A message shared in a groupchat in 2024 profoundly changed many lives: A student at Cornell University sent out a call to his fellow friends and fraternity brothers on a chat called “Chi Phi Actives” that there was “free p—-” available for the taking, according to a recently filed lawsuit.
Documentation of this message exchange is central to the case, which is being brought against seven men in the chat, their fraternity, Cornell University, the local district attorney’s office and the bar accused of serving the subject while underage at the time.
Because that so-called “free p—-” was attached to a human woman, referred to as Jane Doe in the lawsuit. Jane Doe alleged she was rendered passive by alcohol and drugs; effectively a receptacle for the impulses and a misplaced desire for male bonding amongst more than a half-dozen men who she alleged proceeded to have nonconsensual sex with her while she remained in a compromised state.
Social media did not, in fact, make us more social; instead, it put a screen between us and other human beings.
Later, the woman reported it to campus police; after viewing her signed statement, prosecutors at the Tompkins County District Attorney’s Office didn’t find grounds to bring criminal charges. The recent lawsuit alleged her initial report was not properly handled by campus police or the DA’s office (two men were expelled and the fraternity was suspended). Attorneys of some of the seven men named in the lawsuit have publicly denied allegations. Cornell on Thursday agreed to an independent investigation into the allegations. The Tompkins County DA said his office was unaware of some of the details included in the new lawsuit.
The story of “The Cornell 7” has since blown up in the news and on social media. The DA has agreed to reopen an investigation into the case, and on Thursday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed New York Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor for the case, replacing the Tompkins County DA as lead prosecutor after Hochul called into question the decisions of the Cornell Campus Police and the DA’s office at the time Jane Doe reported the incident in 2024.
But there is a cultural crisis beyond Cornell’s campus worth parsing here. In many ways, the Snapchat messages are at the center of the case, and the outrage around it. And that seems darkly apt. Because social media did not, in fact, make us more social; instead, it put a screen between us and other human beings, making it easier to render them into caricatures, to demean them, to behave cruelly toward them and to objectify them.
Pervasive online pornography and ubiquitous and targeted misogynist online messaging has warped the minds of many young men. The social media universes in which a growing number of men spend time is too often a troubling mix of sexual degradation designed to arouse and blatant misogyny designed to invoke a sense of superiority. In the manosphere, women are often “foids” — a human-like female, not quite a person. Terrifying as it is, are we all that surprised at the horrific scenarios it’s all wrought?
Sexual violence, of course, well predates social media and the internet. Women have been objectified and mistreated by men throughout history; the world was generally a far more violent, sadistic and misogynist place decades and centuries ago. But when that objectification and mistreatment is mediated through a screen in the modern era, it has the power to erase a viewer’s fundamental empathy. That virtual disassociation may be what allegedly allowed a young man, whom Jane Doe alleged in her lawsuit she knew and considered a friend, to see her not as a person but as a thing to be used and offered up. It is undeniably part of what led to so many other men receiving a message about “free p—-” to seem to think it was funny, or enticing or anything other than profoundly sociopathic. At the very least, we know of no one in that chat who considered it alarming enough to raise concerns. The dozens of other men in the Snapchat group were witnesses who, as far as reporting shows, did nothing. And that is one of the other dangers: groupthink that leads to inaction in the face of violence and other wrongdoing committed by a select few.
In response to the lewd invitation, respondents appeared to laugh and gloat.
“Like you can walk in and whip it out,” one noted. One man asked, “Shop still open?” to which another replied in the affirmative.
The pitfalls of social media do not excuse behavior like that alleged in this lawsuit. But it does account for a common component in the widespread issue of poorly handled sexual assault on women on our college campuses. This story is yet another in a continuous line of campus rape cases that have captured, and often divided, public opinion — often along partisan lines.
Because the grotesque invitation was mediated through a screen, it simply felt less real — and as a result, the person being offered up felt less like a real human being.
Because the grotesque invitation was mediated through a screen, it simply felt less real — and as a result, the person being offered up felt less like a real human being. The same dynamic now animates the online discussions about the case. Too many commentators, opinion-havers and viewers are talking about this as though it’s merely a question of legal standards, or slotting it into their pre-existing views on campus sexual violence, Title IX, feminism or wokeism — and in doing so, rendering the woman at the center of it more object than person, someone to act upon rather than someone to see, hear and feel for.
We are all, in other words, implicated here. And we should take that fact, and this case, as an urgent reminder to figure out how to rehumanize the people we see and discuss through a screen.
The post What a lewd Snapchat message tells us about the ‘Cornell 7’ allegations — and our culture appeared first on MS NOW.
Author: Source Author
From MS Now.
Leave a Reply