Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Consent and the "Cornell 7"

Transcript

Consent and the "Cornell 7" · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  I'm Josh Steps and you are Kat Rosenfield and we are, well, felled.
• 0:07
  No, felled.
• 0:07
  You were right the first time.
• 0:09
  Good.
• 0:10
  That's where my head always goes and then I second guess myself and I shouldn't.
• 0:13
  I should know that I'm a complete and whole human being and perfect as I am, like we all are.
• 0:19
  Except for the monsters who committed gang rape in Cornell.
• 0:26
  That's me.
• 0:27
  That's me.
• 0:28
  There you go.
• 0:29
  There you go.
• 0:31
  There's a funny thing I should say before we even begin.
• 0:35
  In non-American countries, it always seems weird to us the extent to which Americans prejudge the guilt of people who've been charged with a crime.
• 0:45
  Now, in this case, the guys haven't been charged yet, but it's against the law in Australia.
• 0:51
  I saw people, responsible people like Bill Maher will talk about...
• 0:56
  Luigi Mangione or something and say that he's the he's the shooter of the healthcare executive.
• 1:02
  He's on trial.
• 1:03
  You can't say that about somebody.
• 1:05
  Is your connection OK or am I stuttering?
• 1:08
  You froze twice and now it says my connection is unstable.
• 1:13
  But yeah, I don't know.
• 1:16
  This is this is probably me.
• 1:17
  Yeah.
• 1:19
  I don't know.
• 1:19
  It's always a little bit of a buggy experience.
• 1:22
  Unfortunately, there's work being done in my house, and for all I know, they've managed to knock a cable loose or something like that.
• 1:27
  No, blame me.
• 1:28
  It's all right.
• 1:29
  I'm sure.
• 1:30
  I'm in Manhattan where obviously nothing works, so it's like I could be doing this on the subway.
• 1:34
  Just...
• 1:36
  Maybe you are.
• 1:36
  Actually, no, it's too clean back there.
• 1:39
  That's true.
• 1:40
  Yes.
• 1:40
  But I think I can probably guess what you said, even though I heard basically none of it, which is that people are rushing to judgment and often operating based on a narrative that isn't necessarily true or accurate, but that they're getting from social media because we're all kind of existing in these like different silos where the story about what happened at Cornell is completely different.
• 2:03
  different depending on where you're getting your information.
• 2:05
  Is that about it?
• 2:06
  That's much more eloquent than what I said, which I actually said something which was sort of tangential, which was that once a person has been charged with a crime, which these people haven't, but once a person has been charged with a crime under the British inherited justice system, which Australia and New Zealand and presumably Canada
• 2:24
  use, it's against the law to talk about it in public as if the person is guilty.
• 2:31
  So it's always a bit baffling when an Australian, like I'll watch like Bill Maher and he'll talk about Luigi Mangione as the guy who shot the healthcare executive.
• 2:40
  In Australia, Ilmar would be fined for a contempt of court for saying that.
• 2:46
  First Amendment, baby.
• 2:48
  I know.
• 2:48
  But also, what about the right to an unprejudiced jury trial?
• 2:53
  Like, the man is fighting for his, you know, we don't know.
• 2:56
  Anyway, so there's that.
• 2:58
  Yeah.
• 2:58
  But I want you to tell people, the normies amongst us who only know the headlines about Cornell, before we get all philosophical about, like, consent and what it means to be human and what it means to have a penis or a pussy.
• 3:10
  I want to understand what the kind of narrative about the story is.
• 3:14
  And I just looked at the headlines today and it's like...
• 3:19
  I don't know if it's just my feed, but the Guardian headline is from seven hours ago.
• 3:26
  Here's what connects the Cornell alleged rape case to those before accused men not being held to serious account by Emma Brocks.
• 3:35
  There was progress after Me Too, but not enough.
• 3:38
  Certainly not enough to shift the assumptions that still protect men and denigrate victims.
• 3:43
  Another piece, the horror of the Cornell rape case is how ordinary it is by Laura Donegan.
• 3:48
  Many men rape.
• 3:49
  Many men giggle encouragingly or shrug indifferently when their friends rape.
• 3:53
  Many men rape and few seem to think that it's a very big deal.
• 3:58
  Good grief.
• 4:24
  There, yesterday, students occupied a dining hall on Cornell's campus for seven hours in solidarity with the seven-hour rape by seven male students.
• 4:35
  They encouraged students to stop spending money on campus yesterday.
• 4:39
  And on Monday, hundreds of students marched through the campus in a Justice for Survivors rally, and they wore purple ribbons and held signs with messages like Support Survivors.
• 4:48
  expel rapists.
• 4:50
  And the president of Cornell University says the university is going to examine the role of fraternities and sororities on campus because of this incident.
• 4:59
  Now, as I mentioned, no criminal charges yet, although the police are looking into it.
• 5:03
  What do we, how did this all come about?
• 5:05
  And what do we know about what happened?
• 5:07
  Okay, well, I mean, it's,
• 5:10
  Hearing all of the stuff that you've just said, including about what's happening on Cornell's campus is so dispiriting to me because it really just illustrates how spreading false narratives about an incident like this is not a morally neutral thing to do.
• 5:25
  You know, you end up creating a situation where people are terrified, you know, having an incredibly strong emotional reaction to what's happening.
• 5:33
  what they think is the truth.
• 5:35
  And it's, it's actually just like needlessly frightening people because everything that you basically just described, like the story being told in the headlines is not accurate to what is alleged even by the victim herself.
• 5:49
  So yeah,
• 5:52
  What happened at Cornell that we know for certain, and this is based on documentation that's come out, you know, the police report that she filed with the campus police back in 2024, stuff that's in the civil suit, stuff that has text messages, screenshots and so on that have emerged.
• 6:11
  We know that this 20-year-old woman in 2024, fall of 2024, went after a night of drinking at and with her sorority, went to a fraternity house, the Chi Phi fraternity house, to meet up with a friend, a male friend who she had a crush on.
• 6:32
  And when she got there, he suggested to her that they have group sex with one of his fraternity brothers.
• 6:41
  She agreed.
• 6:42
  They did some ketamine.
• 6:43
  They had some drinks.
• 6:44
  They went upstairs.
• 6:45
  They started to have sex.
• 6:49
  But the two guys, one of them, the one who proposed this entire encounter to begin with, couldn't stay hard and eventually just passed out.
• 7:00
  And the other one...
• 7:02
  kept dry heaving.
• 7:03
  And so he also was like, I can't do this.
• 7:06
  So then for a period of time... Dry heaving as in like he was vomiting because he was so dry.
• 7:10
  Yeah, he was going to puke.
• 7:11
  So real sexy, right?
• 7:12
  Like, you know, one guy's flaccid, the other one's vomiting.
• 7:15
  That's the kind of sex I've always wanted to have.
• 7:17
  Hey, it's college, baby.
• 7:19
  So they basically take a break
• 7:23
  Another man then enters the room and wants to get involved in the activity.
• 7:30
  And she then has consensual sex.
• 7:33
  This is according to, again, her report.
• 7:36
  She consented to do this.
• 7:38
  And when you say her report, we should probably just clarify for people.
• 7:40
  Right after it happened, she... Three weeks after she went to the campus police.
• 7:45
  Yeah.
• 7:45
  So a couple of years ago, she went to the campus police.
• 7:48
  It's also weird to my Australian brain that they're a campus police.
• 7:51
  So like, this is not the police.
• 7:53
  Are they?
• 7:53
  Oh, other can of worms.
• 7:55
  Yeah.
• 7:55
  What does that mean?
• 7:56
  This is, you know, college campuses have set up this like extra legal bespoke, not court system, but it might as well be where they adjudicate police.
• 8:07
  sexual offenses so that the offense doesn't necessarily end up getting reported to the actual police.
• 8:14
  In this case, the campus police apparently took, you know, testimony from this woman, investigated, gathered a lot of documentation,
• 8:24
  And then sent something to the district attorney at the time and basically said, it doesn't seem like there's anything actionable here.
• 8:33
  It seems like this was all really gross and sleazy and horrible, but consensual.
• 8:37
  Just a quick question.
• 8:38
  Are the campus police actual cops or are they like mall cops who just wear like you just buy the uniform?
• 8:45
  And like, do they can they arrest people and put them in a cell?
• 8:49
  Yeah.
• 8:49
  I don't know.
• 8:51
  It's been a while since I was in college.
• 8:53
  I know it's hard to believe being 23 years old.
• 8:56
  You are, obviously.
• 8:57
  Look at me.
• 8:58
  But I mean, it sounds like there's, you know, sometimes like Silicon Valley nerds will propose some libertarian idol, which they're going to build off the coast of, you know, Greenland or something.
• 9:07
  And it's going to have its own laws and its own taxation and everything.
• 9:10
  Some Ayn Randian universe.
• 9:12
  You already have it.
• 9:14
  It's American college campuses with their own.
• 9:16
  Yeah, yeah.
• 9:17
  To an extent.
• 9:18
  But look, I'm trying to get through this.
• 9:20
  So just let me try to lay it out.
• 9:22
  But my only point was to clarify for people the reason why you're saying that the way that she described it was perhaps more benign than the way that it's being understood or portrayed this week is that what you're talking about is something that happened a couple of years ago that was reported by her a couple of years ago, a few weeks after the event, which is distinct from what's being talked about now.
• 9:41
  Yes.
• 9:41
  Okay.
• 9:42
  So then there's, so at this point, there's one man asleep.
• 9:47
  The puking guy is joined by a third man who wants to have sex.
• 9:52
  And the, the woman and these two guys, while the other original guy, Mr. Limpy is asleep on the bed, they start to have sex.
• 10:01
  Then the first guy wakes up
• 10:06
  I think unbeknownst to the woman or necessarily anybody else in the room, sends a picture to the Kifi group Snapchat saying, free pussy upstairs, come whip it out, boys.
• 10:20
  Yeah.
• 10:21
  This guy, number one, we should just make a note that he seems very interested in having sex with his fraternity brothers and seems very keen primarily on getting as many fraternity brothers in the room as possible.
• 10:35
  Doesn't seem to care that much about the girl.
• 10:37
  I'm not going to speculate the reasons why.
• 10:40
  It's a very good, robust, straight thing to do, to have lots of hard penises.
• 10:45
  Yeah, you're like, you know what?
• 10:47
  This orgy needs like 1,000% more dicks.
• 10:52
  Listen, as a gay guy myself, I've always found it a bit weird when there are these scandals where these ultra straight rugby players are all like in a hotel room with like a couple of girls and there's like eight guys all naked, like banging someone.
• 11:05
  Everyone's upset, obviously, because it's degrading to the woman.
• 11:09
  But I'm always a little curious, like...
• 11:11
  was it just about the woman isn't there some there's some there's some stand-up guy it might be bill burr who's saying like uh you know he was watching porn where there's like a woman who's being like taken from both ends and like the guys are kind of looking at each other as they're doing it and he's like just give the woman the night off let her you know yeah yeah she doesn't need to be there anyway you know you make the eye contact i don't know how long did it last
• 11:35
  So, okay.
• 11:37
  Then other men, you know, as a result of this Snapchat message start turning up in the room.
• 11:42
  I guess three more guys come in, want to join in.
• 11:48
  And the woman says no.
• 11:50
  And so they don't have sex.
• 11:53
  But then...
• 11:56
  At some point, some guys snort ketamine off of her naked body, which she says okay to.
• 12:02
  Then at the end of the night, after somebody has come into the room and said, I think we need to break up whatever's going on in here, you know, some hero, nobody knows who this is.
• 12:13
  Um, then the woman, the first guy and the fourth guy to enter the room retreat to another room and have, according to her report, consensual group sex until it's now like five something in the morning.
• 12:29
  And she's like, I'm tired.
• 12:31
  I'm leaving, you know, so this has been going on for hours.
• 12:34
  Um,
• 12:34
  So basically, it sounds like a very long, gross, unsexy, kind of convoluted evening.
• 12:41
  And this is the report that she gave to the campus police three weeks later.
• 12:47
  Immediately after this happened, she seemed basically to be pretty okay with it.
• 12:54
  And then she found out that she was joking about it with her sorority sisters.
• 13:00
  And then she realized that...
• 13:04
  people on campus were starting to talk about it.
• 13:06
  And this is all, I'm basing all of this on the documentation.
• 13:09
  I'm not like speculating about her frame of mind.
• 13:11
  This is, you know, stuff that she said or stuff that she texted.
• 13:13
  She realizes people are starting to talk about it on campus, that everybody knows that the guys are telling people
• 13:19
  about what happened.
• 13:21
  And so she starts initially to do reputation management.
• 13:23
  She tells one of her sorority sisters, if somebody asks about this, say that it's not true.
• 13:29
  And she also starts talking to the guys who are like...
• 13:35
  One of them is concerned that there are these rumors starting to go around that the sex wasn't consensual.
• 13:41
  And she says, no, it was, you know, everything that happened was legal.
• 13:44
  I had fun with you and Matt.
• 13:45
  Like the next time, you know, that we do this, maybe let's have it just be you and me, you know, so on and so forth.
• 13:54
  Is that on the record?
• 13:56
  We have text messages of her saying, no, don't worry, it was consensual.
• 14:00
  Yes.
• 14:01
  Yes.
• 14:03
  Then, and she's excited to go back to the fraternity a few weeks later for their Halloween party.
• 14:12
  But this entire thing is starting to really pick up steam as a story.
• 14:17
  Everyone is talking about it.
• 14:20
  And she...
• 14:22
  is disinvited by the fraternity president from attending the Halloween party.
• 14:27
  He apparently called her and said, you can't come to this.
• 14:30
  It's for your own good.
• 14:33
  At this point, she sends an angry message to the first guy who was her friend saying, it always happens like this.
• 14:43
  You know, the woman gets thrown under the bus.
• 14:46
  And then very shortly after that, she went to the police and reported that she had been raped.
• 14:53
  And so it's...
• 14:58
  It's not for any of us.
• 14:59
  We're not a federal court.
• 15:01
  We don't know for sure.
• 15:03
  And there's still information that may come out here.
• 15:05
  But what this looks like for the moment and what the people investigating this concluded at the time was that nothing that happened was illegal, but a lot of what happened was against the Campus Code of Conduct.
• 15:21
  And two of the men, this is where we get back to the narrative that is being put out there that that she was gang raped brutally for seven hours by seven guys while she was like drugged unconscious and that they, you know, nobody suffered any consequences.
• 15:39
  None of that is true.
• 15:40
  Yeah.
• 15:42
  She had reportedly consensual sex with four men.
• 15:47
  She said no to three who, you know, respected the no.
• 15:52
  And after the end of the night, she reassured them that it had been consensual.
• 16:00
  But then she was not happy, ultimately, about the denouement to the entire thing.
• 16:09
  And so she reported that she had been assaulted immediately.
• 16:13
  And what happened to the guys is there were, I think, 12 Title IX investigations on campus, off campus.
• 16:22
  Just explain what Title IX is to non-American.
• 16:24
  Title IX is the statute that guarantees equal access to education and sport for women.
• 16:32
  And it is also the statute under which a lot of campus sexual misconduct is adjudicated.
• 16:43
  The tenets of which are not necessarily in accordance with what our criminal justice system is, like the standard of evidence for being expelled for sexual misconduct is substantially lower than it is to be put in prison for raping somebody.
• 16:57
  As it should be.
• 16:58
  Yeah.
• 16:58
  Yeah, yeah.
• 17:00
  Also, I should say, just as it should be, in case people think that this is going to look like a total right wing, like, you know, victim shaming episode or something.
• 17:09
  If you are a young man and you enter a room in which a drunk and, you know, semi out of a girl is surrounded by other young men, you don't text your buddies.
• 17:21
  Hey, there's some free pussy here.
• 17:24
  And you don't have sex with her and you don't like.
• 17:27
  do that.
• 17:28
  That is like, I'm not, I think you're not casting moral, like giving a moral hall pass to the conduct of the guys here, but rather trying to understand the way that the conversation is taking place amongst the rest of us.
• 17:41
  Yeah, I think it's important to, you know, we're talking about felonies.
• 17:46
  We're talking about an accusation of somebody having committed a felony, which if convicted, they would go to prison potentially for life.
• 17:52
  This is a big deal.
• 17:57
  specific, to be accurate, you know, to talk truthfully about what happened here and what it actually means.
• 18:05
  And, you know, it's unfortunate that to do that often results in being accused of being a rape apologist, which I'm not.
• 18:13
  I don't think rape is good.
• 18:14
  Don't do rape.
• 18:16
  Controversial opinion.
• 18:17
  You heard it here first.
• 18:18
  You heard it here first.
• 18:20
  And just to understand the, you know, I gave a little bit of a glimpse at the beginning about the way that it's being reported just from having opened my news apps this morning.
• 18:29
  But you, your piece in the Free Press and another, was it in the journal, your other piece?
• 18:34
  Yeah.
• 18:35
  Oh, I wrote something on my Substack.
• 18:37
  Yeah.
• 18:37
  There was a Substack one.
• 18:38
  Oh, that's right.
• 18:39
  And the free press.
• 18:39
  Yeah.
• 18:40
  In one of those, there's a link to some really interesting responses that have happened very prematurely.
• 18:46
  I'm just reading from The Hollywood Reporter here where on Sunday, Florence Pugh, the actress, spoke out on social media about this, saying this is really the moment where we need our men to be as horrified and as sickened as us.
• 18:59
  You need to be leading conversations about how we change the allowance and complicity of this behavior as much as we are.
• 19:05
  How can you expect us to trust that it's not all men when in moments like this, many of you stay quiet?
• 19:12
  There's also Josh Gabb, the actor who posted on social media saying, this isn't an oopsie daisy.
• 19:19
  This is a destruction of life.
• 19:20
  We are sending a profoundly disturbing message with our inability to hold anyone accountable that this is okay.
• 19:26
  The star of Heated Rivalry, the smoking hot Canadian hockey gay thing that I haven't seen.
• 19:32
  Yeah, you've never watched it.
• 19:34
  it i have my listen my husband loves it i watched the first half of the first of the pilot and i was like i mean if i wanted gay porn i'd just watch gay porn do i have to put up with bad acting and relationships that show that show is for straight women by the way right exactly yes
• 19:50
  So Hudson Williams, who's the star of that show, shared photos of the accused men.
• 19:54
  This is the other sort of imbalance, right?
• 19:56
  These guys are named and one of them has been expelled, I think.
• 20:00
  Both of the guys who she initially had sex with were expelled.
• 20:05
  This is important to just put a pin in because the narrative is that they suffered no consequences.
• 20:10
  No, they were.
• 20:11
  They were expelled.
• 20:12
  That's very, very serious consequences.
• 20:14
  Were they expelled before or after this latest blow up?
• 20:16
  No, at the time.
• 20:18
  Oh, okay.
• 20:18
  Okay.
• 20:19
  So Hudson Williams, the head of the star of heated rivalry, he shared photos of the men.
• 20:24
  And he wrote, arrest them, fuck them and fuck Cornell to AOC, the house representative, had a town hall in Ithaca, which is where Cornell is and said, this is a culture, this is norms, these are practices.
• 20:38
  And what we must do is understand that we cannot protect those spaces anymore.
• 20:42
  And she said that she said flat out that what had happened was that a young woman was
• 20:48
  and raped and, you know, gang raped, which, as you say, contradicts the actual, even the girl's, the woman's own testimony when she made it a few weeks after the event, which again is not, like I had one of those frustrating conversations last night, Kat, with a friend of mine.
• 21:06
  We were over dinner and she said,
• 21:08
  was just talking about this case because I said that I was going to be talking about it the following day, but she didn't know you or the valence of your point of view.
• 21:17
  And she, as a mother of a young girl, was just saying, I just feel so exhausted by the fact that the only people who seemed to...
• 21:27
  be taking a stand for young women's rights are other women online.
• 21:31
  And so many men seem to think it's okay to just drug and rape young women because they're not out there speaking out about it.
• 21:41
  And I tried to sort of do a little bit of Kat Rosenfield pushback, but it just landed for her as yet another man trying to make yet more excuses for why
• 21:53
  we shouldn't take seriously the safety of young women, especially on college campuses.
• 22:00
  And I wasn't sure what the most parsimonious response to that is.
• 22:05
  Can you help?
• 22:07
  It's a hard thing to have a conversation about because people are, you know, often operating with completely different sets of facts that aren't actually facts.
• 22:17
  There's sort of no shared
• 22:23
  I mean, this is where I get back to, you know, what I was saying earlier, that there's this kind of machine in place that's designed to push out this terrifying story about a young woman being drugged and raped violently for hours on, you know, one of the most elite college campuses in the country.
• 22:44
  And nobody cared.
• 22:46
  And if you take a step back and you just think about what kind of a place Cornell University is.
• 22:53
  and what kind of a place the United States of America is in 2024.
• 22:57
  And ask yourself, does that sound remotely realistic?
• 23:01
  Does this sound plausible?
• 23:02
  Does this sound like a thing that would actually happen that a woman was violently gang raped after being drugged, unconscious for seven hours on an Ivy League university campus and nobody cared?
• 23:14
  That's just not
• 23:16
  It's not plausible and it's not what happened.
• 23:20
  And I think a lot of people think it is plausible.
• 23:23
  I think a lot of women think, I mean, because of the information ecosystem that we live in and what you see, I mean, it depends on what you see coming across your feed, doesn't it?
• 23:33
  I mean, I think I know a lot of young women who.
• 23:37
  who would say that there is a frat boy kind of sports jock, institutionalized culture in which sort of rich old boys who sit around smoking cigars in their plush leather armchairs sort of give a nod nod and a wink wink to male misbehavior and say like, oh, well, boys will be boys and that there's a blind eye turned to sort of
• 24:04
  semi-rapey sexual encounters that should not be tolerated and that a lot of women are walking around either having had experiences that they can't be bothered reporting because they don't want to be dragged through the spotlight or afraid of having experiences that they have no way of judging in advance whether or not the man who they're entering a room with is
• 24:29
  going to press himself upon them or be violent in some way.
• 24:32
  And then there's going to be no real recourse without overturning their lives in the justice system.
• 24:36
  I think a lot of women do think that that is the world.
• 24:40
  I mean, if they think that it's because they've been told that, but it's a lie.
• 24:43
  I mean, I hate to be so strident about this, but it actually makes me very angry as a woman how we have spent the past 25 years or more, basically ever since the conversation about date rape on college campuses became front and center within the culture, which started in the early 90s.
• 25:04
  We have been feeding young women this, you know, very contradictory set of narratives, telling them that, number one, that it's empowering to have casual sex, you know, even with somebody they don't know well, that they should, you know, that they should desire this and that they should be able to do it, that they should be able to get as drunk as they want to and then, you know, go to bed with a man and, you know, and never experience any kind of
• 25:33
  Discomfort, either like during the moment or after the fact.
• 25:37
  But also we tell them that they're utterly powerless, that they lack agency, that they are, you know, so trained to be people pleasers that any pressure from a man will leave them incapable of asserting themselves.
• 25:50
  Sorry, I'm starting to like inarticulate because I'm mad.
• 25:53
  Yeah.
• 25:54
  We tell them that, you know, once you're with a guy, you're actually inherently so already on the precipice of victimhood by virtue of the fact that he's a man and you're a woman, that if you say no, there's a very good chance that you're going to end up being overpowered and he's going to be a man.
• 26:11
  going to force himself on you.
• 26:12
  And so, you know, it's dangerous to assert your boundaries.
• 26:15
  And so then women are persuaded that they just need to like give in, even if they're uncomfortable and don't want something, because it's like, I'm going to consent to sex I don't want, because otherwise this guy might make me have sex I don't want.
• 26:29
  It's a very kind of circular, weird, and ultimately really disempowering way that we talk to young women.
• 26:37
  I find it very frustrating because the
• 26:40
  The whole idea originally of the sexual revolution and of women's liberation was to tell young women, it is okay for you to decide when and why and with whom you want to have sex.
• 26:53
  And we should empower young women to seek out the sex they desire, if they want it, without being shamed for it in the same way that men do.
• 27:03
  And at some point...
• 27:04
  over the years, this got condensed down to having sex like a man is empowering.
• 27:09
  But that is not actually true for a lot of women.
• 27:11
  A lot of women really prefer to have sex in the context of a relationship with somebody that they love and trust, who knows their body, who's going to be able to make sure they have a good time.
• 27:24
  Casual sex just like physically tends not to be as much fun for women as it is for men because of anatomy and biology.
• 27:32
  And, um,
• 27:33
  This is just like this mess of narratives that we've been pushing on young women over the course of the past 30 years.
• 27:40
  And now we're seeing the downstream effects of this where you have young women showing up to college campuses, getting super drunk and going to bed with men who they barely know, who are not –
• 27:55
  who either don't care about them or don't know them well enough to know what caring about them should look like.
• 28:00
  And the guys themselves have been told over the years that like women are, you know, women are empowered now.
• 28:06
  Women can pursue having casual sex.
• 28:07
  Like, don't you dare second guess a woman because that's slut shaming.
• 28:11
  And so nobody knows what's going on.
• 28:14
  Nobody is having fun.
• 28:16
  Everybody is getting absolutely wasted and then falling into situations that they're not enjoying.
• 28:22
  And I don't think that anybody after this particular incident, the men or the women felt good about it.
• 28:28
  I don't think it was what any of them signed up for.
• 28:32
  But because the world in some senses has not changed the way that feminists would like it to, and because it is still...
• 28:41
  a little bit of a reputational hazard to engage in an act like this as a 20-year-old woman, especially within the context of like a campus community that's pretty small and pretty close knit, you know, we end up creating incentives for women to reframe experiences that they've had consensually but then come to regret as something that was forced upon them in which they had no responsibility.
• 29:08
  Sorry, I was talking for a really long time there.
• 29:10
  I think it's interesting and you're getting to the heart of why I like, I mean, your way of thinking and articulating things because it is not a predictable, I don't know, Fox News sort of victim blaming thing of like, well, how do we know?
• 29:24
  Like, let's poke all of these holes in her story and like rip her apart on the stand.
• 29:27
  It's more of a larger cultural, sociological kind of psychological analysis of what is the space that...
• 29:36
  between enthusiastic, consensual, loving sex where everyone goes home happy on the one side and sort of criminally disgusting, non-consensual abuse on the other.
• 29:52
  And we haven't done a very good job of trying to figure out ways of talking about or thinking about our parents.
• 29:58
  I don't want to say complicity because it sounds again victim blamey, but our involvement in putting ourselves in situations that end up being regrettable.
• 30:07
  And at what point of that, in that experience, is it legitimate to pull the ripcord on consent?
• 30:14
  I mean, it's always legitimate to pull the ripcord on consent.
• 30:17
  You can always say no.
• 30:18
  But that
• 30:19
  That's a legalistic question.
• 30:21
  It's not a psychological or cultural or emotional question.
• 30:25
  And at the risk of just reciting your own prose back to you, allow me to quote from your piece, which I thought was great, where you say, you write, to consent is to acknowledge that you may get hurt.
• 30:36
  You may get scared.
• 30:37
  You may get wet on this ride.
• 30:39
  But more importantly, that past a certain point, whether or not these things happen is something you can neither predict nor control.
• 30:46
  One would perhaps assume that if you've agreed to participate in group sex in an unlocked bedroom during a drunken melee at a crowded fraternity house, you're also prepared for the possibility that things might not go exactly as planned.
• 30:58
  And you go on to write, Every single person in this story was completely and totally unequipped to handle the unscripted, unpredictable and profoundly disappointing reality of half a dozen naked drunk idiots trying and mostly failing to have sex.
• 31:11
  When she says I didn't consent to this, you write, I suspect the true meaning is more like I would never have consented to this if I'd known it was going to be like that.
• 31:22
  I think that is a really important distinction for us to figure out a way of getting our heads around it.
• 31:29
  Yeah.
• 31:29
  And, you know, the solution to that situation, and it's not a popular thing to say, but is among other things to wait to have sex until you have built up a certain level of trust with somebody.
• 31:45
  And to not maybe when you're,
• 31:47
  first starting out when you're inexperienced and it's incredibly possible for you to be careless with other people as well as with yourself because you don't know yourself that well, especially in like the sexual realm, to just hold off on doing the kind of elite Olympic level sexual activity, like a 20 year old having group sex at a fraternity house, like, you know, get a boyfriend first.
• 32:18
  Thanks, mom.
• 32:19
  It's so funny to me that like, you know, because I am the age that I am.
• 32:24
  When I was growing up, when I was a teenager, we were still kind of in the waning days of the influence of the moral majority.
• 32:31
  We were still doing a lot of kind of purity wars stuff.
• 32:34
  The religious right still had a fair amount of power in terms of the cultural narrative about sex and relationships.
• 32:42
  And so it was back then that.
• 32:46
  a situation where you could be in a relationship, you know, as a teenager, and it would be like, I've been with my boyfriend for a year, and on prom night, we're finally gonna do it, you know, and this was scandalous.
• 33:01
  It was like, you slut, you know?
• 33:05
  Save it for marriage.
• 33:07
  And obviously that was not a great situation for young people who wanted to, you know, like get married on a normal timeline and also like live on a normal timeline, have a certain amount of experience.
• 33:24
  experience, you know, including the physical act of love with somebody that they cared about, you know, as a way of creating intimacy and having, you know, an enjoyable relationship with somebody.
• 33:36
  But we've pushed the envelope so far now.
• 33:39
  And I think a lot of it has to do with the eternal quest to kind of like find a new taboo to violate as, you know, as young people, that now it's just kind of expected.
• 33:52
  And maybe porn has something to do with this,
• 33:54
  too, for young people who are just like very much in the first era of their sexual experience, who are making their sexual debut, that they're going to be doing stuff that, you know, used to be the kind of thing you would do with your husband 10 years into the marriage after you guys have gotten bored of the missionary position, you know?
• 34:14
  Yeah.
• 34:15
  We're going to open up the relationship.
• 34:17
  We're going to do butt stuff.
• 34:18
  We're going to pee on each other.
• 34:19
  I mean, but the counterpoint to that, Kat, is that, you know, I have an elementary school age daughter and so does my friend who I was having dinner with last night.
• 34:28
  And she would say, and I would have some sympathy for the idea that it should not be a requirement that we go back to like 1950s ideas about, you know, sexual coyness.
• 34:41
  in order for women to be able to operate freely and expect that the men around them are not going to capitalize on their position of vulnerability and take advantage of them when the opportunity arises.
• 34:53
  Like, it's not like, yes, it might be silly for her to have put to trudged a mile to a fraternity house in order to have group sex and then done ketamine.
• 35:02
  But that should not...
• 35:04
  make us feel like it's then okay for all of the subsequent stuff that happened to happen.
• 35:11
  Like we should, we ought to live in a world in which men and women respect each other enough that women can make the silly mistakes that 20 year olds make without men, I guess, that's,
• 35:25
  Yes, taking advantage of that situation to the maximum extent possible and doing things that they know are highly likely to result in her regretting the situation.
• 35:32
  That's so paternalistic, though.
• 35:34
  Are women free to make their own choices and are they responsible for them or not?
• 35:41
  Are you asking me or the hypothetical person who I'm having friends with, who I'm having dinner with?
• 35:45
  I mean, are they free to make their own decisions?
• 35:52
  Of course, they're free to make their own decisions.
• 35:55
  The question is, what responsibility do the men in their life have for ensuring that their bad decisions are as non-deleterious as possible?
• 36:07
  Yeah.
• 36:08
  Like, does anyone have, do we have each other's backs, basically?
• 36:11
  Well, I mean, do women owe something to men then in this paradigm?
• 36:15
  Or does it only go one way?
• 36:16
  Because here's what bothers me about this conversation.
• 36:18
  The way that it's discussed, the way that it always shakes out, we end up assigning agency and responsibility for women to men.
• 36:26
  And in doing so, we open the door to the idea that women are inherently
• 36:33
  like that they cannot be treated like the full equals of men, not just sexually, but legally, socially, professionally.
• 36:41
  We push this idea that women are so susceptible to pressure that you can't really trust them when they say yes to things, that they can't really meaningfully consent to things.
• 36:52
  And once you open that door...
• 36:54
  You basically are arguing for the infantilization of women.
• 36:59
  You're arguing for us to be treated legally, socially, in every way, like something slightly below a full human being.
• 37:07
  That's interesting.
• 37:08
  Yeah, it certainly is.
• 37:10
  You're certainly asking for more than the women's rights activists claim to be asking for when they say things like men just need to stop raping women.
• 37:20
  Like what they're in this scenario, what they're actually asking for is men need to be actively involved in protecting women from their bad choices.
• 37:29
  and not taking advantage of women's bad choices, which is a much, I mean, that looks worse on a placard, doesn't it?
• 37:36
  And it sounds like worse to chant.
• 37:39
  Yeah.
• 37:39
  Yeah.
• 37:40
  I mean, I think that unfortunately we remain culturally even however many years after the sexual revolution, it currently is very, very uncomfortable with the tradeoffs that we ended up making when we dismantled the strictures and structures that did do something to protect women from having...
• 38:03
  having sexual experiences that they may be desired in the moment, but came to regret.
• 38:10
  You know, it used to be that this sort of default expectation was that women did not want to have sex, that the answer was no, because of biological hazard, the risk of pregnancy, because of the risk of damaging their reputations, because they needed to protect their virtue.
• 38:26
  And so it was
• 38:28
  You know, it was a lot safer for women.
• 38:31
  Of course, it was also a lot less free.
• 38:33
  You know, you could not really indulge your desires if you had them.
• 38:37
  And so there are tradeoffs.
• 38:40
  We got rid of that.
• 38:41
  But yes, that does leave women unprotected insofar as nobody's coming to save you from the consequences of your own actions.
• 38:52
  It's tricky, isn't it?
• 38:53
  I mean, the conversation also is impeded, I think, by the inability of both sexes to know what the other sex is talking about when the opposite sex isn't around.
• 39:03
  I think one sense that I get from my female friends who are more on the traditional, conventional, men just need to stop raping women side of this is that they're unsure whether or not
• 39:19
  it's true that most men are kind of okay with rapey behavior when we're behind closed doors, right?
• 39:26
  Like, you know, that headline that I read, where was it?
• 39:28
  From The Guardian, The Horror of the Cornell Rape Case is How Ordinary It Is by Moira Donegan.
• 39:33
  The subtitle is Many Men Rape, Many Men Giggle Encouragingly or Shrug Indifferently When Their Friends Rape, Many Men Rape and Few Seem to Think that It's a Very Big Deal.
• 39:43
  All I can say to any women...
• 39:46
  watching or listening, is that in, and I may be very cloistered, I may be, you know, in this kind of bougie, inner city, urbane, cosmopolitan, progressive bubble, I'm sure I am.
• 40:00
  But I have never in my entire life, been amongst a group of friends where someone has made a remark that is, that even jokes or makes light of,
• 40:14
  rape or sexual violence in which it has not been slapped down by another guy, let alone, I mean, I can't even imagine a scenario at a bar or a friend's place or whatever, even when we're letting our hair down, that someone would confess to, oh, you know, I gave her a bit of a slap, where that wouldn't be immediately disqualifying and a horrifying thing that would get them excluded from...
• 40:39
  all the social groups, you know, it is simply not true that us guys, and I don't have a lot of like gay friends or anything.
• 40:47
  I mean, which I'm talking about normal people, you know, admittedly, they're not like, uh, you know, working class.
• 40:53
  Um, I don't know, super hyper masculine sports guys, but they are normal guys.
• 40:59
  And I, you know, I,
• 41:01
  I worry that part of this conversation and part of our inability as men to have the conversation that you're having, Kat, and to actually sort of wrestle openly and vulnerably with trying to walk on the no man's land where we trigger these tripwires and tread on these eggshells.
• 41:21
  leads to a male silence that gets coded for a lot of women as being complicity in or acceptance of violence against women, when in actual fact what it is, is a discomfort and inability with knowing how to have the conversation that you're having, which is 100% anti-violence against women.
• 41:44
  And also
• 41:46
  Can we talk about what's actually happening?
• 41:48
  And can we talk about the complicated ways in which consent and emotions and psychology and responsibility get entangled in sexual relationships?
• 41:59
  Instead of thinking that the solution to the problem is just to say, men need to stop raping women more loudly.
• 42:07
  Yeah, I think I have a lot of thoughts about what you just said.
• 42:10
  It's interesting that you mentioned that, you know, your friends are more of a kind of educated or elite crowd.
• 42:17
  Most of my friends growing up and even now outside of my professional circle, like in my real life,
• 42:25
  are working class guys.
• 42:27
  My male friends, they work construction, they work in sanitation.
• 42:31
  They're just dudes.
• 42:34
  And obviously I'm not like a fly on the wall when the bros are all together,
• 42:41
  But I have actually just because this was like such a crazy anecdote, I have heard about this one incident, which I think is just very I mean, obviously, it's just a story.
• 42:54
  It's one story.
• 42:55
  But to me, it's very indicative of something.
• 42:59
  So I'm just trying to think about how to how to say this, how to tell this without revealing anybody's identity.
• 43:06
  Yeah.
• 43:06
  So I'm not going to name any names.
• 43:08
  There's one guy in the friend group who is definitely gay and completely closeted even to himself.
• 43:22
  For various reasons, cannot admit that he is not interested in women.
• 43:27
  But this is one of these things that everybody kind of knows.
• 43:30
  Everyone's picked up on it.
• 43:31
  It's not something he hides very well.
• 43:34
  And he, at one point, he will frequently try to like talk shop about women with the guys in a way that makes it always very, very clear that he's never touched a woman in his life.
• 43:49
  It's like a very much like, you know, the 40 year old version where he's like, he has like a bag of sand when you grab her breast.
• 43:56
  They're like, what?
• 43:58
  Um, and this guy was, you know, talking with a bunch of the other guys and started saying that, you know, he was, he was really excited for, um, Halloween this year because he was gonna, he was gonna, you know, dress up as a cop and he was going to find a girl and, and bring her back and, you know, handcuff her to the bed.
• 44:22
  And if she told him to stop, he was going to be like, no.
• 44:24
  oh, I'm going to lay down the law.
• 44:26
  And all of the guys were like, what?
• 44:33
  No, you're not.
• 44:34
  Like, you're like, number one, we know that you've never had sex with a woman before and probably never will.
• 44:39
  But number two, if you did that, it would be rape and it would be disgusting.
• 44:43
  Like, we don't.
• 44:44
  And then one of them actually apparently took him aside later and said, bro, like,
• 44:51
  straight men don't talk about women this way.
• 44:54
  I just want you to know that.
• 44:55
  I want you to know that heterosexual men don't talk about women this way if you get my drift.
• 44:59
  And this guy got so upset and he left and never spoke to them for like, I don't know, six months, something like that.
• 45:05
  And obviously, you know, it's an anecdote.
• 45:07
  But I think that it just kind of speaks to the fact that no, most men are not raping people.
• 45:13
  Most men don't think rape is okay.
• 45:15
  Most men, I don't,
• 45:17
  very genuinely and earnestly believe, if they even sensed in the moment that their partner was unwilling, they would be horrified to the point of like, you know, their penis basically retracting into their body.
• 45:33
  I do not get the sense that most men...
• 45:37
  are turned on by the idea of having sex with a woman who doesn't want to have sex with them.
• 45:44
  And I don't know why this is such a persistent myth about how men are, except that it's
• 45:55
  It conveniently gives us somebody to hate, somebody to react against, somebody to villainize and somebody to, you know, like raise money via NGOs in order to, you know, combat.
• 46:09
  There is at this point after, you know, this whole thing came onto the scene in the early 90s as like the new important cause of.
• 46:19
  There is at this point a relatively large industry, complex, basically, surrounding the narrative that sexual assault on college campuses is like this scourge, that college campuses are absolute hotbeds of gratuitous sexual violence.
• 46:37
  And this is where we come back to, you know.
• 46:41
  Is this true?
• 46:43
  This is one of these things that people will claim to believe, but I think that you can see via like revealed preferences or whatever, you know, via their behavior that very few people actually really do believe the things that they're saying when it comes to this stuff.
• 46:57
  The statistic that gets thrown around a lot is that one in four women or sometimes one in three will be raped on campus during her time at school.
• 47:08
  Yeah.
• 47:09
  If people really thought that that was true, nobody would send their daughters to college.
• 47:15
  Like, it just wouldn't happen, you know, and girls wouldn't be going off to school super excited to like, you know, go hang out, go to parties if they thought that there was a 25% chance on any given night that they were going to be violently raped.
• 47:30
  You know, it's just not how any of this works.
• 47:34
  But there is...
• 47:37
  a kind of a machine in place that incentivizes us to claim that we think that this is true.
• 47:44
  And also that makes it very difficult and very risky reputationally, unless you happen to be like a professional contrarian, to say, Yeah, for us.
• 47:54
  to say, come on, this doesn't pass the smell test.
• 47:57
  Yeah, there's a ratcheting up, which happens because anyone who makes a claim that is virtuous, I mean, this is not just in the case of this particular example of like violence against women, but also any social justice issue.
• 48:10
  If you make a claim that codes you as being on the virtuous side of the debate...
• 48:16
  then by default, that claim sort of has to be believed and has to stand because far more people are going to want to nod along with it and be on the right side of history than they're going to want to nitpick at it and, you know, provide a counterclaim.
• 48:30
  So there's a kind of a perverse incentive where untrue virtuous ideas exist.
• 48:36
  trump true ideas that are more complicated than nuanced but are coded by the wider society as being less virtuous or you know contrarian i mean i'm not even sure kat i would agree with the claim that well i'd probably agree with it but i wouldn't say that we want to rest our case on the claim that most men uh would not get aroused by having sex with a woman who isn't into it
• 49:03
  There are lots of things that lots of people would want to do spontaneously when their wits are not about them and when their emotions take over that they do not do because they are acculturated not to do it and there are consequences for doing it.
• 49:18
  I mean, if someone cuts me off in traffic, I want nothing more than to cut them off, get out of the car with a baseball bat and smash their windshield in.
• 49:26
  Yeah.
• 49:27
  I've never done that because I don't allow myself to do that.
• 49:31
  And, you know, we don't even need to go so far as to say that there isn't some reptilian or primal mammalian like hornbag inside guys that would, especially young guys, that would burn down the world if it could.
• 49:47
  But we wisely constrain those things, you know, and we try to, and we have successfully set up systems in civilization to constrain those urges.
• 49:58
  And there's no reason to think that there's any backsliding culturally on men's sort of
• 50:10
  involvement in and acceptance of the taboos around sexual violence.
• 50:15
  Like those taboos are strong and those taboos are robust regardless of what the animal parts of us might want.
• 50:23
  So I would just plant that flag.
• 50:25
  And the other thing that comes up in this case, which we haven't touched on yet, is inebriation and like sort of taking care of ourselves and each other when we're drunk.
• 50:35
  Because...
• 50:36
  It was a clip that you cite of Jake Tapper on CNN saying that because he has a daughter or something, like the law in New York, which regards, unless you're, correct me if I'm wrong, the law is that unless you're blacked out drunk, merely being drunk,
• 50:56
  is not sufficient to say that you're incapable of consenting in a sexual relationship.
• 51:03
  So he calls that an insane loophole.
• 51:06
  Jake Tapper says that we should change the law so that if you're drunk, you can't consent.
• 51:11
  But that would basically just mean that any drunk woman, that no man can have sex with any drunk woman.
• 51:17
  Or I mean, or can a woman have sex with a drunk man?
• 51:20
  This is again, it's always this crazy double standard.
• 51:22
  You know, it's always it always breaks down along gendered lines.
• 51:25
  And one of the guys actually in this case has attempted to flip the script by saying, well, you know, I was passed out on the bed and she performed oral sex on me.
• 51:38
  And like that was assault.
• 51:40
  You know, I was sodomized and that's not OK. And everyone is like, OK.
• 51:44
  you know, jeering at him, which I think is very revealing.
• 51:48
  But it does kind of highlight also how all of these
• 51:57
  kind of groundswells of wanting to change the law, wanting to change the culture, rely on implementing a double standard that does not treat women the same way that it treats men.
• 52:10
  Oh, and the New York statute, it's specifically, if you've become intoxicated voluntarily and you are not incapacitated, so if you just like, if you drank and then you got drunk,
• 52:25
  Nobody, you can still consent to sex and any other things.
• 52:29
  You're still accountable for the things that you do.
• 52:32
  If somebody drugs you and you don't know it, then you are not accountable.
• 52:37
  If you are so intoxicated that you have become incapacitated, like you can't stand on your own, then you can't consent to sex.
• 52:47
  And if you are so intoxicated that you are unconscious, also you can't consent to sex.
• 52:54
  It's not really a standard that you could implement because what it describes is being in a state where you don't know what's happening and you won't remember it the next day.
• 53:06
  It's caused by blood alcohol spike.
• 53:08
  And I know this because I've read Sarah Heppler's excellent book.
• 53:11
  blackout.
• 53:13
  But the thing about a blacked out person is that they can be walking around and acting basically normal.
• 53:18
  So, you know, it's not possible.
• 53:21
  It's more of a memory thing, as I understand it.
• 53:23
  Yeah.
• 53:23
  Right.
• 53:24
  Yeah.
• 53:24
  It's like you just wake up and you have no idea how you got there.
• 53:28
  But while you're actually doing the thing, you seem...
• 53:31
  I mean, everyone has a little bit of this when they say, oh, I can't remember.
• 53:34
  I can't even remember what happened last night.
• 53:36
  But yes.
• 53:37
  Some people genuinely can't remember what happened last night.
• 53:40
  But the thing is, you know, if you're walking around in that state, somebody who doesn't know you well, especially, is not going to know that you're blacked out.
• 53:50
  You just look like a person walking around to them.
• 53:53
  I mean, and again, this doesn't mean that men should try to have their way with women as much as they can get away with without breaking the law.
• 54:01
  It means that on a criminal basis, when we're actually talking about institutions that can prosecute or, you know, fire or expel or indict or lock up people, we have to have a more mature understanding of the, you know, the difference between...
• 54:21
  a sliding scale of consent that gets you into situations that you later wished that you hadn't consented to versus sexual assault.
• 54:30
  And it is tricky.
• 54:32
  I mean, rhetorically, Kat, I feel like the conversation, where the conversation has gone since Me Too with...
• 54:42
  Men need to do better, right?
• 54:44
  Men need to stop raping women.
• 54:47
  This is a conversation that men need to have.
• 54:49
  This kind of instinct that my friend was expressing over dinner last night, this instinct that we see a lot in women's marches, it's hard to know exactly how to get one's hands around the objection to it as a man.
• 55:05
  But I think maybe an entry point is to compare it to other people
• 55:12
  scenarios where we're trying to deal with a behavior or an extremism or a radicalism in one faction of a broader group.
• 55:23
  So think about counterterrorism, for example.
• 55:28
  I do all the time.
• 55:30
  Yeah, I should hope so.
• 55:31
  That's why we're safe.
• 55:33
  That's why we haven't been hit again, because Kat is on the case.
• 55:37
  You know, in the war against ISIS, we were very – counterterrorism experts know what to do.
• 55:43
  What you do is you don't –
• 55:46
  You don't make it a war against Muslims, right?
• 55:49
  You don't say this is an issue for Muslims to figure out amongst themselves.
• 55:53
  You say you try to sideline the extremists and isolate the radicals from the rest of the Muslims by winning over the Muslims, saying this fight is our fight and your fight.
• 56:04
  This isn't something about you.
• 56:06
  This isn't anything intrinsic to Islam.
• 56:08
  These people are perverting Islam.
• 56:10
  And you try to isolate them and you try to reduce, you try to essentially cleave off
• 56:16
  population so that you can win over the largest number of people to your side of moderateness.
• 56:22
  And we know this because this is the way that we react to counterterrorism, even to this day in the West.
• 56:29
  When a terrorist attack happens, we all understand that it's unconstructive and unhelpful to blame it on Islam, that it is more constructive to talk about it as an extremist phenomenon that
• 56:46
  The strategy seems to be men need to do better.
• 56:50
  This is a problem for all men, which simply alienates men who are well-meaning and good and can't imagine ever being violent because they don't know what more they ought to be doing.
• 57:03
  Like, what exactly is being asked of us in that scenario?
• 57:07
  And emotionally, it just creates the same shutting up, shutting down, silence, silence,
• 57:13
  detachment that, and frankly, an instinct to rally, to defend an identity that you feel has been unfairly maligned, right?
• 57:24
  I mean, so the goal ought to be win over the largest quorum of men as possible into the task of making women safe from violence and
• 57:35
  don't characterize that problem as being a problem of all men and thereby lose half the population from your side.
• 57:45
  Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
• 57:47
  I don't really see anything to disagree with there.
• 57:50
  I mean, I would just maybe say yes and.
• 57:54
  The question of what actually do you want men to do?
• 57:58
  What does it look like for men to do better?
• 58:05
  Most men are not rapists.
• 58:07
  I mean, I know that people, again, like don't.
• 58:10
  It's an unpopular thing to say for some reason, which is interesting because it's like you would think people would be relieved to realize that most men are not rapists.
• 58:19
  And yet there is this genuine desire for things to be worse than they are.
• 58:24
  You know, we want the boogeyman to be real.
• 58:26
  Yeah.
• 58:27
  But the idea that men need to be held accountable and blamed and that they need to subject themselves en masse to some kind of struggle session because a handful of guys are behaving badly.
• 58:43
  I mean, just to, you know, like zoom out for a second and analogize a little bit, if
• 58:51
  There had been during the Lindsay Clancy trial, like a groundswell.
• 58:56
  Remind us which one that was.
• 58:57
  Oh, this is the woman who murdered her children horribly and then tried to commit suicide, but survived and was on trial.
• 59:07
  If there had been this groundswell within popular culture, you know, celebrities weighing in op-ed after op-ed.
• 59:17
  why are women silent on the scourge of women killing their children?
• 59:22
  You know, women need to do better.
• 59:24
  You know, all women really, you know, either would kill their children, secretly want to, and we're not talking enough about this, this huge problem with women.
• 59:37
  People would be like, wait a minute, that's one crazy lady that has nothing to do with me.
• 59:42
  Yeah.
• 59:43
  And it would be absolutely fair to be outraged by that and to say, like, you know, stop trying to assign guilt by association to an entire sex based on.
• 59:51
  I mean, the difference there, the critic would say, is that there is that women do not kill their women more, that kill their children more than men do.
• 1:00:02
  Oh, they absolutely do.
• 1:00:03
  Do they?
• 1:00:04
  I mean, the other objection could be there is nothing intrinsic to motherhood that implies child killing the same way that there are cultural norms of toxic masculinity that encourage and tolerate treating women as casual sex objects.
• 1:00:22
  Yeah, I guess the question is, you know, what what cultural norms?
• 1:00:25
  You know, one of the things that we've been talking about is the whole boys will be boys thing.
• 1:00:31
  Right.
• 1:00:31
  You know, I've heard that phrase said many, many a time, you know, invoked to describe what's wrong with culture.
• 1:00:38
  I've never heard it used.
• 1:00:41
  in earnest, in reference to a man committing an act of sexual violence or even borderline.
• 1:00:48
  That's true, actually.
• 1:00:49
  It's interesting, isn't it?
• 1:00:50
  It's one of those ghost sort of satirical things.
• 1:00:53
  It's an urban legend.
• 1:00:55
  Only the people who are criticizing it actually say that it exists.
• 1:00:58
  Yes.
• 1:01:00
  I mean, I do think...
• 1:01:03
  I'm going to still get canceled for this, but whatever.
• 1:01:06
  There is an element within the culture that is anxious for there to be an epidemic of sexual violence.
• 1:01:16
  And especially in rarefied spaces, photogenic spaces like college campuses where everyone is, you know, young and hot and nubile and smart.
• 1:01:25
  They want there to be sexual assault happening in that setting.
• 1:01:30
  to an extent where the demand really vastly exceeds the supply.
• 1:01:35
  And I think that, you know, the result is that you get what seems like this kind of screwy, like alternative reality that half of the or well, not half, but the portion of the country that drives the national discourse, that writes the op eds, that makes the movies and so on that they seem to be living in, where there's.
• 1:01:54
  Not only have we made no progress on this and other social issues since the 1950s, but actually things are worse than ever.
• 1:02:05
  It's interesting, isn't it?
• 1:02:06
  I mean, it's like...
• 1:02:09
  It's reminding me of other sort of social justice issues like almost Gaza and Israel and stuff where it's like if there's a monstrous calamity that can provide meaning to your defiance of it or to your struggle, then the confusing world is cleaner than if...
• 1:02:29
  sort of things are mildly okay, but bad shit also happens and everything's a bit complicated and there are no goodies and baddies.
• 1:02:36
  I guess it's a goodies and baddies thing, isn't it?
• 1:02:38
  I mean, it's like there's a...
• 1:02:40
  There's a comfort in narratives that have goodies and baddies rather than gray areas.
• 1:02:46
  That's why like great literature and great art struggles in the gray areas, like in deals with that, because there's something very complicated about it that is not that doesn't come naturally to most of us when we're just in our role as normies walking down the street.
• 1:03:01
  Like we like superhero stories better than Proust.
• 1:03:06
  And this is a superhero story where there are bad guys and good girls.
• 1:03:11
  Yes.
• 1:03:12
  And there is actually also this element of, you know, what Joan Didion said, we tell ourselves stories in order to live.
• 1:03:20
  I think that...
• 1:03:23
  What happens here, you have at the national level, you have this discourse that does fall along very tribal lines that allows people to sort themselves into kind of teams.
• 1:03:36
  It's a very almost fandom based way of addressing an issue that.
• 1:03:43
  ensures that there will always be a rivalry and there will never be any kind of resolution.
• 1:03:49
  But the other thing about it, and this is something that I wrote about in one of the essays that I wrote about this, is that we're talking about the relationships between men and women.
• 1:04:00
  We're talking about the relationships that define our lives.
• 1:04:03
  We're talking about big things like sex and love and how we treat each other and what we are and what we do to each other.
• 1:04:09
  And
• 1:04:12
  When I look at this situation at Cornell, what I see fundamentally is a bunch of young people who took mind and mood altering substances, who were inexperienced, who were careless with each other and with themselves, and they were in a way of being able to do that.
• 1:04:34
  And who emerged in the aftermath of that needing to make what happened feel legible and feel less shameful.
• 1:04:43
  And I think that that is as true of the men involved as it is of the woman.
• 1:04:49
  And I think everybody basically retreated to a corner where they could start telling themselves a story about what happened that was.
• 1:04:57
  made them feel less like a bad guy and more like a good guy.
• 1:05:02
  If not a hero, then at least a victim, at least not a villain.
• 1:05:08
  I mean, the other challenge that you're reminding me of in all of this storytelling and narrative talk is that there's this narrative out there that boys are being raised to believe that there are no consequences for mistreating women.
• 1:05:23
  But when I actually talk to men,
• 1:05:27
  especially young men, none of them believe that there are no consequences for mistreating women or that mistreating women is okay.
• 1:05:35
  What they do feel is that there is a high risk of having social interactions with women.
• 1:05:42
  And the risk of propagating this narrative, even if you don't care about the unfairness towards men who are wrongly accused or whose misbehavior is escalated
• 1:05:57
  You should care about women who only have a pool of terrible assholes to choose from because all of the good guys are too afraid to have one night stands with them.
• 1:06:07
  If you want women to have safe one night stands.
• 1:06:12
  Yes, there's actually something there that I often wish we talked more about, which is over the past 10 years or so, and especially in the wake of Me Too, there was this crusade, basically, to define male sexuality as inherently predatory and inherently toxic.
• 1:06:33
  And to start applying consent frameworks to things like flirting or apologizing,
• 1:06:40
  approaching a woman, asking for a date, that kind of thing.
• 1:06:44
  And it got to the point where it was like, if you approach a woman at a bar or like on the street because you like the way she looks and you'd like to give her your number, maybe get to know her, well, she didn't consent to be approached, so you've committed a violation.
• 1:07:01
  This is not really how human sexuality or interaction works or has ever worked.
• 1:07:08
  You know, the fact that we have these apps now where people can kind of consent to being approached, obviously, you know, it makes it possible for you to make that argument.
• 1:07:16
  But the apps are not making anybody very happy.
• 1:07:18
  They are not working that well to, you know, to create genuine chemistry based romantic connections between people.
• 1:07:25
  But.
• 1:07:26
  This has become such a prevalent narrative that it's bad to approach a woman.
• 1:07:30
  You know, the kind of long time paradigm where men throw and women catch is problematic.
• 1:07:37
  It's toxic.
• 1:07:38
  It's toxic masculinity.
• 1:07:39
  It's predatory.
• 1:07:40
  It's scary.
• 1:07:43
  And there has actually been a pretty successful push to stigmatize that mode of interaction.
• 1:07:52
  Yeah.
• 1:07:53
  The upshot of it being that now all of the decent guys have become afraid and they're trying to do the right thing according to the new norms that have been imposed.
• 1:08:06
  And the only men you have left who are still willing to approach women is.
• 1:08:11
  are the ones who are basically sociopaths who don't care about conforming to norms.
• 1:08:15
  So you've created that pool of terrible assholes.
• 1:08:19
  I mean, not you personally.
• 1:08:20
  No, no, I get it.
• 1:08:21
  I mean, I get it.
• 1:08:22
  I often think about this in terms of the gay community as well, because there's...
• 1:08:27
  you know, not to, at the risk of playing, and now I'll get cancelled, but at the risk of playing into the stereotype of gay people being more predatory, and gay men being total hornbags, the norms around how you ask each other out in the gay community, certainly in a gay bar or some sexualized environment like that, are much more physical than they would be in a polite,
• 1:08:58
  looked with interest at some of the controversies that have arisen around, especially gay men of an older generation who are accused of unwanted sexual advances on other guys.
• 1:09:10
  And I was the subject of unwanted sexual advances by an older work colleague, a male work colleague, when I was
• 1:09:19
  young and pretty in my early 20s.
• 1:09:20
  I was going to say, you must have been so irresistible.
• 1:09:22
  And I mean, come on, look, even now, even as a haggard old man, I'm still, you know, a catch.
• 1:09:29
  So back then, yes.
• 1:09:31
  And I found it completely unremarkable and untraumatizing and, you know, slightly pathetic and fun and whatever.
• 1:09:39
  And, you know, it didn't go anywhere.
• 1:09:41
  And I just, but
• 1:09:44
  And that's not the way that everybody has to interpret that, and it's perfectly legitimate for people to feel victimized by it.
• 1:09:51
  But the reason I raise this is because how would one expect a person who grew up gay in the 1950s in a conservative part of America, for example, to express their affection for another guy who,
• 1:10:12
  by asking them out on a, like a date, they don't have that language.
• 1:10:16
  They don't have that understanding of themselves or of courtship.
• 1:10:22
  And now we're imposing norms from the 2020s onto the way that,
• 1:10:31
  you essentially need to have consent even in order to make the initial overture about whether or not further physical activity is going to be accepted, right?
• 1:10:41
  It's not just that consent is required for sex.
• 1:10:44
  It's that consent is required for what is effectively a request for physical contact or sex, as you say.
• 1:10:52
  Like in other words,
• 1:10:55
  If you're, you know, it might be like, I don't know, rubbing of the person's back or it might be like, you know, a cheeky hand on the buttocks or something like that outside the jeans or something.
• 1:11:08
  That now constitutes, you know, not slipping your hand down, but exactly.
• 1:11:12
  That now constitutes sexual assault.
• 1:11:17
  But that's actually the step before the sexual assault, you know, in most environments in which gay people would find themselves.
• 1:11:24
  That's just an aside to say that this whole thing has become quite thorny.
• 1:11:28
  And I think you're right that even in straight relationships, the hazard of feeling like you are engaging in some form of sexual harassment is...
• 1:11:38
  if you try to raise the questions that would need to be answered in the affirmative in order to protect you from accusations of sexual assault, are high enough that it's very difficult to know how to even get past that first hurdle.
• 1:11:53
  So a lot of people are sitting at home and masturbating.
• 1:11:56
  Yeah, yeah, seems like it.
• 1:11:59
  I think, God, I had a bunch of thoughts as you were talking.
• 1:12:08
  Because we've only we only now talk about sexual ethics in terms of consent and have basically entered this sort of reductive era in which it's it's understood, even though this is not actually true, but it's understood that if anything ever goes wrong between a man and a woman, it's because of consent.
• 1:12:28
  It's because there wasn't enough consent, something non-consensual happened.
• 1:12:32
  And that's the only because there's only good sex that is consensual or bad sex, which must then have been non-consensual.
• 1:12:40
  It was disappointing.
• 1:12:41
  It didn't go the way you thought.
• 1:12:42
  And there is this notion, I think, going back to the part of my piece that you read about.
• 1:12:50
  what consent used to be understood to mean.
• 1:12:53
  I think that a lot of young people, and, you know, they believe this because we've told them, believe that you can basically control the minutiae of your relationships, your encounters with other people, such that you are never disappointed, never surprised, never uncomfortable, so that nothing unexpected ever happens.
• 1:13:15
  And I think
• 1:13:18
  you know, and so that you never get hurt.
• 1:13:20
  And what this misunderstands is that
• 1:13:24
  to make yourself, to put yourself in a relationship, to love somebody, to care for somebody is inherently risky in a way that you cannot consent framework your way out of.
• 1:13:37
  You cannot mitigate the risk of having your heart broken.
• 1:13:41
  That is just table stakes.
• 1:13:43
  You know, it may happen.
• 1:13:44
  It probably will because most relationships come to an end.
• 1:13:49
  And so, yeah,
• 1:13:52
  The result of that is that, you know, we've started talking about sex and relationships as though they are these not just inherently risky, but like terrifying, dangerous things.
• 1:14:07
  And the message that young men are receiving is that if they...
• 1:14:14
  miss a cue, misread, you know, a bit of body language, make one wrong step, accidentally zig when they were supposed to zag, they're always basically one breath away from raping somebody, whether they mean to or not.
• 1:14:29
  And that's a terrifying thing to be led to believe.
• 1:14:32
  And then young women are simultaneously being told that in any given encounter with a man,
• 1:14:41
  if they let down their guard for one second, they are going to end up being raped, you know, because consent is supposed to be enthusiastic and ongoing.
• 1:14:51
  And so that means that if you are at any moment uncomfortable or unsure during a sexual encounter, because if there's one thing that sex is, it's like totally predictable and you always know exactly what's going to happen and nothing ever surprises you.
• 1:15:04
  But if that happens, it must mean that the encounter has become non-consensual because you're uncomfortable.
• 1:15:10
  And so something has gone terribly wrong.
• 1:15:13
  And so we basically prime both sexes to fear each other, to misunderstand each other, to go into encounters.
• 1:15:22
  They're mistrustful of each other, expecting that they're going to be harmed, expecting the other what other person doesn't care about them and is going to do something to traumatize them.
• 1:15:32
  And on top of everything else, you know, it doesn't surprise me that Gen Z is having a lot less sex because we haven't made it sound like it's all that fun.
• 1:15:41
  We've made it sound like it's terrifying.
• 1:15:43
  I mean, to loop the narrative question into what you're saying as well, not only is it difficult for the male to know now whether or not they're one step away from potentially engaging in a criminal activity, there is also the retrospective.
• 1:16:04
  problem of how you narratively sort of contextualize what the consent was and what your regret is after the fact.
• 1:16:12
  Like in my own experience, for example, I said it was completely benign and completely untraumatizing, but post hoc, there have been people who have been like, but that was completely not okay for an older employer in a position of power to
• 1:16:30
  to try to manipulate you that way.
• 1:16:32
  And I could imagine choosing to like to reframe that and go, wow, yeah, like the shades are really falling from my eyes and I'm understanding that that was criminal and I'm a victim essentially.
• 1:16:47
  But at the time that wasn't my feeling about it and my belief,
• 1:16:54
  My re-concluding or re-contextualizing or re-interpreting that after the fact would not change one iota of what his conduct actually was.
• 1:17:05
  You know what I mean?
• 1:17:06
  So it's like because we're dealing with something that's only taking place between the ears of the participants and not with actual facts that are verifiable in the form of physical atoms in space...
• 1:17:19
  It's an almost permanently ambiguous situation.
• 1:17:23
  Like, you know, not only do you need to ensure that both parties are doing things that they would consent to now, you need to ensure that both parties are doing things that they will have wanted to have consented to tomorrow and in three years.
• 1:17:42
  Yeah, I was thinking about this because it's interesting.
• 1:17:47
  I do emotionally relate to that feeling of
• 1:17:54
  Well, you know, but I only consented to having a good time and this isn't fun at all, you know.
• 1:17:59
  And in the aftermath, I especially feel like, you know, I'm really disappointed by this and I really regret that I did it.
• 1:18:06
  I told this story on my own podcast, but I'm going to tell it again here just because it's like it's funny.
• 1:18:11
  It's also horrible, but it's like horrible.
• 1:18:13
  horrible in a funny way.
• 1:18:15
  I had a long distance boyfriend when I first went to college as a
• 1:18:26
  He asked me to come visit him at his campus.
• 1:18:28
  And so I did.
• 1:18:29
  I went and drove about two and a half hours to see him.
• 1:18:33
  I got there.
• 1:18:34
  As I arrived, he was very anxious immediately to bring me back to his room so we could do the thing that we hadn't done in a few weeks, having been apart on separate campuses.
• 1:18:44
  And after that was over, he immediately got up out of bed and put his clothes on.
• 1:18:52
  And I said, what are you doing?
• 1:18:53
  And he said, I'm breaking up with you.
• 1:18:55
  I was still nude, by the way.
• 1:18:58
  And as I was driving two and a half hours home, crying so hard that I couldn't see, I thought to myself, you know...
• 1:19:10
  Had I known that this was going to happen, I would not have had sex with him.
• 1:19:17
  I would not have even gotten in my car.
• 1:19:20
  And, you know, I felt very taken advantage of.
• 1:19:24
  And I think it's absolutely reasonable that I felt taken advantage of.
• 1:19:26
  He knew, of course, that had I known what was about to happen after, you know, that five minute interlude, that I would not have embarked upon our sexual encounter.
• 1:19:41
  whatever, for a last lark.
• 1:19:45
  There is this kind of groundswell of sentiment that would encourage me to classify this as a form of assault because I didn't consent to that.
• 1:19:56
  I consented to having a nice time.
• 1:19:58
  And then instead I got like pumped and dumped and sent back on the road to my home crying the whole way.
• 1:20:05
  And I understand that emotionally, you know, the, I felt so stupid and feeling stupid and ashamed of yourself.
• 1:20:14
  And like, you know, I probably should have seen that coming.
• 1:20:16
  I think I missed some of the signs.
• 1:20:19
  It would have been very, very tempting in that moment to reframe the encounter as something other than something that I entered into fully understanding, you know, knowing the risks, um.
• 1:20:31
  But that's not a tenable paradigm.
• 1:20:35
  It's not a way that we can just like, as good as it may feel emotionally, we just have to accept that all of us are capable of being hurt.
• 1:20:46
  We're also capable of hurting other people.
• 1:20:48
  I don't know that I've ever done anything quite that horrible to somebody, but I'm sure that I've been careless with the hearts of men that I was dating when I was young in ways that felt violating to them.
• 1:20:59
  It made them feel really used.
• 1:21:01
  And this is just what it means to be human.
• 1:21:04
  And after the fact, you know, we say I'm sorry.
• 1:21:08
  We don't send each other to jail.
• 1:21:10
  Mm-hmm.
• 1:21:11
  That's shitty that that happened to you.
• 1:21:13
  That is essentially like you're not actually consenting to the thing, really.
• 1:21:17
  I mean, you're consenting to one thing and then he's taking that consent and making it consent for another thing, which is like a last fling.
• 1:21:26
  He really needs to tell you before that.
• 1:21:28
  But you're right.
• 1:21:28
  It's not criminal.
• 1:21:29
  And we've all, you know, if we've been sexually active in our youths, we've all had experiences where we've walked away from it and gone, well, that was shitty and sucked.
• 1:21:39
  I did not have fun that night.
• 1:21:41
  But I walked into it thinking that I would, and I'm learning a lesson and moving on.
• 1:21:46
  Again, all of which is just not to say that if the guys at Cornell behaved the way that they seem to have, that that is okay or admirable or the way that young men should behave.
• 1:21:58
  I just want to make that clear because that is what people will take away.
• 1:22:01
  That is what people will intentionally misunderstand us to be saying if they're not listening carefully.
• 1:22:08
  Yeah.
• 1:22:10
  And if they're cynical.
• 1:22:12
  Well, shame on them.
• 1:22:13
  Shame on them.
• 1:22:14
  I didn't consent to be misunderstood.
• 1:22:16
  Exactly.
• 1:22:17
  I consented to you.
• 1:22:18
  Yes, only to being perfectly understood in the nuanced and sophisticated and heterodox way that we are speaking.
• 1:22:25
  Kat, it's lovely to talk to you.
• 1:22:26
  It's great to see you.
• 1:22:28
  I look forward to seeing you again in a few weeks, hopefully in the flesh.
• 1:22:32
  In the flesh.
• 1:22:32
  Yes.
• 1:22:33
  People who don't know Kat should follow Kat on the Substack and listen to the podcast.
• 1:22:37
  If you're coming over from Kat's side of things, I'm Josh Sebs and you should subscribe to Uncomfortable Conversations where we have conversations about all kinds of things that would make people uncomfortable if you were to express a strident opinion about them at a cocktail party instead of talking about them in sophisticated ways like we do here.
• 1:22:53
  Thank you, Kat.
• 1:22:54
  Love ya.
• 1:22:54
  Thanks.
• 1:22:55
  Have a good one.
• 1:22:56
  Bye.