I’m probably the last person who should write about morality. I grew up on the Left, after all: a hippie childhood in Topanga Canyon, then coming of age as the first generation after Roe v. Wade as a liberated woman who did whatever I wanted, dressed however I wanted, and always felt free in my mind and heart. I was never someone who would have demanded morality. I didn’t even know what that was.
I watched the counterculture revolution of the 1960s and 1970s break free of norms and traditions. Where we’ve ended up is at the Empire’s end: a Caligula-like culture that strictly polices thought, speech, racism, sexism, homophobia, bigotry of any kind, but one that also treats morality and decency as oppressive relics from a patriarchal past.
So when a 20-year-old Jane Doe walked into the Chi Phi fraternity at Cornell on October 24, 2024, her only armor was the rule of “consent.” As long as it was okay with her and she said so, anything goes.
She agreed to a threesome with two 20-year-olds, but then, when more men flocked to her body like seagulls chasing a bag of chips left on the beach, she was too high or drunk to even know how to get herself out of it.
No one knew how to just say this is wrong, this is bad behavior because they don’t live in a culture that believes that — not unless it’s rape. But this wasn’t rape by any legal definition. She consented, then she consented again. Then, she was drowning in a sea of consent, and so were they.
In the days, weeks, and months that followed, Jane Doe would absorb the truth about what really happened that night. Shame would follow when she saw her classmates pointing and laughing at her, calling her a slut, saying it was a “gang bang.”
If the boys said nothing, she said nothing; no one would know what they did that night, but the boys bragged about it. They betrayed her trust, and she ended up looking bad.
The real kicker was being disinvited to that same frat with those same guys. In her mind, she was the one being punished and not the boys.
From the New York Times:
At Chi Phi, the fraternity was preparing for a Halloween party, and Jane Doe was eager to attend. Text messages included in the investigation show Mr. Ingalls assuring Jane Doe that he and other fraternity members wanted her to be there.
“chi phi is your house and you are welcome here,” he wrote, relaying the views of the fraternity’s president, who was not among those accused of sexual assault.
“thank u i really appreciate that,” Jane Doe responded. “<3 i’ll bring my cigs tomorrow”
But then Jane Doe received a phone call from the fraternity’s president, according to the text messages.
She was disinvited from the party. It was for her own good, he said.
Jane Doe sent a biting text to Mr. Ingalls.
“I knew this was going to happen,” she wrote. “The woman will always get the short end of the stick. Yall aren’t my friends. Yall are covering your asses.”
That’s when the anger and resentment set in, and eventually, it would fester until she decided she needed to get something back, something she lost in her efforts to protect the boys and not herself.
Whether she knew it or not, she was walking around with a loaded gun and a trigger she could pull at any time. Two years later, she did just that, and the righteous, delusional, fanatical mob ignited into a frenzy. Even AOC got into the mix, condemning and convicting the boys, putting an image in everyone’s head about what happened that night.
Everything that came next has been a horror show. The Cornell newspaper released the boys' names, knowing that in modern-day America there can be no such thing as due process. If she was accusing them of rape, gang rape, then they were guilty.
The University newspaper, the Cornell Sun, wrote an op-ed naming the boys:
We refuse for this victim to be reduced to just another story. Cornell has failed to protect its students. Cornell has failed to address the growing issue of sexual assault on campus with its pathetic task force. Cornell has failed the student allegedly raped by those seven men at Chi Phi in October 2024. Cornell has failed her. Cornell has failed us.
To Matthew Ingalls, Jonathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar: We know who you are and we refuse to let you benefit from this University’s concealment.
Two websites cropped up to name and shame the boys. One is Cornellseven.com, run and operated by activist Aaron B:
And the other, The Cornell 7, run by a former South Park writer, Toby Morton.
Some guy was mistakenly identified as one of them and began receiving death threats:
They had their villains. They just needed their innocent victim. Jane Doe is such a perfect name for the kind of victim our culture seems to so desperately need. A helpless baby deer caught in the headlights just before she’s run over.
In their mind’s eye, she had been passed out as men did a train on her. In reality, that was never true. In reality, she did consent. It was only later, as she thought about it, that she decided it wasn’t consensual. None of them got away clean. They all carried with them a film of shame.
It is not cool anymore among Gen Z and younger to have morals when it comes to sex. Consent is all they decide matters. And yet, morality is the only thing that might have stopped Jane Doe from consenting to the threesome in the first place. It’s okay to say that allowing men to snort ketamine off your “perfect body” is wrong.
Not to excuse the boys. Like her, they’ve been saturated in a culture that doesn’t think morality is cool either. It’s a culture where anything goes for almost everyone, unless you happen to be a heterosexual man.
Then, you are sequestered off into the booming online porn industry where sex is everywhere, any kind of sex, especially group sex with girls who act like they want it and anything goes. Imagine having one of these typical porn scenarios playing out in the very next room.
Hollywood could not have cast them better if they were looking for inclusive and representative, though they’d never portray the alleged rapists as anything other than white. We see them now, their faces innocent and smiling, unaware of what lies ahead.
Each image on the website looks like a “wanted: dead or alive” poster.
The porn industry is booming to something like $13-60 billion a year. Young heterosexual men have nowhere else to turn because just looking at a girl across a room can be seen as predatory now, let alone asking for a phone number and the fear that goes along with dating a woman who can turn around and accuse you of anything.
Ah, but now, they can have an entire industry of OnlyFans girls welcoming them in, cultivating what feels like a real relationship almost, and even more importantly, they’re not treated like rapists.
Barely legal virgins making cute little TikToks to build a massive client base on OnlyFans and make hundreds of millions? Check.
Lily Phillips sleeping with 100 guys in a train and claiming she’s doing society a favor by helping these men out? Check.
Bonnie Blue proud of all the men she slept with and holding a Baby Daddy reveal party? Check.
And everywhere they look in culture, extreme sexuality is on display for almost every kind of person except them. Queer sexuality especially is treated like some kind of sacred ritual to be encouraged, with no limits.
Kids are even exposed to it because what parent would be caught dead sounding like a bigot? They seem obsessed with their private parts in deciding what gender they might be. This is all way too much for children.
Camryn Manheim went viral for saying the quiet part out loud: how white liberal women today desperately need queer kids to give them status in the non-binary, Ceterosexual, polysexual, multisexual, and pansexual world of Gen Z.
Of course she’s virtue-signaling for applause and making jokes to make gay sons feel better, but it also has the opposite effect by further shaming heterosexual sons, like they are somehow the minority.
It isn’t that morality should mean a “trans genocide” or forcing everyone to be heterosexual. It’s just that it’s become an upside-down culture, leaving young heterosexual men almost nowhere to turn but to porn and young women with no idea what to do with their bodies once they have opened the door with consent.
For these boys, finding a girl who wanted to party and had no problem having other men join in was straight out of a porn fantasy. They couldn’t believe their luck.
Women need the story
I didn’t want to watch Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story on Netflix. I already knew from how Ryan Murphy fetishized serial killer Ed Gein, suggesting that if he had been treated for gender dysphoria, he might not have killed all of those women. The blending of extreme violence and sexuality was too much.
But since I am a Lizzie Borden obsessive who's read everything, listened to every podcast, and knows all the details of the case, I thought, let’s see what this show is about. That was a mistake. There are scenes in that series I will never unsee. All I could think when it was over was how much Hollywood needs the Hays Code back.
Anyone can turn on Netflix and watch that series, which depicts an axe pounding a human head into a bloody pulp as Lizzie and her maid, splattered in the victim’s blood, embark on a love affair. Again, the message is that if only our society allowed queer women to feel empowered, maybe they would not kill.
They somehow bring in serial killer Aileen Wuornos, who brings her gay lover to the Borden House Bed and Breakfast (which didn’t exist as a B&B until after she had been arrested), and they have sex in all of the rooms, even on the murder couch.
As bad as it was, it became a must-see, with 12 million views after it dropped. Everyone was talking about it on TikTok, most people panning it because it’s terrible, but some women seemed to really believe the story, to see Lizzie Borden as the victim. She was not the victim. She murdered her parents so she could get the money and live the life to which she believed she was accustomed.
Kall Me Kris sums it up well:
But it’s the story that had to be rewritten for today’s Great Feminization, a culture dominated and saturated with the female gaze - a gaze that sees itself as both empowered and helpless. And always abused and traumatized by men.
Netflix has done the same thing with the new East of Eden, a feminist reboot that sympathizes with Cathy, the book's embodiment of evil.
And of course, the whole thing came full circle with the star, Florence Pugh, posting about the Cornell 7 on her Instagram, then talking about it at a Q&A:
Women have to be the victims now because men have to be at fault. But that also means women are infantilized, which ultimately makes them unable to even consent just by being female. Ironic, isn’t it?
This clip of Camille Paglia, a voice greatly missed right about now, was making the rounds.
The Pendulum Swing
I grew up in an era mostly free of morality and decency. We policed ourselves with our made-up rules around progressivism. But looking back now, I feel betrayed by my willingness to participate in behavior I thought was liberating, but in reality, I came out of a lot of it feeling used.
I don’t blame anyone but myself, but I sometimes wish I’d grown up with different rules, because now I can see all too clearly what having no standards of morality or decency can do to a person, to kids, to a culture.
The pendulum swing happened in the 1930s with the Hays Code, and it swung again with the Counterculture movement in the 1960s and 1970s. We’re overdue for another pendulum swing, and this time, it will have nowhere to go but back toward morality and decency.
