The Cornell Case Exposes What We Can’t Say
New York Times · LC · trust 24/100
Credit... Allison DeBritz Listen · 4:46 min Share full article By Christine Emba
Ms. Emba is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation.”
Whether or not the student who would come to be known as Jane Doe — at the time under the influence of alcohol and ketamine, in an upstairs room full of fraternity brothers — had agreed at some point to sex has become a flashpoint in the discourse around Cornell University’s rape investigation. But regardless of where one falls on that debate, we should all be able to name the way a 20-year-old sophomore was treated by her peers as degrading and perverse, deserving of sanction regardless of the legal outcome of the case. And while the dozens of frat brothers who were sent a Snapchat message advertising an intoxicated woman as “free pussy” were not under legal obligation to intervene, their broad refusal to do so should also be regarded as a moral failure.
The lurid account has haunted the public imagination since The Cornell Daily Sun, a student newspaper, published the details in mid-September. While the alleged assault happened in 2024, its re-emergence this year has resulted in a steady drip of shocking and at times conflicting evidence into the public conversation.
Campus sexual assault isn’t new. Something about this case — the coarseness, the extremity, the failure of trusted institutions to forcefully respond — has triggered widespread revulsion, a sickening shared sense that a boundary no one thought to name has been broken. It has attracted a different kind of attention, as well — with some observers defending the perpetrators, some interrogating the rush to judge them.
There are discussions to be had about agency, responsibility and justice. But we don’t have the shared language to talk about what, exactly, went wrong.
Not that we aren’t trying to talk about it. It’s just that our public conversation feels quibbling, inadequate to the outrage at hand and insensitive to the victim’s humanity. Where does this fall under New York State’s laws? Don’t some women like rough sex? Was it a rape, or was it just a bad experience regretted after the fact?
The last question is at the heart of our shrunken moral vocabulary. “Consent” has become the consensus standard of our time, a compromise between “her body, her choice” sex positivity and a societally necessary condemnation of sexual violence. The consent standard is meant to remove ambiguity without prescribing a larger framework: Sex without consent is rape, and rape is a crime. The certainty of those categories fits neatly into our existing accountability mechanisms as defined by the legal system. Anything outside of rape is a personal affair.
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