I remember that feeling well, the mixture of horror and fascination—the inability to look away even though a big part of you wants to. The Latin root of “fascinate,” fascinum, means a charm or enchantment. Witchcraft. To be deprived of your will by supernatural means. To be under a spell.
I spent a decent chunk of my childhood on the island of Malta, just off the North African coast, where the tuna go to breed and the great whites follow. When my grandfather was stationed in Libya in the 1960s (officer, Royal Air Force), he bought a farmhouse on the south of the island so he and his family, including my mother, could escape the brutal summers in Tripoli. It was only 40 degrees C in August, as opposed to 50, which was a mercy, I suppose, though only a small one.
I remember being very young and heading down to the beach at Delimara laden with glass bottles of Fanta, hard, dark Maltese bread and packets of fatty salami that would sweat in the afternoon sun. We’d spend long days there swimming and my parents would lay and read and I’d go hopping off across the salt pans looking for stuff to poke. I remember, so vividly, staring into simmering rockpools and peeling back seaweed and lifting up stones to reveal shapeless creatures that sucked and oozed and fixed me with their eyeless gaze.
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve felt that strange feeling again—the four-year-old confronted with a writhing anemone—as I’ve watched the ongoing media circus over Jane Doe and the Cornell Seven.
Unless you’ve been living under a stone yourself, you’ll have some understanding of what’s been going on. Girl goes to frat house, gets drunk and does drugs with a bunch of fratboys, they all have sex, and after first being okay with it, she later decides that, actually, she was raped.
The events took place nearly two years ago. Jane Doe went to the university first to complain, and they disciplined the boys, excluding two of them and closing the Chi Phi chapter. Police decided, however, that there was no evidence of coercion and declined to bring charges. Now Doe has brought a civil suit, and after the media outcry and the inevitable barrage of women on TikTok, Instagram and BlueSky screaming “I am Jane Doe,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul has appointed Letitia James—that Letitia James—to reconsider criminal charges. Even President Trump has commented on the case, in support of the boys, of course.
Everything is obviously not quite as someone like AOC would have you believe. On stage in New York last month, she described the incident as a “gang rape,” and said it was part of a “culture of rape, sexual assault and pedophilia” at elite universities. I’ll spare you all the gory details, save for one, because I think it says a lot. During the course of the “gang rape,” Jane Doe is alleged to have sodomized one of her “rapists” without his approval. He told police that at the time of the initial investigation. After the unbidden bumming, our “victim” allegedly began performing bodybuilding poses—naked, one assumes—in front of the other men, before resuming sex. I think they call that a “mogging.”
While you might doubt whether it’s even possible for a woman to assrape a man, one look at Jane Doe will tell you otherwise. Maybe a woman can assrape a man. Jane Doe has a heavier deadlift than many male fitness influencers I know. I’ve joked on Twitter that if Vince MacMahon were still in charge of the WWE, as he rightly should be, he’d already have signed Jane Doe and pitted her against Brock Lesnar’s daughter in a hell-in-the-cell match.
Really, you’ve got to laugh.
And yet, this is deadly serious.
I’ve seen plenty of cheap moralizing on Twitter, including from renowned internet tough guys, about how the whole thing is “degenerate” and if you’re interested in it you’re “degenerate” too. If people just stopped paying attention, the logic seems to be, stuff like this would stop happening. Just look away. Oh yeah, and don’t let your daughter go to college.
It is disgusting and unedifying. But no, this stuff isn’t going away, whether you look at it or not, whether you send your daughter to college or not.
