Is Rape a Crime?

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.

Caro, do you want to do the honors? And just, like, give us the high points as you understand them.

Sure.

This is a story that blew up, I would say, was it several weeks ago? Yeah.

And it was actually reported by the student newspaper.

And so TLDR, a young woman, claims that she experienced an incident of gang rape at one of the fraternities, Chi Phi 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 doxxed.

Their identities of the seven boys who are allegedly involved in the gang rape have been doxxed.

And 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've seen kind of seized upon most that have stuck out to me as like particularly relevant.

Number one is the technology.

This is kind of a rare.

Yeah.

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 Snapchat group messages that I haven't really seen discussed much but feel really relevant to me and 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 Kai-Fi 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.

Anyone 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 in two radically different ways on either sides of this debate.