Episode 387: Kate On: The Cornell Case, Male Violence, and the Limits of Empathy

Kate Anthony (0:00)

But I want to ask something a little, maybe, heretical. Why does women's liberation have to be marketed to men as a benefit to men? Why isn't women's freedom enough? Period. There's something so revealing about our impulse to make the case, that no, but feminist is good for you too. Patriarchy is bad for you too. What if it's just enough that it's bad for us? Because even inside feminism, we often seem to believe that women's interests require male relevance before they become legitimate.

Welcome to The Divorce Survival Guide Podcast, where we have open and honest conversations about co-parenting, separation, divorce, and the hardest question of all, should you stay or should you go?

I'm Kate Anthony, your Divorce Survival Guide, and I'm here to help you navigate some of the roughest waters you've ever swum in and answer some of your toughest questions. I've been to hell and back, and now it's my mission in life to help you get to the other side of this process, with your sanity and your heart intact.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back.

So I have been trying to figure out what I have to say about the Cornell case that hasn't already been said a million times by a million people. And honestly, my first answer was fucking nothing, right? I'm angry, obviously, but mostly I'm just so weary.

Because how many times have we been here?

We've got Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, Brock Turner, Kavanaugh, and Christine Blasey Ford. We did Epstein. We did Me Too. We have watched women come forward, watch them be doubted and doxed, watch their lives be turned upside down, watched institutions close ranks, watched powerful men continue to be powerful. Now we have Jane Doe at Cornell. At some point, I don't want to record another episode explaining why women don't report correctly or immediately or consistently enough to satisfy people who've never experienced trauma. I don't want to explain intoxication and consent, and I don't want to explain what happens to memory.

I don't want to do that. That's 101 We have done that. We fucking know. If knowing hasn't changed enough, then maybe knowledge isn't the problem. That's really where I have landed for now. I think we spent a really long time treating a power problem as an empathy or understanding problem, and it's not getting us anywhere. It's just not. The allegations at Cornell are horrifying. Jane Doe alleges that she was drugged and sexually assaulted by members of the fraternity in 2024 and the original criminal case wasn't prosecuted, and now, after a civil lawsuit brought substantially more attention to the case and what happened and raised serious questions about the original investigation, the case has now been reopened and New York Attorney General, Letitia James, God love her, has been appointed special prosecutor. Amazing, and awful. Also, really, that's how far it had to go? Then there are the messages. One of the publicly reported messages in the fraternity Snapchat was free pussy. There are additional screenshots circulating online containing even more degrading comments about women, including one about hoping a woman wasn't another fatty, which really indicates that they've done this before many times. It really opens up the question about how many times has this happened? How often has this happened? How many more victims are there? Are they trafficking women now? This now seems like a trafficking issue, right? Not just a one-off rape case. But the term, the free pussy, right? It's very clear, right, that the woman, the humanity has disappeared from their perception. There's a resource. The resource is available. There's no person.

There's no humanity. So it's extreme moments like this that often expose assumptions that are usually more carefully concealed. So what I mean by that is like the assumption underneath free pussy is one that, I guess, feminism has been wrestling with since the dawn of feminism, right? Like who is entitled to access women, not just sexually, who gets women's time, their bodies, our work, our attention, our care. And what happens when women withdraw that access? That's a question that interests me far more right now than another discussion about whether boys understand consent because I don't think we're dealing primarily with a comprehension problem. I think they comprehend it just fine.

They comprehend it just fine. We're dealing with entitlement. And entitlement is a power problem. So if somebody doesn't understand something, education is an appropriate intervention. But if someone understands perfectly well and benefits from pretending not to understand, we call that weaponized incompetence, education is a complete waste of everybody's time and it's a distraction. This is something that Zawn Villines writes about brilliantly in the context of heterosexual marriage on her sub stack, liberating motherhood. Women will say, I've told him a thousand times that I'm overwhelmed. I've explained the mental load. I've told him that I need him to do more. How do I make him understand? And Zawn's answer every time is, why are we assuming that he doesn't understand? He can see you're working while he's sitting down. He can see that the laundry gets done. He knows that we need food in the house. He knows that toilet paper runs out and we need more.