There Is No Secular Remedy to Rape Culture

A woman’s lawsuit against a Cornell University fraternity alleges she was gang raped at a frat house party. I’ve read quite a bit of The New York Times’s extensive coverage. I believe to a functional certainty that this woman (“Jane Doe” in the documentation) was incapacitated through alcohol and ketamine. She has admitted as such. She’s also admitted that the beginning of the sexual encounter, which included at least two men right from the start, was “pretty OK” to her. Things eventually went badly, as more and more frat guys poured into the room. The men involved have told investigators that Jane welcomed their advances verbally.

I believe her story. I also believe the men’s story. Unlike many other campus sexual assault cases, I don’t think the bare facts of this particular incident are in much doubt. Most seem to agree generally about what happened. What they disagree about is what it meant.

I’m not going to litigate the case. We have juries and courts for that. I pray, as all Christians should, for justice to be done. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing observable or meaningful here.

Why #MeToo Failed

Back in the late 2010s, the topic of campus rape was massive online. It culminated in a 2014 Rolling Stone story that alleged a horrific gang rape at a University of Virgnia fraternity. That story was eventually debunked, the magazine was sued, and its author more or less lost her journalistic career. Freddie deBoer wrote extensively on this case, and I recommend his work.

I don’t mention the UVA case because I think the Cornell situation is like it. I mention it specifically because I think one thing Freddie warned about multiple times did in fact come true. The Rolling Stone article represented an editorial failure in a particular direction: the direction of, “Believe all women.” By tying activism against campus rape to a dubious social media mantra—and even worse, by suppressing warranted doubts about a suspect piece of journalism—people who care about preventing sexual assaults on college campuses greatly damaged their own cause. The debunking of “A Rape on Campus” became, by virtue of the movement’s choices, a vicarious debunking of many similar allegations.

This is a useful example of something important. Liberals think about rape and sexual assault in a way that has not borne meaningful fruit in the fight to prevent them. If MeToo was able to knock a few pervy celebrities out of the limelight, that’s good. I’m just not sure it was much of an achievement. What I tend to think is that #MeToo was shot through with deeply confused ethical reasoning, more than a dash of third wave feminism, and a fundamentally “online” ethos that prioritized immediacy and rhetoric over justice and social transformation. The progressive sexual ethic is effective at assigning legal categories based on legal arguments; e.g., something becomes “rape” if something called “consent” is not given. What progressive sexual ethics is really bad is understanding the realities that put most men and women in these kinds of situations to begin with.

I’m not talking of course about the men who stalk women in alleyways or push them against walls. I’m talking about the far more complex dynamics of casual sex, hook up culture, non-monogamy, and the inescapable asymmetry between male and female sexuality. Because liberal sexual ethics only understand consent and its presence/absence, it approaches every question of sexual morality as one of either two things: every encounter is either a passionate, remorseless, unequivocally positive thing that must be celebrated by any reasonable person, or else, it’s a man stalking a woman down a dark alleyway.

The Law Doesn’t Know What We Know

The Cornell story is striking for a few reasons. First, Jane Doe has been admirably transparent that, in addition to being inebriated, she did make herself sexually available for at least two men, neither of whom were a romantic partner. The New York Times also points out that Jane “came to understand” what happened to her as a rape after a bit of time had elapsed. Consider the following:

Around 11:15 a.m., [Jane Doe’s roommate] said, Jane Doe arrived home, still in her “big boots and small dress” from the night before, according to the roommate. She had consumed ketamine and had sex with multiple men, she told her two roommates. One roommate told investigators that Jane Doe did not use the word “rape” or “assault” yet.

It seemed like she was “in shock,” her other roommate later told investigators, “not really understanding the gravity of what she was saying.”

The next day, on Oct. 21, Jane Doe went to her “big sister” — a woman designated as a mentor — at Cornell’s Tri Delta sorority and told her there were rumors circulating that she was a “slut.” The big sister, a junior at Cornell, told investigators that Jane Doe added with a laugh that “unfortunately they are true.”

…That same day, Jane Doe received a text message from Jonathan Newell, one of the men she would go on to accuse of sexual assault.

“I just wanted to apologize for how things went down the other night,” Mr. Newell wrote. He then said that both he and Matthew Ingalls, another of the men she would later accuse of assault, both felt terrible for being too under the influence of drugs and alcohol to “shut it down and kick people out before it got way out of hand.”

Jane Doe replied and reassured him.

“At the end of the day non of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly i really liked being w u and matt,” she wrote.

Again, I’m not litigating the case. None of this means that Jane was not assaulted. I take a rather different conclusion. From the details available to the public right now, it seems to me that she was assaulted, by multiple men, and that she did consent to this assault as much as she possibly could given her physical state.

Legally, what I’ve just said is nonsense. No one can be assaulted consensually. Of course not. But this reveals a limitation of our law, not a limitation of sex. Our law cannot make sense of a punishingly exploitive and victimizing sexual encounter without understanding the object of that encounter as having zero real agency in the whole thing. But this kind of thing happens all the time. People allow horrible, traumatic things to happen to them for many reasons: Money, control, relationship, hope of a relationship, etc. That a person might invite these things to happen does not change the moral nature of what happened. A sexually brutish man does not cease to be sexually brutish because the women gives in. Her agency does not change his character. And neither does his character change her agency.

We understand this experientially, because we understand that our sexual personhood is not just about seeing which body parts can legally touch which others. It’s about our whole selves. Humans are not raw hormone factories. We want things. We don’t want other things. But the way these two categories intersect is as complicated as life itself.

It is not, however, complicated in exactly the same way for men and women. And herein lies the second mistake of progressive sex ethics. Not only does consent-or-no framework miss the reality of agency and desire, it severely misrepresents how agency and desire affect men and women differently.

Women are not vaginal men. Men are not penile women. Anatomy does not exhaust the different way men and women relate to themselves and to the world, but it does begin to reveal deeper differences. The presence of a womb inside a woman gives her a relationship to the world that a man does not quite have. A man’s sexual cycle gives him a relationship to the world that the woman does not quite have. Many have observed that the sexual ethics which emerged in Christianized societies were far more compassionate toward women than the ethics of the pagan and tribal societies. Why? Because the Christian societies saw women, not only as bearing the image of God (that’s true!), but as bearing the image of God as women. Women were neither animals to be owned, nor soldiers to send to war. They belonged neither in a brothel nor a barracks. All that blossomed into compassion began as knowledge. Christianity was, and is, compassionate toward women and men because it knows what they truly are.

The Best Consent Can Do

The liberal sexual ethic doesn’t know this. It flattens, relativizes, and eventually disowns the differences between men and women. And on this foundation, it builds massive artifice in which women are robbed of the very things that protect their natural vulnerability. Hook-up culture—the uncontested view that every 18 year old man and 18 year old woman has an inalienable right to sleep with whomever they want, whenever they want, for any reason they want—is rape culture.

Why? Because hook up culture throws men and women into a blender and asks them to figure out who’s going to come out ahead. By tearing down the moral, social, and logistical barriers to sex, hook-up culture makes sex a sport. And all sports must have losers as well as winners. Who are the losers of any sport? The ones who fall behind, the ones who aren’t as quick, the ones who have to linger and think about what’s happening to them and what they’re going to do and what everyone else is going to do.

Who does that sound like?

The minute that Jane took a drink and/or that hit of ketamine, she was losing the sport of sex. I don’t know exactly why she was there, or why she offered herself to those two men. Perhaps she was hoping that that night, even if it would never be one she’d tell her parents about, would end up being a happy part of her story. Maybe a story of falling in love. Maybe a story of becoming the kind of person everybody talked about. Maybe she was just determined to lose herself for a few hours. I have no idea. She might not, either.

Stuff like MeToo can’t really help Jane. Even if Jane ends up winning some money from Cornell, the fraternity, or the men who abused her, this isn’t really help. It's just insurance, like the kind of check you get for the value of your car after you are pummeled on the freeway and can’t really sleep or focus on anything for a long time. Our society has only consolation for sex’s losers. Our elites offer no real safety, no transformation, no deeper understanding, and certainly no meaning, to sex. When it comes to sexuality, consent-or-no ethics are like Pawn Stars. “Best it can do” is a few bucks.

There was a time when I was afraid to say it quite like this, but I’m not anymore. There is no secular remedy for rape culture. There’s just not. There’s nothing that works, nothing that resonates, nothing that actually changes how people and societies see each other. Without the Christian view of the body, a college campus turns sex into a sport which women will inevitably lose. Without the Christian view of the body, sexual assault activists will work for a world their very beliefs make impossible. The secular sexual ethic is a quest for fire without heat. It just doesn’t work. And even its momentary success will be pyrrhic. Lawsuits succeed inside the courtroom, while the birthrate plunges outside it. “Informed consent forms” and Human Resources seminars abound, while dating becomes a hellscape. Everyone keeps their hand to themselves, while giving their heart to a chatbot.