Episode 387: Kate On: The Cornell Case, Male Violence, and the Limits of Empathy

Content warning: This episode covers the Cornell 7 case and includes discussion of sexual assault, drugging, and how survivors are failed by the systems meant to protect them.

"The conversation we should be having about the Cornell case isn't one about consent, it's one about entitlement."

I have been trying to figure out what I want to say about the Cornell case that hasn't already been said. I'm angry, obviously, but mostly I'm just so weary. We have watched women come forward, watched them be doubted and doxxed, and watched powerful men continue to be powerful. I don't want to record another episode explaining consent. That's 101. We know. And if knowing hasn't changed enough, then maybe knowledge isn't the problem. We've spent a really long time treating a power problem as an empathy problem, and it's not getting us anywhere.

Jane Doe alleges she was drugged and sexually assaulted by members of a Cornell fraternity in 2024, and one of the messages reportedly shared in the fraternity's Snapchat referred to her as "free pussy." In that phrase, she stops being a person and becomes something to be used.

This all points to a question feminism has been circling for as long as feminism has existed. Who gets access to women? Not only to our bodies, but to our time, our labor, our attention, and our care. I don't believe these frat guys didn't understand consent. I think they understood it perfectly well. What we're looking at is entitlement, and entitlement is about power.

In this solo episode, I talk about why women keep explaining our pain to people who already know, and why we keep selling women's freedom to men as something that's good for them too. Marriage is where so many of us see this play out most clearly. A woman spends years trying to get her husband to hear her, and the minute she asks for a divorce, he suddenly gets it. He always got it. What changed is that now it costs him something. And I think that's where feminism has to go next, from explaining to leveraging.

What you'll hear about in this episode

Why the Cornell case feels so wearying after Anita Hill, Kavanaugh, Epstein, and Me Too

What "free pussy" reveals about who is entitled to access women

Why entitlement is a power problem and education is a distraction from it

Zawn Villines on household labor and why the arrangement works perfectly well for him

Liz Plank on how the manosphere turned male loneliness into a grievance against women