same under-reporting phenomenon. So, like, I want to allow for that as well. But part of what we know now comes from that survey, the NCVS, which started collecting data in 1973. And what it shows is that rape declined, albeit bubbly, from 1973 until 1995. And even then, the report cautions that before a survey redesigned in, I believe, 1992, the survey did not ask respondents whether they had been victims of sexual assault, other than rape or attempted rape. So, the survey itself is strongly caveatting its own results. And even then, the rate of rape over the time in question post-feminist revolution is going down. The survey does not get data from a lot of vulnerable populations either, which admits children under the age of 12, people living in nursing homes, people experiencing homelessness, people living in military barracks. So, I say this not to suggest that the survey is not useful, but these numbers are under-reported. Like, we know that that's true. QJ under-reported, yeah. The point is, the data that we do have suggests that sexual violence has declined since the feminist movement of the 1970s. But even then, the data is noisy. It can be inconsistent. The nature of the crime means that the statistics are almost definitely under-reporting incidents. And when you expand the timeline and you go back over centuries, there's really no singular narrative of social change here. And so to get around all of this noisy data in lack of consistency, Luis Perry just bravely cites nothing. And finally, the moment you have all been waiting for, we have arrived at our capstone bad faith take. Helen Andrews. Helen Andrews. Come on down. Clocking in it. I don't know how much she weighs. 110 pounds wet soaking wet. Helen Andrews. Helen Andrews argued last year that wokeness is the feminization of our institutions. She was a guest on Rolly Polly friend of the show, Ross Douthits podcast, where she debated. She was arguing for separate but equal offices in 2026. That was her grand argument. She debated another conservative woman about which specific rights we should remove from women. In a conversation that was originally titled, did women ruin the workplace? Okay. This is her follow-up piece, did women ruin the frat party? I'm just kidding. It's called, it's called the great feminization comes to Cornell if you can believe it. Somehow, that's worse than did women ruin the frat party. She's really, she's like, she's really trying to coin the great feminization. She's got hats. She's got t-shirts. She's ready to rock. Caroline, I have been waking up in the middle of the night with excitement. So huge article.