“The great question that has never been answered... is Was will das Weib?”
That was Sigmund Freud, famously struggling in German with what he identified as the supreme unsolved problem of early 20th-century human psychology: What do women want?
Female desire endlessly mystified the Viennese shrink. He was never able to come up with a better answer than “penis envy.”
It deserves to be revisited today, but for different reasons, not least the security and safety of women and girls. The question that vexes us now is: What do men think women want?
It’s urgent because in recent years it’s become increasingly clear that a significant subset of men not only prefer an incapacitated female to a coherent and conscious sexual partner – they believe that women like it that way.
The allure of the incapacitated female is pervasive. From Gisèle Pelicot to the online “rape academy” (where tens of thousands of men contribute videos and drugging tips), to the roofie-rape allegations that our American “War Secretary” silenced with a monetary settlement, all the way to the Cornell Seven. It’s the same shared fantasy: having your way with an inert female form.
It is so widespread that the obvious questions go unasked. If seven men are in a room with a naked, drunk woman, what makes those men think they should have sex with her? What makes them think she wants it? And, more to the point, how is it legal?
The Cornell Seven join a list of young men involved in high profile incidents involving gangs assaulting incapacitated females, including Richmond High School (2009), Steubenville (2012), Audrie Pott (2012), which I covered for Rolling Stone, and Rehtaeh Parsons (2011).
The Pott and Parsons cases ended in the terrible tragedies of two teenage girls committing suicide. Their assailants were never punished. The only case in which the perps got prison time was Richmond High School, where the boys were urban, majority Latino and working class.
All those incidents provoked a moment of public indignation. But we know how the cycle goes: outrage, gendered tribalism, naming and shaming of perpetrators and the victim, then a slap on the wrist, if any punishment at all. Then the forgetting. And the slogans, too, gone with the wind: Take Back the Night. Believe All Women. Time’s Up. Me Too.
I would like to think that the Cornell Seven are downstream from the Predators’ Ball that is our world: the Trump White House and its philharmonic accompaniment, the manosphere. Even at this echelon, the predilection is clear. Besides roofie-rape-accused Hegseth, Special Envoy for Global Partnerships Paolo Zampolli is also accused of drugging and raping a woman in a lawsuit filed by Victoria Drake.
The “grab ‘em by the pussy” hot mic was greeted with horror at the time, but it didn’t stop Trump from getting elected twice. Trump 2.0 even flew the rape-cheerleading, rape-accused, self-described trafficker Tate brothers into Miami and gave them safe haven.
Barely a blip of notice until the UK demanded their extradition.
And the women? Liars all!
The sentiment crosses political lines. Aging Bernie bro and leftie manosphere defender of the free-range male Michael Tracey has made a shtick of feeding the “heterodox” outrage machine. Last week on Piers Morgan, he came to the rescue of the named Chi Phi men and solicited public help to doxx Jane Doe. (Tracey has a long history of doxxing women. And Julie Brown has accused Tracey of physically harassing her, so yeh, he’s creepy.)
Libertarian-leftie Glenn Greenwald is also upset about the naming. He posted about how ID-ing the Cornell guys tramples on our system of justice (the Western tradition is always under threat these days!), of due process and innocent until proven guilty. Commenters drew their swords. One of Glenn’s fans, posting as “qwert,” blamed “the illogical dogma of feminism amplified by media hacks who want to be heroes” for replacing rights with social media vigilantism. He wrote: “Also, the idea women don’t have their own sexual proclivities and agency is bloody sexist and patriarchal.”
Only bluestockings and prudes would deny a barely conscious woman the alleged enjoyment of being pounced upon by seven men at 4 a.m.
Now mind you, all this “bloody” reverse sexism is happening against the backdrop of Cornell logging 1,200 sexual assault cases from 2018 to 2024. Only seven of them ended in expulsion or dismissal. The vast majority of those found responsible remained on campus, according to USA Today.
During those same years, the FBI logged a thousand women now redacted and deemed trafficked in the Epstein files. Not one man has been charged.
Of course, the presumption is that those 1,200 women are lying. Or to quote the many Xitter commenters, male and female, they are regretting “slutty” behavior and rebranding themselves as victims.
The poster child for the college assault out-liar is the woman at the center of the Charlottesville rape case. I wrote occasionally for Rolling Stone and know a little about how that journalistic disaster played out: An overly protective survivor network in charge of the campus sexual assault crisis center convinced an experienced journalist and her experienced editors and fact-checkers – who should have refused to comply and ended the reportage at that point – that asking too many questions, even the basics like who where and when, would be too psychologically damaging for the victim.
Voila! A new, all-purpose, long-lasting “all women lie” poster girl for the ages. And a notch for the “fake news” crowd. Some women may indeed lie. I suspect they are outliers. Out-liars, if you will.
To believe a victim like Cornell’s Jane Doe is a liar is to imagine a young woman brazen enough to sign up for global shaming, online and probably IRL harassment, and a lifetime wearing the letter V for victim. Because there is no way she gets out of this with her dignity intact or identity shielded forever.
A better question than “Is she lying?” is: Why do seven men in a room think a drunk, drugged woman wants them to “whip it out,” in the argot of the Chi Phi chat, on her?
The great philosopher Martha Nussbaum has an answer in her 2021 book Citadels of Pride. The title comes from Dante’s Purgatorio in which the proud spend eternity bent over – crooked and blinded by their own deformity – a metaphor for their inability to see the humanity of others. Much of Nussbaum’s book concerns the experience of “moral injury,” a syndrome seen in soldiers as well as sex assault victims. Moral injury is the deep emotional, psychological, and spiritual damage caused by doing, seeing, or failing to prevent something that violates your core moral beliefs.
Back to the men: What are the origins of the fantasy of the unicorn female who is borderline unconscious but who has “proclivities,” to quote Glenn Greenwald’s fan?
Is it nature? The caveman clubbing the future mother of his spawn in service to the continuation of his DNA, as the evolutionary biologists and their reactionary friends on the right would have it?
Emma Camp, writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, offered a more modern answer: violent internet porn. “Watch enough porn, and you’ll think it’s perfectly normal for a woman to want group sex with strange men. Watch enough porn, and you’ll think it’s perfectly normal to strike a woman while you’re having sex with her.” Watch enough porn, and you’ll think that women like to be choked while giving blowjobs – that they enjoy a man’s hands squeezing their windpipes.
Meanwhile, studies are starting to show unusual numbers of younger women with signs of brain damage from the practice, from temporary incoherence to permanent disability. For some men perhaps, nothing could be more alluring.
Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.
