Time for another depressing one that has nothing to do with games. Sorry!
Thing is, I’ve been thinking about the Cornell case a lot this week. In addition to thinking about the crime itself, and the environment that produced it, and our benighted political and cultural climate, I keep thinking things like, Well, who cares what I think? I’m a nobody, and does anybody really need another man to weigh in on this right now? But there is one aspect of this that I do need to push myself to write about, and even if my tiny platform only reaches a dozen men, some of those men probably need to hear it. We mustn’t fall into the trap of assuming that all of our friends, everybody who’s “like us” in some cultural sense (has the same hobbies, the same interests) shares our values and knows what we know.
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If somebody I’m close to—a friend, a cousin, a friend’s kid, whatever—were accused of a heinous crime like this, I think, to be truly honest, that I would reflexively reach for exculpatory explanations. I would have, deep in the pit of my stomach, the fear that the accusations were true, but I suspect that that fear would only strengthen my desire to explain, to rationalize, to excuse. I would not reach for explicit victim-blaming, knowing how vanishingly rare false accusations are, but I expect that I would grasp for an explanation along the lines of “This must have been a misunderstanding.” There must be more to this story. I know him, and he wouldn’t do that.
Again, though, that’s if the accused were someone close to me. One of the things I find most sordid, depressing, and alarming about this story is how many men, including quite a few men with large platforms, men in positions of authority or credibility, have reflexively reached for explanations like these (or worse) despite having no relationship whatsoever to the accused.
I hope it goes without saying that if someone close to me were a victim of a crime like this, I would reflexively defend and support her. In a situation where everybody involved is a stranger to me, though, my response isn’t emotional, although it is a kind of second-nature reflex just by nature of having read about or heard about crimes like this so many times. I know the statistics. I know what my female friends and family members went through during their college years (which I suppose does make it emotional, to some extent). I know what frats are like. I immediately assume not only that the woman is telling the truth but that the men aren’t the only guilty parties, that they’re beneficiaries of a corrupt culture that abets and protects them.
What does it say that so many men instead react to this story as though the accused were all their brothers, their sons, their dear friends? Why do they feel so strongly that These nice boys wouldn’t do that? Why not reflexively think of the woman, equally a stranger, as their friend, their sister?
Some of these men, of course, are themselves rapists—some are rapists who know what they are, and want to stamp out any accountability for crimes like theirs; some are rapists who don’t believe that’s what they are, and are alarmed to find things that they themselves did when they were younger, and perhaps still do (coerce or trick or drug women into sex that isn’t what they think of as forcible rape but also isn’t in any sense consensual), now correctly described as rape. These men are scrambling to defend themselves more than they’re thinking about the accused. (I think this is what’s going on with a lot of the big names on Twitter and elsewhere in social media defending the accused or casting aspersions on the accuser.)
But there are a lot of men who are genuinely, if misguidedly, concerned for the accused, and for some broader idea of “justice” and, God help us, men’s rights. To some degree this is a consequence of decades of diligent far-right activism, the relentless promulgation of a fantasy narrative of totalitarian feminism and political correctness run amok. But that alone can’t explain it, and it certainly can’t excuse it. You can’t earnestly believe in a “war on men,” or believe that women receive disproportionate help and support in our society such that things need to be proactively counterbalanced to make things fairer for men, if you have any genuinely close relationships with women. Which suggests that none of these men do have such relationships. And whether it’s the misogynist attitude that precedes the inability or unwillingness to form those relationships or vice versa, it’s clearly of a piece with the fact that so many men see seven (or fifty-seven) strangers as their brothers and the woman those men abused as something less, or nothing at all.
If your reflexive response to hearing about or reading about this story was to feel sympathy for the men, to be concerned that they were being treated unjustly, to be indignant about their names being publicized, please reflect on that for a moment. Why are their feelings, or their treatment, or their good names more real to you, more important to you—why are they more human to you—than the woman they assaulted? What do they have that she lacks?
