I Sure Am Sick of All These Dudes' Opinions About the Cornell Jane Doe

(I've got some news about a book I'm writing! Click here to read about it!)

I’ve been making a concerted effort to lower the temperature of this S Peter Davis Internet News Magazine for a while now because, since the reinstatement of the world’s most famous racist game show host in the highest seat of worldwide power, world events have taken a turn that can charitably be described as a “bummer.”

 With that in mind I hadn’t intended to touch on Cornell University at all, in part because I’m not a journalist and I don’t report news qua news, even if the horrendous consequences of entitled masculinity is kind of my beat. There’s nothing much I can say about the so-called Cornell Seven that will tread new ground. But then I began to notice another secondary discourse. I don’t want to talk about the guys who did the thing, but I do want to talk about other guys who have opinions about the thing.

And if you’re mercifully offline and don’t know what The Thing is— look, I’ve had some trouble with email subscribers not getting my stuff delivered and I don’t know if automated email filters have a vendetta against certain words that you’re not allowed to say on TikTok. Just Google for the latest nasty news out of Cornell University in New York—just typing the word “Cornell” into your browser bar will probably bring up half a dozen news headlines that will collectively tell you all you need to know.

 You might notice that I talk about gender politics quite a lot, which has me pegged as the always notorious Male Feminist (derogatory); a deceitful and cunning creature whose only possible motivation for talking about this stuff is trying to get into the trousers of hot, kinky, purple-haired, twentysomething college humanities majors. In reality I haven’t been to university since Obama’s first term and I don’t know that I’d know enough about what twentysomethings are into these days to hold a conversation with one, but more to the point, I try not to talk about women or women’s experiences in a way that implies some kind of overlapping magisteria. I don’t even think I bring up hard-F feminism very often at all, even though I’m schooled in it. No amount of book learning is ever going to give me access to women’s experience in the world.

There is another type of guy who talks a lot about gender politics, and they’re the type of guy who know all about women’s experiences, and their inner psychology, or so they believe, but it comes from, like, an almost ornithological perspective. Like, it’s not necessarily full-scale hatred of the particular species of their purported expertise, but they can very much understand why a particular specimen of the Northern Southwest Golden Swallow might cry rape after a consensual threesome turned into a non-consensual seven-bird gangbang.

 Ah, damn, I was being so careful about staying vague.

 I write a lot about the “manosphere” space, but there are a lot of men on social media who don’t exactly fall inside the manosphere but who are sort of manosphere-adjacent. If you consider the manosphere as an actual sphere the size of Jupiter, then these guys are its many moons. It’s men whose primary beat is talking about women, not exactly with the masculinist supremacy gusto of Men’s Rights Activism, but still with a kind of pseudoscientific penetration into women’s true motivations, and one that always seems to conclude that women lie about having been sexually assaulted, like, all the time. In fact it skips straight past that like some kind of axiom and reaches for explanations about why that is.

 And this is where we meet Michael Tracey.

Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now:

Michael Tracey is a self-described journalist whose entire thing—his entire thing—is trying to prove that high profile sexual assault accusations are all completely manufactured by the accuser. He’s leaped on every single notorious sex abuse scandal in recent memory. He stuck up for Diddy, he stuck up for Harvey Weinstein, and as far as Tracey is concerned, Jeffrey Epstein never so much as committed a fashion crime, let alone a sex crime.

 But Tracey also has his theories about what’s actually going on in women’s heads when they spend all their time lying about having been molested. He psychoanalyzes them to conclude that their actions are not the actions of sexually abused women. In his defense of Graham Platner, he draws many curious details about his accuser’s story and with smug delight proposes that she would not have acted in certain ways (for example, spending the rest of the night in bed with him, or calling him the next day) if he legitimately had done something to her without her consent. As for why she would later make that claim, Tracey determines that she was a political puppet, and goes so far as to propose the possibility that she may have been hypnotized via some kind of strange false-memory-planting quasi-science.

In the Cornell case, which seems to have involved an initially consensual threesome in a college dorm that went bad for the female participant when a whole bunch of drunk frat boys barged into the room, Michael Tracey is again entirely convinced that this thing either didn’t happen, or if it did, that she was fine with it at the time.

 This incident took place in late 2024. Tracey’s contention is that the accuser was persuaded by a bunch of her blue-haired feminazi friends to later lodge a false complaint about it in revenge against the patriarchy for electing Donald Trump.

To be fair, Michael Tracey seems to really get off on this for reasons that aren’t entirely based on the sheer joy of turning rape accusations around on the accuser. He seems to have some kind of actual fetish for being dogpiled on the internet, and if it moves off the internet, even better. There are a lot of people on social media who really hate him for what he does, a fact that makes him giddy with joy. He does this weird thing where he spends half the day on Bluesky name-searching himself and reposting people’s insults.

 Obviously it drives people into a greater rage when they find they can’t rattle him, and that creates a runaway feedback loop. Mob rage over his coverage of the Cornell case led ultimately to some people doxing him, and people started calling his phone and showing up to his home… which he also seems to have enjoyed.

 Here’s the problem—Tracey’s personal inclination that doxing is fine and may even be character-building led him on a week-long crusade to dig up and publish the identity of the accuser of the Cornell Seven. On October 1, he succeeded, or believes that he did. After a few hours, he took the information down, with the bizarre and internally contradictory rationale that he in fact does not hold animus toward her, but also wanted to make an example of her, but also hopes she doesn’t get harassed, but also knows she will be through his deliberate actions?

 This is a brazen, insane lie. Tracey’s entire stated point from the beginning for wanting to dox the accuser was that he thought it wasn’t fair that she was safe from public harassment but the accused were not. He knows that taking down her name hours later does jack shit because thousands of people tweeted about it and are now busy trying to track down where she lives, which was the point.

 Anyway, Michael Tracey is far from the only miserable goblin online who thinks they can get inside women’s heads and speculate about why women Are The Way They Are. Another regular woman whisperer is Tracey’s close friend and frequent podcast buddy Richard Hanania.

In his conversation with Tracey about Cornell, Hanania speculates, in earnest it seems, that the accuser may have concocted her scheme from an episode of Sex and the City. 

Hanania is my age and still thinks that Sex and the City is the show that all of the teen and twentysomething girls watch. I don’t know, fellas, I think his opinions about how women think and feel can be discarded.

 Matt Walsh is another patient explainer of women’s inner psychology who has never seen a rape accusation that he believed—at least, not one involving a white man. Walsh tells us that the Cornell accuser is actually wracked with guilt for freely and consensually engaging in pack fornication, but mistakenly believes that her guilt is actually trauma, and she believes this because she’s been brainwashed by therapists. He tells us that women, by their nature, actually do not want to be free (they were put on Earth to obey men), so godless women hold the delusion that nothing they do is their own fault. The solution is not therapy that tells them they were victimized, but to embrace righteous slavery in strict dogmatically religious marriage.

You see how smoothly that explanation comes out? Pseudopsychology is actually really easy. It’s like worldbuilding a fantasy novel except you’re brainbuilding fantasy people. You don’t actually need to have the lived experience of a class of people in order to figure out how they think, because how they think is necessarily an extension of how you think, and we know this because you are always right.

 Let’s try another one: White supremacist Aporia slop king Steve Sailer has his own views about women’s behavior. After getting momentarily distracted by racially profiling the accused men (he’s puzzled trying to identify the race of one of the men with a Portuguese name) he determines that what really happened here was that, of course, Jane Doe was perfectly fine with the Cornell encounter, but she was later bullied by other women who correctly identified that she had “lowered the price of sex.” How were these other more conservative ladies going to land a Chad quarterback who will buy them expensive jewelry when this hussy was giving it out in group sessions for the price of a margarita and a line of ketamine?

 So, to win back her social standing she needed to rectify the situation by destroying the men involved, thus triggering sex inflation and raising sex back to its natural market price.

Wheee! So many alternative psychologies! So many theories of mind that curiously resemble men’s own private lived experience. Of course the theocrat thinks the woman is suffering tradwife guilt and the Aporia dipshit thinks she’s upset about having had interracial sex and the goblin in his 40s thinks she’s obsessed with a show that was in its peak of popularity the last time he touched a woman.

 Look, I’m not happy that the names of the Cornell Seven were made public. I think that too much actual justice is poisoned by the court of public opinion and I don’t think that it should be open season on people, their careers, and their lives the moment they are accused of something. I’m not under the illusion that false accusations don’t happen. We will always have the Duke Lacrosse thing.

 Michael Tracey and the other ardent orgybro defenders are right that said orgybros have not been proven guilty of anything, but what they seem to fail to see is that the Jane Doe (whose real name, if he’s even correct, Tracey smugly and sweatily tossed to the Twitter wolves like raw hamburger) has also not been proven guilty of anything except in the court of their own minds.

 But the court of their minds is all that really matters to them. When you, particularly if you are some sort of ideologue, project your own mindset, worldview, and personal experience onto this woman, of course she necessarily comes off looking like a villain.

 Here’s the thing—these are all much older men. Except Michael Tracey who is apparently in his 30s, but I guess it has been a rough 30 years.

If you are a white dude in your 40s, 50s, or 60s, you simply have no business trying to explain, certainly not with an air of smug condescension, what is going through the mind of an early 20s college girl. You don’t get to explain how you think an early 20s college girl would react to an actual sexual assault, you don’t get to explain how you think that differs from how a particular early 20s college girl actually behaved, you don’t get to explain what you think this proves, and you don’t get to make unilateral decisions about that woman’s life based on what you think this proves.

 But it seems it’s too late now and one twentysomething woman (who may not even be the woman involved) is about to have her life ruined because a thirtysomething dude who looks like a fortysomething golem made of hair glued together with sweat thinks that she didn’t react to a surprise orgy with seven drunk men in the same way that he would have reacted to it.

 Yeah, I don’t think that’s quite right.

I'm writing a book about right-wing reactionary movements in tech and geek culture in general. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and if you like this newsletter then you'll probably like my book. I've been dropping parts of the draft as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. You can check it out here:

Here's what paid subscribers are reading right now: