When Jane Doe filed a police report alleging that she was gang-raped at Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity house, she stated that she had initially agreed and was “excited” to have a threesome with two of the men. “It’s a part of her story that has been variously twisted or discounted in the media, by commentators operating both within and well outside the bounds of good faith,” Anahid Nersessian writes in a new essay. In a Times roundtable about the case, for instance, the political columnist Michelle Cottle asserted that we have “fetishized consent just by itself.” She went on: “The extreme version of ‘no slut-shaming’ ” has made it unfashionable “to call anything out of bounds as long as everybody has said, ‘Oh, no, I’m O.K. with this.’ ”
“I would venture that sex between adults to which everybody has said, ‘Oh, no, I’m O.K. with this,’ is, in fact, O.K., and that people who want to have a threesome should be able to have a threesome without being gang-raped,” Nersessian counters. “Anyone who implies that Jane Doe was assaulted because she was already doing something slutty or immodest is complicit in the harm that’s been done to her. That harm also includes the subversion of her sexual agency, and it is compounded by those who want to turn a rape case into a parable about how women don’t know their own minds, how they have been so manipulated—by the patriarchy, the maxims of sex positivity, or both—that they can’t tell the difference between sex they want to have and sex they don’t.”
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When Jane Doe filed a police report alleging that she was gang-raped at Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity house, she stated that she had initially agreed and was “excited” to have a threesome with two of the men. “It’s a part of her story that has been variously twisted or discounted in the media, by commentators operating both within and well outside the bounds of good faith,” Anahid Nersessian writes in a new essay. In a Times roundtable about the case, for instance, the political columnist Michelle Cottle asserted that we have “fetishized consent just by itself.” She went on: “The extreme version of ‘no slut-shaming’ ” has made it unfashionable “to call anything out of bounds as long as everybody has said, ‘Oh, no, I’m O.K. with this.’ ”
“I would venture that sex between adults to which everybody has said, ‘Oh, no, I’m O.K. with this,’ is, in fact, O.K., and that people who want to have a threesome should be able to have a threesome without being gang-raped,” Nersessian counters. “Anyone who implies that Jane Doe was assaulted because she was already doing something slutty or immodest is complicit in the harm that’s been done to her. That harm also includes the subversion of her sexual agency, and it is compounded by those who want to turn a rape case into a parable about how women don’t know their own minds, how they have been so manipulated—by the patriarchy, the maxims of sex positivity, or both—that they can’t tell the difference between sex they want to have and sex they don’t.”