Even Ivy League Universities Slut Shame

Stop lying about human nature

The New York Times has just destroyed the narrative surrounding the alleged 2024 gang rape at Cornell. Fill out your Michael Tracey apology forms here. We now know that the woman involved at first did not see herself as a victim. Jane Doe, as the NYT calls her, was then slut shamed, which caused her increasing distress. At one point, she found a forum post in which the incident was characterized as a “gang r*ape.” She couldn’t believe it was described that way, and confided in Matthew Ingalls, one of the men who she would later accuse of assault.

One week after she was supposedly raped at a frat house, the woman was upset because she was disinvited from a party at the same location “for her own good.” Days later, she started describing her experience as non-consensual.

We’ve been doing this campus rape controversy thing for decades now, and these conversations never get anywhere because they only reveal that we are in denial about human nature.

Women have been told that consent is what matters in sexual relationships. Of course, “consent” sometimes exists on a spectrum, particularly when it comes to sex, an area of life where humans communicate more subtly than they do elsewhere. Little explicit guidance is given beyond that. Men, we all know, want to have a lot of sex with a wide variety of sexual partners. Movies, TV shows, and feminism tell us that women can legitimately decide to behave the same way, and that this is either morally neutral or empowering.

You’re particularly likely to get this message if you’ve made it to an Ivy League university. If you’re on the spectrum or bad at understanding subtle social cues, you might take this ideology seriously.

One thing I’ve always been struck by is how little congruence there is between what educated Americans say and what they do on matters of race, sex, class, and other sensitive topics. I’m not talking about the normal conservative critique of “oh, you believe in racial equality but live in an all-white neighborhood and send your kids to private school.” That’s an old argument, and it’s true. But I’m talking about personal interactions, sources of self-esteem, and how individuals understand their social roles.

Next time you’re around a highly educated young woman who has views and attitudes typical of her social class, imply that something about her is stereotypically masculine. It could be her gait, her jawline, her voice, whatever. If your understanding of humanity is based on how people answer survey questions, you might expect her to shrug it off. But trust me, unless she’s a fully committed pronoun person, she will not. You can try the same thing with the typical cis-hetero male of the same educational background, and call him effeminate. I admit to having conducted versions of these experiments, and people generally react with anger or distress, since they still desire to be perceived as someone representing traits associated with their biological sex.

Most girls who go to elite universities are not that promiscuous. They understand that everyone is supposed to say that men and women should be judged equally, but also that nobody lives that advice. Educated American women generally do not have group sex with random men. And if there are times when they do behave like sluts, they try to keep such behavior secret rather than proudly owning it like actresses do in the movies.

The sexual double standard rests on certain fundamentals about human nature. Men who were promiscuous had an evolutionary advantage, while a woman who wasn’t selective about her partners was at risk of ending up with bad genes for her offspring or being abandoned in a vulnerable state.

This is not real life

I’m not failing to make the is/ought distinction here. It is true that simply having an evolutionary explanation for some aspect of human nature doesn’t morally justify it. Nonetheless, the fact that men and women are psychologically different must be taken as a fact about the world. The double standards aren’t just a matter of judging other people, but determine how we judge ourselves too. If women did not evolve to have casual sex, then casual sex is probably going to cause psychological distress. Morning after regret is a woman’s body telling her that she did something wrong, and the social stigma that comes from such acts is no less a part of human nature.

How we feel about the behavior of others is not infinitely malleable through rational discourse. Note that we are talking about an Ivy League university in the fall of 2024. Even in such an environment, a woman was slut shamed to such a degree that it led to her dropping out of college and ruined her life. If Ivy League universities cannot eliminate slut shaming after decades of feminist ideological domination, what hope do the rest of us have? Civilized countries should be applauded for no longer arresting those who have sex outside marriage or stoning them to death. But to go beyond this and say that we should not judge promiscuous women harshly is asking too much of human nature. Every other society has found it easier to just encourage women to practice modesty and discretion. We’ve decided to try something else, and the result is endless moral panics and controversies over fuzzy concepts like consent, sexual assault, and power imbalances.

The Cornell student is a victim. Likely not of rape, but of lies about human nature.

Here’s what women need to be told. You have a choice to behave promiscuously. We’re a civilized society and believe in individual liberty. But if you do have sex with men you don’t know well and are not in a committed relationship with, you will likely regret your actions. Other women will gossip about you, and even the men who you’d think would be grateful will often dehumanize you, laugh at you behind your back and see you with contempt. I know you’ve seen a lot of TV shows where the most attractive, confident, and high status women go through life sexually free and open without suffering much in the way of emotional distress and reputational consequences, and there is probably some minority of women for whom that is possible, but the odds are extremely low that you are one of them. This will be true whether you’re a waitress at a restaurant or an elite college student, even though in the latter case you’ll be subject to a lot more propaganda on this topic.

We are in the process of relearning what nearly every other society has understood instinctively. Unfortunately, our unwillingness to take human nature seriously enough is creating a lot of broken women and punishing too many innocent men along the way.