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

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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.

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