Kate Anthony: [00:00:00] Hey, everyone. Hey, everyone. Welcome back. So I have been trying to figure out what I have to say about the Cornell case that hasn’t already been said A million times by a million people. And honestly, my first answer was fucking nothing, right? I’m angry, obviously, but mostly I’m just so weary because how many times have we been here?

We’ve got Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, Brock Turner, Kavanaugh, and Christine Blasey Ford. We did Epstein. We did Me Too. We have watched women come forward, watched them be doubted and doxxed, watched their lives be turned upside down, watched institutions close ranks, watch powerful men continue to be powerful.

And now we have Jane Doe at Cornell, and at some point, I don’t wanna record another episode explaining why women don’t [00:01:00] report correctly or immediately or consistently enough to satisfy people who’ve never experienced trauma. And I don’t want to explain in- intoxication and consent, and I don’t want to explain what happens when, to memory.

I I don’t wanna do– I don’t wanna do that. That’s 101. We have done that. We fucking know. And if knowing hasn’t changed enough, then maybe knowledge isn’t the problem. And that’s really where I have landed for now, right? I think we’ve spent a really long time treating a power problem as an empathy or understanding problem, and it’s not getting us anywhere.

It’s just not. The allegations at Cornell are horrifying. Jane Doe alleges that she was drugged and sexually assaulted by members of the fraternity in 2024, and the original criminal case wasn’t prosecuted. And now, after a civil lawsuit brought substantially more attention to the case and what happened and raised serious questions [00:02:00] about the original investigation, the case has now been reopened, and New York Attorney General, Letitia James, God love her, has been appointed, has been appointed special prosecutor.

Amazing. And also really, that’s how far it had to go? And then there are the messages, right? One of the publicly reported messages in the fraternity Snapchat was, “Free pussy.” There are additional screenshots circulating online containing even more degrading comments about women, including one about hoping a woman wasn’t another fatty, which really indicates that they’ve done this before many times.

It really opens up the question about, like, how many times has this happened? How often has this happened? How many more victims are there? Are they trafficking women now? This now seems like a trafficking issue, right? Not just a, a one-off rape case. But the term the free pussy, right?

It’s very clear that th- the woman, the humanity, [00:03:00] has disappeared from Their perception. There’s a resource. The resource is available. There’s no person. There’s no humanity. So it’s extreme moments like this that often expose assumptions that are usually more carefully conce- concealed. So what I mean by that is the assumption underneath Free Pussy is one that I guess feminism has been wrestling with, till, since the dawn of feminism, right?

Who is entitled to access women? Not just sexually. Who gets women’s time, their bodies, our work, our attention, our care? And what happens when women withdraw that access? That’s a question that interests me far more right now than another discussion about whether boys understand consent, because I don’t think we’re dealing primarily with a comprehension [00:04:00] problem.

I think they comprehend it just fine. They comprehend it just fine. We’re dealing with entitlement, and entitlement is a power problem. So if somebody doesn’t understand something, education is an appropriate intervention. But if someone understands perfectly well and benefits from pretending not to understand we call that, weaponized incompetence, education is a complete waste of everybody’s time, and it’s a distraction.

This is something that Zan Zan Vilines writes about brilliantly in the context of heterosexual marriage on her Substack, Liberating Motherhood, right? Women will say, “I’ve told him 1,000 times that I’m overwhelmed. I’ve explained the mental load. I’ve told him that I need to, him to do more. How do I make him understand?”

And Zan’s answer every time is, “Why are we assuming that he doesn’t understand? He can see you’re working while he’s sitting down. He can see that the laundry gets done. He knows that we need food in the house. He knows that toilet paper runs out and we need more. [00:05:00] He knows that his life contains more leisure because somebody else’s contains more labor.”

The problem is that he doesn’t understand isn’t that he doesn’t understand, it’s that the arrangement works perfectly well for him. What Zan, her formulation around household labor is intentionally confrontational, right? Inequity persists because it benefits men. Because they want it. It works for them.

And so I keep thinking about, like, how much bigger that idea becomes when we take it out of the kitchen, out of the home. Women have spent decades explaining our pain to people who fucking understand it. They get it. The thing that we have been, we’ve misunderstood is not male ignorance, but it’s male incentive because people do not reliably surrender advantage when someone explains the disadvantage more eloquently.

[00:06:00] That’s not, never how power has worked And so much feminist energy has been poured into explanation, right? We explain whil- why sexual harassment is harmful. We explain consent. We explain domestic labor and coercive control, blah, blah, blah, right? This is why we don’t go up to our abuser and say hey, actually, what you’re doing is abusive.”

They know it. ‘Cause there’s something in the underlying assumption that says surely if they really understood, things would change. But no. No. The system- systems don’t change because they finally grasp the pain they’re producing. They change when producing that pain becomes expensive, when it costs something.

And that’s a very different feminist project, and I think we’re gonna come back to that in a bit, if I don’t go completely off, off the rails. But there’s another piece of this that I’ve been thinking about because of Liz Plank. She [00:07:00] wrote For The Love Of Men about seven years ago, and a huge part of that project was taking men’s suffering under patriarchy seriously, and it’s something I’ve talked about a lot.

I’ve talked about it on the podcast. I talk about this a lot, right? Male loneliness, emotional isolation, depression, the way that masculinity restricts men, and how patriarchy is really bad for men, too. I think that was really important work. I think it really mattered. But a few weeks ago, she wrote something on her Substack that I thought was fascinating, and she said essentially that she watched the manosphere take some of the very arguments that she made about how patriarchy harms men and then weaponize them against women.

So instead of saying patriarchy has isolated men from intimacy and from one another, the manosphere increasingly said women did this to you. So instead of asking men to build deeper and richer relationships with other men, to question masculinity or expand their emotional lives, [00:08:00] the grievance became, women don’t date us enough.

Women don’t have sex with us enough. Women are too independent. Feminism took something away from us. And Liz wrote in that, that she still believes deeply in empathy, but understands its limits differently now. Male loneliness is real. Women are not responsible for curing it. Patriarchy did something to men.

It does something to all of us. It’s not women’s fault It’s not men’s fault, it’s patriarchy’s fault. It’s so interesting that the men are now– like they cannot fathom investigating a system that ultimately benefits them, where the cost-benefit analysis is still working out in their benefit, so they can’t like question the system.

So anything that has a cost, right? It’s gotta– it’s women are the problem. Women are the problem. I think that’s a bigger feminist reckoning than, maybe we’ve been looking at because feminists have spent a lot of time in recent years reassuring men that feminism is good for them, [00:09:00] too. Patriarchy hurts you.

Feminism will make your relationships better. All of which may be true. Yep, you’ll be a better father, you’ll be emotionally healthier, all of this, right? Feminist men talk about this all the time. But I wanna ask something a little maybe heretical. Why does women’s liberation have to be marketed to men as a benefit to men?

Why isn’t women’s freedom enough, period? There’s something so revealing about our impulse to make the case that “No, but feminist is good for you, too. Patriarchy is bad for you, too.” What if it’s just enough that it’s bad for us? Because like even inside feminism, we often seem to believe that women’s interests require male relevance before they become legitimate.

It’s like we will go, “But what if it happened to your sister? What if it impacted someone you love? What if it happened to your daughter? Wouldn’t that make it… do you see now?” Why– Don’t end sexism because [00:10:00] women deserve equality. End sexism because men will be happier too. What the fuck?

We’re literally saying “Stop raping girls because, what if it, what if one of them is your sister or your daughter?” No, stop raping girls because it’s bad. I understand the strategic appeal. We’re trying to make it seem like it’s appealing to them. I think we’ve reached a point where we have to ask what is getting lost when feminism keeps seeking male buy-in.

Because male pain is real, male advantage is also real, and those things can coexist, right? With the cost-benefit analysis as long as we’re still be- benefiting. I think we have sometimes had trouble holding these things together. We can talk about the ways that masculinity wounds men or patriarchy wounds men and forget that masculinity also gives men access to power.

A man can be profoundly [00:11:00] lonely and still benefit from sexism. A husband can still feel enormous pressure to provide and still benefit from his wife’s unpaid labor. Suffering doesn’t cancel privilege, and compassion doesn’t require redistribution in the sufferer’s favor. I think that’s really important to unpack, right?

Because somewhere along the line, the conversation about male loneliness started acquiring a weird implication. Women are doing something wrong by refusing men. What? Women fought for generations to gain greater freedom to choose whether we marry, whom we marry, whether we have sex, whether we stay, whether we have children, whether we financially depend on a man.

And then women exercise more choice, and some men experience less automatic access to female [00:12:00] partnership, and somehow women’s freedom becomes part of the male loneliness crisis. What? No. A man’s loneliness may be completely real, but a woman is not a public accommodation. Her refusal is not discrimination.

Her autonomy is not an injury inflicted upon him. And that may sound obvious, and yet an enormous amount of contemporary discourse seems really fucking confused about it, and I think Cornell sits on the brutal far edge of that same question. Who is a woman for? Is she a sovereign person, or is she in some sense available for male use as free pussy?

‘Cause that is entitlement stripped of any euphemism

We’ll talk about sexual violence primarily as something that happens to particular women, right? A woman is assaulted, she’s harassed, she’s stalked, she c- she’s killed. But male violence also acts on women who are never [00:13:00] directly attacked. The possibility, we have to organize our entire fucking lives around the possibility that we might be next.

And this is one of the reasons that I don’t love that conversations that redu- th- we don’t– I don’t love the how the conversation often reduces violence against women to crime statistics. The crime is measurable. It’s a s- it is a statistic, but the, the behavioral effect of the threat is much harder to measure.

We know this. We know this intimately. You can never, you can have never been attacked in a parking structure and still behave differently in one every time you enter one. You might never have had your drink drugged, and you will still monitor your glass and cover it and bring it with you into the bathroom, right?

You may never have been assaulted on a date and still calculate how directly you can or cannot reject him. A threat does not have to be realized in every woman’s life in [00:14:00] order for it to shape every woman’s freedom. And that’s why feminist theorists have always understood that sexual violence is a form of social control.

Not because every violent man is consciously participating in some grand political project to keep women subordinated. He doesn’t have to. Power doesn’t require a, a, a meeting. If women collectively learn that freedom carries danger, women collectively modify freedom. And I think we badly underestimate the economic and psychic cost of that.

We absorb the vigilance. Men retain the freedom to not have to think about it, and that is an unequal distribution of labor. And the more I think about it, the more connected it feels to the work that I already do around marriage and divorce, obviously, because so much of heterosexual m- women’s lives involves compensating for things that men do not have to notice.

That’s essentially what invisible labor is. Someone notices, someone [00:15:00] anticipates, someone absorbs the consequences, and the fact that women have become exceptionally good at managing these things can actually obscure the inequality. The family works, so the unpaid labor becomes invisible. The woman gets home safely, so the threat management is totally invisible.

The high-conflict divorce doesn’t explode, so the hundred strategic decisions m- she made to prevent escalation become invisible. I think about this all the time in my work. Women come to me, and they have been become fucking PhDs in their husbands And they can tell from a punctuation mark in a text what kind of night they’re about to have, and they know when to bring something up and when not to.

They know how to word a request to minimize the reaction. Then they s- separate from their abusive spouses, and now they’re expected to become experts in family law and documentation and biff- biff communication and judicial temperament and trauma responses and financial discovery, and we call this [00:16:00] empowerment.

Some of it is, right? I teach these skills because women need them, and strategy matters when you’re navigating power. But Jesus Christ, there’s a certain point at which we have to admit that women are being required to become extraordinarily skilled at surviving conditions we should be trying to eliminate.

There is a difference between giving women tools and mistaking those tools for liberation. I can teach women how to document coercive control really beautifully, and that is incredibly useful, but my highest feminist aspiration cannot be that women become excellent documentation– documentarians of male harm.

At some point, we have to change how much male harm she’s being asked to document, right? And this is where I think Me Too becomes really interesting to reconsider. Me Too gave us testimony. Millions of women came forward and essentially said, “This is fucking everywhere.” And the revelation [00:17:00] was like, whoa.

And I’m not here to diminish that for one second. We needed that at that time. We fucking needed it. Silence protects abuse and abusers, and naming it matters, and we are almost a decade out from the explosion of Me Too. Nobody gets to say that they didn’t fucking know. That’s over. So what happens? Okay, we all became aware.

We all said, “Me too.” Now everybody knows that it happens to all of us, right? So what happens now? Feminism sometimes gets, like, trapped, gets stuck on the disclosure. Tell your story. Break the silence. Raise awareness. Believe women. Yes, okay, and then what? If a wo- woman reveals what happened, gets torn apart publicly, and the system remains fundamentally unchanged, we have asked her to perform an enormous act of vulnerability in exchange for what?

Another fucking hashtag? At some point, testimony has to become leverage, and that feels like the feminist transition we’re struggling to make. We [00:18:00] know. Now what are we prepared to do about it? So this is where Cornell becomes m- more than another, horrible fucking case. Look at what has happened since this woman came forward.

There are now people trying to identify her publicly, dox her. Her lawyer said that she’s received threats pressuring her to drop her lawsuit, and then thousands of women have responded by, hashtag I am Jane Doe. And, yes, that’s incredibly moving. But it’s also oh my God, we’re here again?

Women surrounding another woman because telling the truth has made her less safe, and there’s something unbearable about that. This is what I meant earlier when I said that women are often asked to survive the violence and then survive everybody’s response to the violence. At a certain point, I just stop being interested in whether everybody involved personally holds sexist beliefs.

The outcome is sexist. Again, we know. We know about all of this. If the burden of sexual danger is falling [00:19:00] overwhelmingly on women, I don’t need every participant to have a conscious ideology of female subordination before I’m willing to call the system gendered. We spend so much time trying to locate sexism inside people’s intentions, right?

Did he mean to be sexist? Does he respect women? Is he otherwise a good guy? I really don’t care. I don’t give a shit. Show me the distribution of harm. Show me who gets the benefit. Show me who does the labor. Show me who’s afraid. That’ll tell you a fuck of a lot more about the system than anyone’s– like, what they’re willing to admit to.

A man can sincerely believe in equality while still benefiting enormously from an unequal system. An institution can have a really great Title IX policy and still produce terrible outcomes for women. This is why I really– I increasingly think feminism has to become less interested in declared values and more interested in material outcomes.

Who has power? Who pays? Who benefits? That’s it. Those [00:20:00] are the questions. If I bring this back to marriage, and what a lot of you are here for, because this, I think, sometimes where we can recognize this dynamic immediately. I can’t tell you how many women I have worked with who spent years trying to get a husband to understand, right?

She explains that he’s drowning. She begs him to come to therapy. She tells him she’s lonely, right? She says marriage can’t go on like this Nothing changes. And then she says she wants a divorce, and now suddenly he understands everything. He finds a therapist. He starts doing bedtime. He remembers the pediatrician.

He can articulate her complaints with astonishing precision. And then she thinks “Where the fuck has this man been for the last 10 years?” But hello, so many women we fall for this, right? “Oh my God, he’s finally heard me.” No, he heard you all along. It’s proof that he heard you all along. The difference is consequence.

Her pain was information. “Oh, my leverage is working.” Her departure, whoa. Now the [00:21:00] cost-benefit analysis is like, “Oh shit, now the cost is outweighing the benefit.” So what if society’s response to women work similarly? Women have been saying we’re unsafe. We’ve been saying we’re overburdened. We’ve been saying we’re underpaid.

We’ve been saying violence is pervasive. We’ve been saying motherhood is structurally unsupported. We’ve been saying that heterosexual marriage often demands more from women than men. We have explained ourselves exquisitely. Society has fucking heard us. The it gets it. Our sys- the system gets it. Our suffering just hasn’t carried enough consequence.

So if that’s true, then the next feminist project isn’t better explaining, it is better leverage. It’s leveraging. It’s how much are we going to shift that cost-benefit balance? When I talk about leverage, I’m not talking about women waging war on men. I’m talking about women possessing enough power that our wellbeing can’t be treated as optional.

So there’s a profound difference between somebody, respecting your [00:22:00] boundary because they’re a beautiful, enlightened person, and somebody living inside a system where violating your v- boundary reliably costs them something. I, look I hope for the enlightened person, I do, but I want the system, because women’s safety can’t depend on extraordinary men.

This is where the good men go out and gather your folks, gather your men, talk to your people. It can’t just depend on getting the good judge, the good prosecutor, the good husband, the good boss, right? The good frat boy who happens to finally say, “Hey, guys, stop.” The entire point of rights is that you don’t have to rely on someone else’s virtue.

I’m more interested in what happens when we stop trying to earn equal standing inside of institutions whose basic architecture was created under radically unequal conditions. There’s a strain of feminism that has been incredibly invested in access, right? Women becoming CEOs, women becoming presidents, women getting into the room.

Important. Very important. But What if the room itself is the [00:23:00] problem? What if putting women into institutions organized around dominance, extraction, competition, and hierarchy doesn’t fundamentally alter what those institutions do? What would it mean to organize society around different assumptions about human value?

This is when I think of matriarchy, right? I’m not thinking about female domination. I’m thinking about a different theory of power, and I think that be- that’s really urgent when we talk about violence because patriarchy doesn’t just place men above women It trains all of us to understand power vertically.

If I have more, you have less. If I gain, you lose. If women become freer, men become deprived, right? The zer- zero-sum logic is all over the manosphere, and it’s exactly what Liz Plank noticed when she revisited her work on men. She wanted men to see that patriarchy was hurting them, but the manosphere looked at the same pain and decided that, oh women just got too much.

Women became too [00:24:00] free. Women stopped needing men, and now men are suffering. It converted female liberation into male deprivation. So if women once needed marriage to survive economically and now fewer women do, a man may genuinely experience more romantic rejection. That doesn’t mean something unjust happened to him.

I don’t know. Maybe you should just be better. If we don’t, if we don’t need you, make us want you. Give me something where you benefit me. Where does that leave me with Cornell? Not with the men. I find myself very disinterested in why these boys and men allegedly did what they did than I would’ve been 10 years ago, right?

I’m interested in the system around them. I’m interested in why women remain so available for harm, and men remain so insulated from its costs. And I’m interested in why female suffering repeatedly becomes raw material for public discourse while male entitlement remains really durable. And I’m interested in why institutions can metabolize [00:25:00] scandal so efficiently, right?

An investigation, a statement, a committee, a training, a promise to do better, an essay, and then another woman. That’s what power does best. It absorbs critique. It learns the language. It incorporates just enough reform to avoid actually having to change. I think that feminism has to get better at distinguishing the two because repres- representation is not redistribution.

Empathy is not liberation. I think that’s why I feel so weary, right? It’s not because we’re hearing the same story again, although it is. It’s because we keep responding to it with versions of strategies that we’ve already tried. Tell the story more loudly. Explain harm more clearly. Teach the men more carefully.

Ask institutions to care more deeply. I don’t think caring is irrelevant. I just think power is more reliable, and maybe that’s where the next phase of, what the n- the next phase of feminine– feminism needs to ask. Not “How do we make men understand us?” But what becomes possible when they don’t fucking have to?[00:26:00]

When a woman’s autonomy doesn’t depend on whether a man ev- ever empathizes with her. In the cost-benefit scale, what is the consequence that we are willing to give to, leverage? Me Too asked us to listen, and women spoke, and we listened, and we documented, and we learned the vocabulary, and we exposed the scale of the problem.

But the next question is harder. What are we gonna do with what we know Because knowledge without leverage leaves women in the same position we have occupied for centuries, telling the truth about what’s happening to us and hoping somebody with more power decides that it matters. I don’t want us to have to hope anymore.

I want us to have power, and I think that’s a really different feminist project. I have zero idea how we do it. I would love to hear your thoughts on it, but I really think that’s what we’re up against at this point. All right, that’s enough for today. I’m exhausted, and I’m weary, and I know you are too. I love you so much.

I’ll see you next week.