The traditional ideal of higher education was that of the site of intellectual, and ethical and social, christening. Venerated have been the co-constitutive processes of academic enlightenment and maturation, critical thought and scholarship intertwined with discovering how to live in community. In the 21st century, the relationship between the economic function of the degree and studying at an institution have been made more explicit in the public consciousness. We have been taught to lessen an idealistic association, and instead embrace its value as an investment for our future economic position. Students are encouraged (I would say increasingly pressured into prioritizing) to accumulate credentials, networks, professional experiences, and forms of cultural capital that can be converted into advantageous positions and marketability in the competitive labor market. A diploma is a costly and corporatized, no longer public good, and commodified, not issued from an independent institution but a purchasable means to an end. Although when we apply in our senior year of high school, we may daydream images of ivy-covered walls and libraries groaning under the weight of decadent anthologies, four years later, it is the italicization of the university’s name on our CV that replace them.

Furthermore, the neoliberal university participates in the production and reproduction of class position through credentialization and differentially allocating access to professional opportunities. This reproduction operates one, through students’ subsequent insertion into the labor market, and two, within the walls of the university itself as an institution, concerned with its relationships with (current and future) wealthy alumni, donors, employers, and political and professional elites.

The university is a site of privilege in two ways: a site of class reproduction, that is likewise structured by relational power, organized by gender, race, and other axes. As such, institutional priorities are formulated based on this matrix, dictating whose interests are protected and whose futures are deemed most socially and economically valuable. Some students and staff will be worth more in its eyes. We are speaking of the prime revenue-generating bunch, such as grant-earning tenured professors or superstar athletes, whose economic success is bound up with the university’s, as well as those poised to be the future donors and framed alumni. Amongst them are often the kings of college, the golden boys branded by gilded Greek letters: fraternity brothers.

Sororities and fraternities screen and admit members through processes that evaluate a pledging student’s full package. They consider how they look, their class background, their sexuality (but not necessarily the sexual reputation of brothers… ‘slut shaming’ is to be reserved for sisters!), what they can offer in terms of DEI, and their cultural capital, all together cultivating, through specific curation, and institutionalizing a structural, norm-ordained pipeline of social and economic mobility. By controlling the campus’s social infrastructure, including party locations, alcohol distribution, entry, and social themes (such as the only two ones I’ve heard of, which degradingly and, with truly astonishing unoriginality, are entitled Golf Pros and Tennis Hoes and CEOs and Office Hoes... wow, what else can we find that rhymes with ‘hoes’?), their plebeian subjects and maidens are theirs to command and will.

It is under these institutionalized conditions that the future of seven male Chi Phi students – Matthew Ingalls, Scott Norris, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Jonathan Newell, Diego Sarabia, and Scott Kretzschmar, who wanted “free pussy” – and the appearance and financial stakes of the university were calculated to be more valuable than the human dignity of a female student, a survivor of drugged, multi-partnered, multi-rounded rape, and her future.

The legal trajectory of the Cornell Seven case is as follows. Jane Doe filed a lawsuit against Cornell, the fraternity Chi Phi, the seven men, and other defendants on September 16, 2026, reopening the case from November 2024. In this lawsuit, Doe alleges that she was pressured, being also underage, to consume drugs (ketamine, marijuana, and alcohol) and was subsequently sexually assaulted by multiple men over several hours, nearly two years ago. She originally reported the incident to Cornell Police on November 8 that year. Following this year’s lawsuit, the Tompkins County District Attorney reopened said former criminal investigation September 27/28. After internal Cornell proceedings of 2024, Doe’s attorney told CBS that only two accused students were expelled. Current information provided by Cornell leads us to believe that for the rest, two were briefly suspended, one had already graduated before any sanctions could be imposed, and the final two found not responsible for any sexual misconduct. Thus the university’s internal disciplinary process produced a set of what it deemed to be some appropriate sanctions. In the lawsuit, the allegation states that students involved were offered by Cornell the opportunity to write essays to receive lesser sanctions. Meanwhile, in 2024 the criminal investigation resulted in no charges being filled. Additionally, the two systems appear to have been operating with materially different information. Cornell says it provided the DA will all necessary investigatory material (including the Snapchat group chat screenshot), while the DA said his office never received the screenshot and had not seen the transcript of Doe’s interview to campus police where she stated she was confident she was raped. Doe’s lawyer has also revealed that Doe dropped out of Cornell after the events described in the complaint.

It is also worth mentioning that Cornell has (unlike three of the Cornell Seven who went unscathed) allegedly expelled, and documentededly suspended and banned students involved in pro-Palestine protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza, including bans from campus for three years (in comparison with the mere two-semester suspension sanctioned on two of the Cornell Seven). It also failed, a year after, to protect a student’s immigration status after his student visa was revoked due to his participation in pro-Palestine protests. As the university initially moved toward disenrolling him, he chose to leave the United States voluntarily, after ICE asked him to surrender and a judge declined to immediately block the government from deportation proceedings. We might want to raise questions about what kind of conduct the university is keenly interested in punishing.1

The subsequent paragraphs will summarize and recount Jane Doe’s 2026 civil lawsuit statement, the allegations, and purely pulls from such (i.e.: this is not the same material handled in 2024). I urge you to please, take a moment and reflect whether, in reiteration of the trigger warning, you decide to proceed with reading it. I have visually differentiated the following text to make it easier to skip.

^{On the evening of October 19, 2024, Jane Doe walked to Chi Phi to meet a friend, Male No. 1, whom she had arranged to see over text. Before arriving she had been at Tri Delta, then two bars, where she had consumed a large amount of alcohol over approximately three hours. Her sorority sisters took her to these bars despite her condition and that she was served alcohol while underage. She described herself at that point as around five out of ten intoxicated, opened a beer after arriving, and flirted with him. He proposed a threesome with him and Male No. 2. She was surprised. She agreed and they had oral and vaginal sex, which she initially described as something she was “pretty okay with,” but she asked Male No. 2 to stop when Male No. 1 became very sleepy. She wanted to make sure he was alright. While Male No. 1 slept and Male No. 2 began dry-heaving and became sick, Doe tended to them, only for Male No. 2 to resume making sexual advances on her. They briefly made out. He repeatedly reached for her vagina, and she repeatedly swatted his hand away. Male No. 3 then entered the room, pulled Doe toward him and kissed her, while Male No. 2 simultaneously groped her, after which the three had sex. When Male No. 1 awoke and proposed a foursome, Doe refused, saying “hell no” because she understood it would involve anal sex, and dove under the covers. She subsequently remembered additional men, later identified as Males No. 4 the way through 7, entering the room. Her memory became elusive and fragmented onwards. She vaguely recalled Male No. 7 making a crude and mean remark to her but not its particular articulation, apologizing, then him grabbing her face and kissing her, only for her to try to back away. Doe recalled that one of the men also slapped her hard enough to leave bruises.}

^{Shortly thereafter, Male No. 2 offered her ketamine, pouring a line, of large quantity, onto his erect penis, implying that she should snort it. She did. He then got under the covers with her and again reached for her vagina. At this point, Doe was under the covers while Male No. 2 lay beside her, Male No. 1 sat at the corner of the bed, and the other men remained in the room. The men proceeded to compliment her appearance and ask whether they could do drugs off her “perfect body”, which she agreed to, before she became dizzy, a probable mix of the ketamine and a pre-existing health condition, and was taken upstairs by Male No. 1 and Male No. 4. She also stated that she was given marijuana and liquor throughout the night.}

^{Before they took her upstairs, Male No. 3 and another man entered the room and said something to the effect of “we’re shutting down whatever the fuck this is.” She further alleges that Male No. 2 had sent a message to the “Chi Phi Actives” group chat with fifty additional members, fifty-seven fraternity brothers receiving the texts in total, advertising that there was a woman available for sex, after which additional men entered the room. Various of the fifty-seven men acknowledged the messages and some responded, which one of the men in the room re-iterated affirmatively that she was still there, prompting that they could join.}

^{Male No. 1 offered her more ketamine, after which she became extremely high and he proposed having sex again, telling her he wanted “redemption” for having passed out earlier. Doe asked, “what happened to just you and me?”, but recalled another sexual encounter happening with Males No. 1 and 4, by which point she described herself as eight out of ten intoxicated. According to Doe’s recollection, the encounter continued until approximately 5:45 a.m., when she said she was tired and needed to sleep and, as far as she remembered, both men stopped.}

^{According to the complaint, the entire episode lasted approximately seven hours and involved all seven men. It further alleges that Doe was left unconscious around 5:45 a.m. When she awoke later that morning and returned to her sorority house, she discovered bruising and other physical evidence that she associated with what had happened at Chi Phi. She subsequently began to try to reconstruct what had happened. She reported the incident to Cornell University Police on around November 8, 2024, during which she stated that she was “100% confident” that she had been raped.}

Mainstream reporting stops at presenting the Cornell Seven as a case of institutional betrayal. However, it demandingly needs to be understood, is more critically characterized as a case of institutional protection.

When sexual violence occurs, the neoliberal university views the primary threat not the moral violation nor the physical harm endured by the student, but the potential public disclosure that could damage the university’s public image, enrollment rates, or revenues. Questions of justice are re-oriented into administrative assessments organized around market logics, whose consequences amount to a response that is undeniably dismaying and disillusioning, purposeful inaction. The mediated sanctions on perpetrators, those of not just legally reprehensible crimes, but cruel, immoral and inhumane acts against fellow students, are constitutively designed to be damage control, seldom systemic accountability or survivor restoration, and fail to bring about substantive justice. Rather than investigating claims transparently, administrative procedures are designed to de-escalate or compartmentalize reports to limit the legal exposure and financial risks. Questions of respecting privacy and institutional order are often invoked, using mechanisms such as confidential settlements, NDAs, and demure resignations that carefully sweep the matter under the rug, whilst high-reward PR statements are mobilized for image protection. Furthermore, the translation of a violent act into an administrative, organizational matter can make the underlying relations of power obscured from view, rationalizing and masking instances of financially-motivated cahoots and gendered violence.

These logics are also mirrored at the student organization level within fraternities’ disciplinary systems. They utilize their own internal self-pardoning judicial councils who secure their fellow kin’s impunity, protecting the fraternity’s reputation and brotherhood. Disciplinary mechanisms and, more broadly, fraternity culture revolve around internal codes of silence like ‘don’t fuck your brother’, such that when sanctions are issued, they are perfunctory, symbolic in purpose. A self-enforcing shield of protection is erected upon the pledge class, for when everyone participates or witnesses the act, there can only be mutual blackmail.

Hazing plays a crucial role in this resocialization of brothers, elite university fraternities functioning like a bacchanalian incubator for the Epstein class. Sorority rushing isn’t absolved either from what it inflicts on its sisters. There they learn how business is dealt with in the real world. Are taught that to secure power and privilege involves no longer seeing violence as violent: the banalization of suffering. Control looks like force and hurting others, enacted in the dark basement of the fraternity chapter house (often, uncannily, columned, white mansions), and that practice a ritualized, hierarchical legacy yours to inherit once you pay your dues. These young men are being primed for the system, to take on the work of their grandfathers and fathers.

If you are outraged by the actions of the Chi Phi brothers, you should likewise be outraged by the administration’s arbiters of justice, the Civil Rights Office, especially Lauren Branchini, the Title IX Coordinator, overseeing every single step of sexual misconduct legal processes. The Civil Rights Office of bureaucrats of ‘neutral’ interest obfuscate operations in favor of the university’s interests (and let me be explicit about what those interests are: those of assets, the university’s personal long term portfolio and financial relationships to donors which depend on a sanitized public and capitulating political image, and ensuring the secure trajectory of the alumni that will belong, and already do, to this very same elite class). These processes are purposefully complex for survivors to proceed with. Branchini’s conduct of them resulted in inconsistencies when comparing the evidentiary material collected with that of civil lawsuit. It is these very processes that yielded the aforementioned unsatisfactory sanctions, with Branchini’s signature at the bottom. I mourn for Doe, thinking about how it must have felt to know it was another woman that ultimately signed off on those papers.

Importantly, Greek life serves as an institutional and campus-cultural bridging between reproduction of power relations organized around class, sexuality, gender, and race. The normalization of ‘hook-up culture’ on campuses can be understood partly as compatible with the neoliberal professional development imperative. Sexual relationships can be engaged in whilst delaying longer-term and effort- and time-consuming commitments of romantic relationships, allowing students to prioritize credential accumulation and career preparation. Hook-up culture ultimately ends up representing an expansion of women’s sexual and economic autonomy to some extent, while simultaneously reproducing gender hierarchy within the new sexual order.

Campus hook-up culture (different from casual sex per se) is illusorily emancipatory for women. Normalizing sexual behavior outside of relationships separates sexuality from the long-term reproductive and relational obligations that historically constrained women’s participation in education and employment. Yet the sexual marketplace through which this freedom to hook-up is exercised is structured by gendered, heteronormative, classed, and racial inequalities, occurring in and organized through social media, dating apps, and, within the university, the Greek system and life. The sexual autonomy ostensibly offered by hook-up culture is therefore accompanied by a pervasive sexual double standard, where fraternity brothers exercise asymmetric control and can deploy coercive sexual strategies with structural legitimacy. Another consequence of hook-up culture is the disregard, devaluation, and marginalization of women’s feelings and personhood within the hook-up scene. The transactional nature of these interactions erodes mutual concern and respect and promotes men’s affective detachment. Moreover, men can engage more frequently in casual sex without losing social status, in fact, can accrue cultural capital for it, while women risk being labeled as ‘sluts’ and socially shamed for engaging in the same exact behavior. Women can therefore technically choose whether to participate in casual sexual relations through hook-up culture, but they do so under conditions that are not equal; their choices are structured by other structural social inequalities (for example, women of color demonstrated lower participation rates, namely on dating apps, by virtue of exclusion and opting out, and report uncomfortable experiences of hyper-sexualization, racialization, stereotyping, or being ignored), concerns of reputation, safety, and the unequal distribution of power over the spaces in which boozey sexual encounters and socializing occur. And said spaces, at many universities, are almost exclusively fraternity parties.

Intense alcohol consumption is also embedded within hook-up culture, lowering resistance to sexual interactions and offering perpetrators plausible deniability, the alibi of a mutual, drunkenly-brazen encounter rather than a non-consensual violation of body and personhood. Along sobriety or lack thereof, there exists a plethora of other rape myths at disposal to divert scrutiny from the perpetrator’s acts onto the survivor’s conduct, utilized by both the student body and administration. Focusing so much time on scrutinizing the survivor’s choices, subjecting them to intrusive and humiliating questioning regarding how much they drank, what they were wearing, or whether they were flirting and presenting it as questioning in good, egalitarian faith, is perversive and a form of secondary violence. And so is that little guileful comment, spoken in a feignedly reticent tone or the guise of being a faithful legalist: “But, I mean… maybe… did she…”

My point is of especial importance in light of discourse I can already see brewing under the surface. Prickly questions about what it means that Doe perhaps intended to hook-up with the first brother and continued to socialize with multiple after that night. The proceeding behavior of survivors should not have to conform to popular expectations of what assault looks like. Likewise, I think we can all bare-minimum conceive more appropriate, more ethical ways to approach consensual (and more contestedly, intoxicated) sex. Moreover, listen to loud resonating whispers of the words ‘I completely understand her’, ‘I see what she did in what I did’, and ‘I sustained a friendship with my assaulter for a while thereafter.’ Upon trauma, the brain doesn’t know what to do. It is trying to process something it should not have to process, cannot easily make sense of. But yes, how could the brother have brutally violated Doe for she iMessaged him that they should smoke together soon, “but like leave out the extra 5 billion men and ketamine”?

A powerful ideology shielding fraternity men is the framing of male misconduct as born out of immaturity and youthful impulse rather than accountable and consciously enacted harm. Popular culture and institutional norms love to depict fraternity misconduct as normal or juvenile, as something that should not impede on the brother’s rightful access to a successful professional future. When transgressions occur, institutional and campus discourses characterize perpetrators as impressionable and horny boys who merely made a mistake, who need to be taught better. Suddenly it becomes obvious how a speciously reformatory, pedagogical-focused policy of having to write a couple of essays, offered as a means of reducing sanctions, can be applied to perpetrators of something as abhorrent as rape, or fifty complicit fraternity brothers. Who watched over the string of messages, including the following three words, sent at 1:42 a.m., that are saturated with such depravity that I lurched my laptop shut when I read them: “Shop still open?”

So fraternity brothers, look at me, at us, and at Doe. Answer us when we ask: is this brotherhood? The monopoly over the social scene, internal codes of collective self-protection and exculpation, and the simultaneous infantilization and brutalization of its members, braced by the knowledge that survivors must entrust their cases to a system whose interests structurally oppose their own? Is brotherhood what made the fifty-seven brothers of Chi Phi feel safe, feel turned on, when they did what they did together?

Is brotherly power derived from being knowing insiders within a pack? Does it mean possession of a ticket for some perverted, carnivalesque exercise of gentlemen’s-club bonding? Is it the de-individualizing suspension of morality and culpability, where the virtue of loyalty means collusion? And to have been able to achieve physical closeness without violating the homophobic boundaries of masculinity, did it demand that the brothers use her body and that voyeuristic group chat as conduits? Must Doe be the sacrificed creature through which the cult can commune?

This condemnatory assessment of Greek life under the neoliberal, gendered university matters not only because it participates in the production of acts of abuse, violence, and discrimination broadly on campus, but because it significantly perpetrates the conditions needed under which campus sexual violence, like the Cornell Seven case, is dealt with. Dealt with in the appalling, seemingly anomalous, but in fact systemic way that it did. Every sort of power structure that functions such that harming other people acquires you more power will breed and nourish rape culture. I urge you to look closer at my words: it is a warning, an indictment of an interminable, waltz of reformism. Just two days after Tompkins County District Attorney said they would reopen the criminal investigation, the Trump administration rescinded Title IX Biden administration rewrites, making it harder to report sexual assault on campuses.

Discourse cannot frame sexual violence insularly as a private misunderstanding between two equally-situated individuals and most certainly not entertain ideas around rape being a consequence of the survivor’s imprudence. Nor can it stop at the recognition that these institutions have errantly failed to administer justice. It must, we must, whilst foremost centering concern and empathy for survivors as they encounter it and our critical efforts, interrogate the social genealogy of perpetration and critically examine rape culture, now and in our daily lives.

In suit, we must also invest equal energy in community-building outside of the institutions that fail us. We need more everyday acts of resistance, such as refusing to partake in and permit the continuation of the culture and traditions safeguarding perpetration and complicity. A greater task is to identify strategic entry points for contravening and rewriting them.

Because when someone makes a rape joke, it is that deep. So are the scoring systems ranking girls and their sexual performance, the spread of rumors and intimate images, or the charged themes of parties. Putting on pussy-cat ears can sometimes be playful, but what happens when that fantasy is no longer about you, the person, but about you the animal, put down on all fours, eye-level with his hips? Living in the chapter house can bring about life-long friendships, laughing with your neighboring brother about how loudly his bed creaked last night, but what happens when he pulls out his phone to show you the non-consensual recording he took of her and him?

For however long the duration for which the physical assault lasts, assault does not end there. Assault lasts a lifetime, is also the narratives and rumors that follow you. The stares from classmates, your heart-sinking when you find out that everyone has an opinion on your university’s anonymous campus social media app before you made the choice to share anything yet, to whom, or ever. Not to mention the other complex ways trauma lives in the body and mind.

The Cornell Seven are a media spectacle, which have and will elicit many differing reactions. There will be denial, rejection, anger, hurt… I’d like to raise attention to two.

One, the feeling of guilt from brothers. Guilt of complicity, perhaps knowing about instances similar in varying degrees alike to Does. In that same vein, I have heard some men say they are mad, I believe secondarily to reckon with that guilt. They say they want to beat up brothers like the Cornell Seven. To this I say, the violence you want to inflict on them is the other side of the coin of the violence towards women. It is a re-iteration of physical domination meaning power. What is a true demonstration of strength and courage is refusing complicity and having the conversations needed to halt instances of sexual violence from occurring. Conversation you may need to have with friends, and certainly, your brothers.

Secondly, and most importantly, the feeling of distress from the sisters of Jane Doe. Survivors. The media spectacle that has come of the Cornell Seven, is in some ways, many women’s story becoming sensationalized. I know I am participating in the circulation. That is why I want to end my essay by saying this. Jane Doe does not need our superficial outrage. She does not need instagram stories of catchy, vacuous 5-word slogans.2 Instead of reposts, what Doe deserves is the support and freedom to process the reporting however she needs to. However all survivors need to as they navigate reading the media coverage themselves. This is the most difficult form of solidarity to show. We are not good because we hate bad men. We are good because we make ourselves useful to those that have been harmed, as well as accountable. Vocal against the harm. Productive, awareness-arming, support, centering the dignity, care, and triumph of one another as survivors, supporters, friends, and family – as brothers and sisters – is of utmost value. Otherwise, these insidious, evasive verdicts will be all that is left, consolatory essay writing deemed appropriate for raping a girl for hours or smirking at the phone screen as it happens a couple floors up.

Note: This piece is part of our new Essay Column, dedicated to longer, more in-depth discussions.

I went to a screening of an experimental documentary about a late cultural theorist and philosopher at Paris’s hottest self-described “lieu culturel pluridiscipliane” (one of those metamodern third spaces hosting club nights, magazine launches, food events, concerts, exhibitions, and more). A panel of academics was to speak after. It’s funny, only after moving here did I discover that one of the metro stations in the 10e is actually an interdimensional portal to Hackney Wick! No Eurostar needed.

The film coupled contemporary documentary work with a fictional dystopian subplot, and had a cyber-anarchist aesthetic. I got the impression its creators see it less as a documentary and more a political and philosophical project, taking up the work of its subject and inviting us to continue his tentative ambition: a promise and (re)provocation of post-capitalist desire into the 21st century.

As I sat there, with my friend, waiting for the screening to start, I felt a bit self-conscious. Holding my posture upright, I kept messing with my bangs. The people who had come were quite attractive. And, I presumed, smart. Stylized, many sporting effectively curated evidence of certain artistic and political sensibilities, I am confident in saying this was, almost ubiquitously, a crowd self-identifying as leftist. Moreover, you don’t hear about an event that is this particular, at this selected venue, entirely by chance. For your visual: baggy denim. Mops of dark hair. All French cheekbones and strong expressive brows. Lots of modish tattoos, from micro to neo-traditional. Pierced earlobes and eyebrows. Combat boots. Needless to say, I avoided eye contact with everyone and yearned for the film to start on time before I sneezed too loudly by accident or something (it did not start on time; it was 30 minutes late, which my friend called ever so French).

15 minutes before the film started, another man went to join the one sitting to my left. I politely smiled and looked up thinking he would say excuse me as he inserted himself into the tight spot (as my friend had done to the woman sitting to our right, making sure she could still see), but he did not.

Upon his self-installation, he displayed immediate signs of no regard for personal space. Over the course of the next 5 minutes, his legs moved from a permissible, albeit uncomfortable for me, leg on the knee stance, to a massive man-spread. Within 30 minutes, I could smell his hot beer breath. His heavy respiration was audible the entire film duration. He also kept talking to his friend. While they were, in spite of disheartened glances from their disrupted neighbor (my glances), almost continuously rowdy among themselves, they interestingly became noticeably listless during the film’s interview with a female academic (a political theorist, beholder of a professorship, and writer of over a dozen books); there was even a scoff released.

It is in moments like these that I gain consciousness. The acrid, forcibly lucid kind.

This was an event for theoretically curious youth. The participants of the Gen Z left, or those who have an interest in the post-2008 left, given the film’s subject matter. The counter-culture. The hope. The campaigners and protesters (this is Paris after all). Who advocate for change, humanism, and the survival of arts and independent media. Those who are continuing the project against domination.

I wanted to take off the makeup and accessories I had picked out trying to doll myself up this morning, and cover myself in mud and shit. Harbor a Pig-Pen cloud of must, and invade my man-spreading neighbor’s space in return.

I wanted to tell him something along the lines of this.

I am angry. You make me angry.

Why, you ask?

It would not be enough for you to close your legs. You did not for the rest of the film anyway. I don’t think you were trying to intimidate me or express disrespect. I don’t think you sat down and thought, I am going to make this woman uncomfortable, make her have to squeeze her bladder so that I can nurse my beer in between my thighs. You simply occupied the space, already yours to occupy.

Underneath the irritation about your legs and breath was something much uglier, something much more sure unearthing within me.

Perhaps this positioning wasn’t even coming from arrogance on your part. Without either of us having consciously chosen the arrangement, one of us is thought to be owed expansiveness, is given entitlement, is to penetrate and define space. And the other subject is expected to yield. Smell his wet, yeasty exhalations.

Here is the problem with many leftist men and misogyny on the left: your acknowledgement of my intelligence, of my comradeship, does not actually alter the structure of our relationship. For many of you, ‘intelligent’ has simply been added to the list of qualities you find desirable in me. A literati, this toy comes packaged with a removable political philosophy book by her side. You not only assess me as hot, but smart, and therefore, even hotter. That is, you admire me precisely as an exceptional woman: attractive and intellectual, against the category of ‘woman’ against which I am being evaluated, within which intellectual depth would never be presumed. A woman may be educated and agreeably articulate; but I am exceptional, in the seriousness, depth, and intensity you are struck to discover I possess.

Understand heterosexual sexuality as a relation of power. Living in a gendered, patriarchal society is to live in a world structured by relations of domination and subjectivation, gender being one of their principal organizing axes. Male desire defines the value and meaning of the feminized body, the object of its desire. That desire then defines how she, which she accordingly internalizes, should and is expected to act. You may recognize me as intelligent enough to be interesting to you, worthy of sexually pursuing or maybe even dating, but you will not, likely unconsciously, in that same act, recognize me as capable of intellectual authority in my own right. My intelligence does not dissolve the gendered relation in which I, the woman, am placed as the object for you to ultimately evaluate, which for most of you anyway, only ever amounts to increasing her desirability.

I am an intellectual in a skirt, and, the cherry on top, a feminist. As you confuse your capacity to desire a feminist with being a feminist yourself, my politics become a turn-on rather than the structure you continue to be complicit in.

Lust must be proof of your own feminist enlightenment. Arousal is mistaken for an unearned claim to an understanding of the world as gendered and oppressive towards women. None of the hard work to educate yourself; all of that can just osmotically be transferred by dating a feminist. And your alibi: your lust is mediated through recognition of my politics. The internal calculation goes: I find her attractive because she’s intelligent and politically interested and engaged; therefore, I’m not crudely objectifying her like all those other men do. Not like the right does. God, I’m such a feminist.

Maybe it is my anger that is sexy to you. Because I am difficult to catch, a challenge for you to approach, and a challenger of the world around me. Just like you, my dear radical.

You, seemingly forbidden to me, are let into the Amazonian kingdom. My transgression is erotic and filthy. You are the one I choose to sin with. The one I deemed moral and conscious enough of the feminist plight. Or maybe the one I defected from my politics for.

And to my delight, you think: she’s not like those bimbo, pick-me, MAGA barbies who vote away their rights. The handmaidens, idiot tradwives, ugly Mar-a-Lago lip-filled bitches, or braindead Silicon Valley waifish escorts orbiting tech feudal lords. You have no difficulty recognizing women as lesser than you, striping them of their agency, and touting misogynistic insults the second they disagree with you. If your opinions on other forms of domination, such as class struggle, ebbed away, could I tell the difference between your reeking rhetoric and that of the oppressors you speak of?

And what would happen if I were to question you? Would intellectualized vitriol be sent my way? Would you paternalize and dismiss my claims, reduce them to cooing distractions, insisting I don’t know what’s best for me? Oh yes, thank you for liberating me from the tiresome business of speaking and thinking for myself!

Into the bargain, I can also become especially desirable to you as a cultural object, like another one of the industrial rings worn on your fingers. Decorated in silver bangles and eyeliner, I have also put in work to aestheticize myself. What’s more, to others, you are seen as a feminist’s man. You will be seen as adjacent, have more authority in progressive spaces, and I, another signifier of your status; you will be imbued with my symbolic and aesthetic capital, absolved of misogynistic grievances aimed at you because you are seeing a feminist, or held on a pedestal for putting up with my annoying temperament. You are hot shit.

Whatever of the following I am, it is all up for you to decide. It is whatever you prefer, à la carte. After all, I’m your girl. An obsequious feminist. I am yours to wear, access, and penetrate, yours to lust for and capture.

That is why I fantasize about covering myself in shit. If I am rolling in that dirty, frightening, pitiful, sublime substance, I cannot be yours. There, I am safe. I am undesirable to you. You will not get to turn my politics into just another aspect of my desirability.

Maybe you, a man like the man-spreader, who goes to these types of events and identifies as part of the left, are reading this and feeling yourself slowly, almost intuitively, get angry with me. Let me halt you before your mind attempts the mental shortcut of calling me an anti-male, radical misandrist.

I am not saying you always consciously think this way. You do not mentally talk yourself through as such: women are objects, therefore I will now proceed to objectify women. Well, I hope not.

One cannot reasonably hold an individual responsible for having been socialized into patriarchy in quite the same way that one holds them responsible for a deliberately chosen act of theirs. You did not fully choose the socio-psychological desires, dispositions, or assumptions you inherited (I am cautious to say desires are entirely private preferences we have no control over, exonerated from examination). You, yourself, did not individually create the patriarchal social order. You were born into it too. And like under capitalism according to Marxists, to benefit from a structure of domination is not necessarily to be liberated by it. The interest of the bourgeoisie is that of capital, which is of no human, of not anyone. With patriarchy, men do receive material benefits, but ultimately, they often suffer from it as well (as evidenced by the infamous, monopolized by the manosphere, statistic of male suicide-rates) and are constrained by its norms.

Let me also be clear: this is not a simplistic indictment of intelligence, values, or political beliefs adding to someone’s attractiveness in someone else’s eyes. What I am pointing at is that we must try to never forget that just because we find ourselves in spaces (metaphorical or physical) that empower, sustain, and are committed to growing political consciousness, it does not mean that we, together in that space and individually, have somehow entirely escaped all the structures concerned. We remain in reality. Nor can we assume that just because of our commitment to the political fight, we stand outside, are immune and do not participate in any configuration or strand of the structures of domination the fight seeks to overcome. The identities, practices, and desires developed and cultivated within such spaces can still be incorporated into existing oppressive structures of desire, consumption, and social distinction, becoming compatible with, and even contributing to, the reproduction of said relations and structures of domination. Those who believe themselves to be conscious, and hopefully are indeed to some extent conscious, may nonetheless participate in reproducing the relations they believe they have learned to recognize. As you know, these structures are ever-mutable, responsive to changes in pop culture, geopolitics, technogenesis, and the myriad of other forces that have an impact and interact with our social reality. Whilst we, on the other hand, are fallible, overly confident in our acuity, and sometimes weak. But our strength lies in our hopefulness, in our belief in the need for change. This needs to be radically accessed and kept in mind.

And yes, I am saying you are quite responsible for what you do with your desire. If you assume you simply have access to me, sexualize me when I do not want to be, exercise sexual aggression, patronize me, or reach for misogynoir and transmisogyny (these two final items being absolutely some of the most popular problems within the left) behind your public shield of progressivism, you are to be held responsible for that. You inviolably, imperatively hold the responsibility of recognizing committing these incongruent, hypocritical, and harmful acts if you have the progressive values you indeed claim to have. Especially if you are a leftist and believe in radical equality. Once you identify yourself with an emancipatory political project, that identification, and the normative commitments that accompany it, bare obligations concerning how you conduct yourself, or, concerning unconscious contradiction, to correct and continuously seek to better yourself.

At its core, this is the same fundamental, formative principle we teach snotty children in kindergarten to set them on their path to growing up into good people in society. You may not have meant to hurt Mary when you knocked over her Lego tower. But now that Ms. Kudela has brought it to your attention, you can move forward and correct what you did wrong. Say sorry to Mary. Do not continue playing with your Legos in the same way and then tell me that you are a good kid. Intent matters, and disposition and environment will have an inherent influence on our actions, but they do not, and we must refuse to allow them to exhaust responsibility. If we accept the fact that our reality is one organized, understood, and effectively naturalized as structured by domination, this acceptance is certainly not a permission for resignation.

I am tired of letting gender as an axis of oppression remain a blind spot of today’s left.

Moreover, in regards to the criticisms leveled at the ‘bourgeois individualist left’ and its moralist, essentializing, identity politics crusade – often associated with this image of an over-sensitive, over-censoring queer, POC, or feminist academic or university student (belovedly used by the right) studying something like ‘lesbian dance theory’ – whilst I do truly agree with less vilifying and blame-game-y articulations of this critique, I find another observation to be of interest. I, personally, have found that many dogmatic, orthodox Marxists men, who are also moralists, frequently possess an unmistakably sexist attitude. These de rigueur men have a conviction that the left has been emasculated, deeply unmilitant, and in desperate need of a revival in virility. Some return to a fraternal conception of its political identity, centered on a masculinist, soldiering ideal (and yet many, I can’t help but giggle and suspect, would easily be taken down in a fight by the average pub prole). This however, goes mostly unnoticed, aside from by women in leftist spaces. But instead, somehow, the face of dogmatism in media remains the blue-haired, pierced woman (our tragic heroine).

I have seen this type live at panels, on social media, and even at house parties. Sometimes, they don’t even happen to be heterosexual. Perhaps this has something to do with feminist concerns being denounced as indubitably subordinate to class struggle (I myself do not subscribe to a view that gendered domination is exhaustively derivative of class relations) or as aforementioned, reduced to the same individual essentialism the orthodox claim to oppose. There’s a nagging irony in militantly condemning identity essentialism whilst championing an idealized, gendered political subject of one’s own: an unalloyedly class-conscious worker, whose universal interests come to mean the interests of a less universal and more masculine subject. But anyhow, maybe this attitude I speak of is simply produced by the oldest explanation available: plain ol’ women-hating.

Lastly, when our feminist politics are used as symbolic capital for men, their urgency and personal stakes are subsequently lost. It becomes a way for them to be gestural, get ironic proximity without obliging change in their behavior. Let us not settle for, at worst, a wry performance of solidarity and, at best, recognition and accountability alone: leftist men must enter the fight and join us in rupturing the structures themselves, where we all have skin in the game. Too often, the Gen Z left as a whole seem caught in a cycle: we enter the fight up in arms, freshly motivated by the political science modules that tore away the veil (a veil that, in fairness, cost several thousand pounds a semester to have torn…), expend ourselves, likely find ourselves amidst toxic discourse with guilt-mongering from our own and insult from elders and those who do not think alike, retreat to our trenches in existential dread, and eventually return to confront the very same structures still intact. We move, but in circles, the structures we oppose absorbing the inertia of protest. Without actual materializing efforts of rupture, mobilization amounts to motion within the system and recuperation.

This is, most definitely, informed by my own explicitly heartening conception of the left. A left accessing, yes, its critical faculties, but also a capacity to imagine the possible, inspired heavily by Haud Guéguen, who writes about restoring hope and actualizing a desirable future. This, as opposed to resting sat, fuming and melancholic in the archaic hot tub of sexist thoughts repackaged as dogma, is what I hope from my left. My conception of the proletariat would consequently, overtly, be spacious: a plural political subject concerned with fighting feminist, racial, queer, economic, and necessarily all other (mutual, often codependent) strands of oppression. Nor must we require the oppressed to be exemplary representatives of their political emancipation. In fact, it is likely that the subject most in need of liberation, the bearer of today’s most profound oppression, will not be the perfect moral or intellectual subject or be the most able to intellectually, articulate and advocate for their case for need. The Afghan teenager banned from secondary education may, herself, express homophobic or patriarchal beliefs if asked. She has, presumably, not cracked open Karl Marx, Simone de Beauvoir or Sara Ahmed and can readily wield their lenses, ideas, and paradigms against the world around her. And she almost certainly does not display the aesthetic editions of her personal philosophical and literary anthology, purchased from Judd Books, Politics and Prose, and Waterstones, on her art deco nightstand (self-dig). But you, my well-read, intellectual leftist men… I know you have a nightstand like mine, or perhaps worse, a coffee table displaying philosophy and art monographs. What is your excuse for your selective curriculum? Try your hand at a woman writer1.

But yes, wouldn’t it be much more convenient if you could just avoid chewing on any of the thoughts I’ve articulated above? Wouldn’t it be easier to just be seen out in public with a feminist woman a couple times, have sex with her, and then ghost her?

That itsy-bitsy word, ‘casual,’ deceives in its liberatory clothes. How politely brought up us young women have been in the emotional discipline of the postfeminist subject, the neoliberal individual subject, and heterosexual womanhood! Nor would you remain unscathed, likewise confronted with alienation and a culture rewarding your detachment. As interrogated in sociologist Eva Illouz’s work on contemporary heterosexuality and author Erin Williams’s continued reflection, our casual arrangement, (what I am referring to as ‘casual arrangements,’ I am problematizing as a participatory instance within a modern culture or institution, the problem not being, strictly speaking, ‘casual sex’ per se) organized around market logics and, par for the course, have gendered consequences. It would follow that I would tolerate “interpretive effort,” as Williams puts it, as part of my alienated, emotional labour: feeling insecurity and self-blame for your lack of attention and the lack of stability, perceiving my feelings as personal psychological faults. The minimization of my own wants would become evidence of my autonomy; my willingness to tolerate deprivation, evidence of my self-sufficiency. An occultation of sensation. To be smaller, to always make myself smaller, into infinite, lithe exiguity.

I would act lax publicly, say it’s an easygoing (get ready for the dreaded word…) ‘situationship’ to friends when asked. Oh! Nothing’s the matter with me (said whilst unlocking and locking my phone, flashing an empty screen). This era of transactionality, where commitment is seen as optional and the abundance of hinge matches responding to prompts about top 4 on letterboxd choices makes everyone interchangeable with the flick. of. a. finger. Aren’t relationships just so bourgeois? A normative path we won’t take. We call this independence, freedom, and being liberated enough to enjoy what is perfunctorily offered.

We are no longer in the age of the patriarch or cultural variations of the New Man, but of a policed (heterosexual) masculinity: you, the self-fashioned progressive, sensitive boy. He who, before he touches her, paints his nails to hide the inveterate dirt underneath them. You have committed to memory certain vocabulary: consent, boundaries, her pleasure. You become the altruistic misogynistic subject, dosing emotional vulnerability and access. There can often be a reciprocity in bed, even bona fide reciprocity, worn like a credential. But in spite of the egalitarian affect, there is a unilateral determination of when closeness is granted or withheld. At the end of the day, the relational leash will proverbially be put in your hand to grip.

So, like I said, you could opt to just like one of my old Instagram posts, eventually slide up on my story, and text me. Text me inconsistently, a fluctuating string of heavy bursts and silences, always keeping me on my toes, keeping me addicted, imprudent, as I try to tell myself that all of this was never anything more than my head overanalyzing. As we both try to convince ourselves that all of this is normal and totally aboveboard on either end. The discontinuous reinforcement, asynchronous intimacy, and my perennial obsession fed by our constant digital availability, always just one click of the send button away. We could eventually (not necessarily too early, according the butchered, unintelligible timeline of contemporary talking-stages) end up spending a night together when you text me late to come over. And then you could slip away, go radio silent. Return to your full-time job of arguing on ‘brocialist’ threads on X, wearing your t-shirt that has ‘real feminists eat box’ written on it.

Enjoy me, discard me, and call it nothing more than the messy, fucked business of being a twenty-first-century man. You’re too busy anyway, getting ready to fight a revolution.

That is what I am angry about.