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Young women in my generation were lied to.
We grew up in the era of “sex positivity” and were told that sex was a morally inconsequential pastime.
We were led to believe that by having sex like men, we could achieve liberation.
Only one problem: that isn’t exactly true.
As it turns out, promiscuity is not empowering.
And there’s perhaps no better case study to prove that than the rape allegations coming out of Cornell University.
That’s where a former student, known as Jane Doe, accused seven male students of taking advantage of her sexually one night in October 2024.
According to her legal complaint, Jane Doe showed up at a fraternity house drunk and consented to a threesome with two men.
By the end of the night she’d had intercourse with seven men total in what she would later describe as a “gang bang” in text messages.
Though she now claims she was too intoxicated to consent, the messages she sent to the men she later accused reveal that she believed the sex-positive lies fed to her generation by activists and the media alike.
In discussing rumors about the night with one of its male participants, Jane Doe wrote, “Everyone needs to grow up cause sexuality and sex and s—t is changing and stuff like this is going to become more common,” she wrote.
“I’m also really open minded [though].”
And when rumors continued to reverberate through campus, she reassured one of the young men with a sexualized spoof of a pro-choice motto: “Our body our choice.”
These are the words of a true believer.
In Jane Doe’s own estimation, her participation in group sex with multiple men was proof of her “open-mindedness.”
The gang bang, she believed, was a symptom of society’s progress.
And those who didn’t think the same on campus was obviously stuck in the past.
Of course, anyone with an ounce of wisdom knows that’s a load of garbage, but that isn’t evident to Gen Z women who were conditioned to believe that sex is inconsequential, so long as it’s consensual. They now are learning the hard way, through painful personal experience, that they’ve been raised on lies.
Of course I can’t get into her head, but it seems to me that, as the weeks went on, Jane Doe’s utopian sex positivity curdled into regret as she realized the uncomfortable truth: that what she’d understood as sexual empowerment had left her vulnerable to exploitation.
Participation in group sex with countless men hadn’t liberated her.
It appears that, as the weeks went on and the rumors swirled, she found herself feeling bad, used, dirty.
That’s why, I think, she reached for a solution: the cudgel of consent.
It’s less morally complicated to blame the men for sex that left her feeling awful than to interrogate whether the sex positive worldview of our moment is fundamentally flawed.
I wrote about the failure of sex positivity in my forthcoming book, “Nothing Serious: How Modern Love Lost Meaning,” before the Cornell case even happened, but the incident explains the predicament my generation finds itself in perfectly: “Without some grander cultural, social, ethical, or religious framework to object to sex, the only justification that girls [are] left with is a legalistic one … If consent is the only rule, then violating it is the only crime.”
Young girls have been failed by the people who promised to empower them.
It’s time girls wrest back control of their sexual lives from misguided activists and accept the uncomfortable truth that’s staring us in the face: liberation won’t be found on the other side of a sexual encounter.