Who is Jane Doe, and how do we provide her with justice?
The reason an institution like Cornell chooses to handle a case like Jane Doe vs the Cornell 7 internally has nothing to do with fairness, or protecting boys’ reputations, or even protecting the reputation of the institution. The reason is that institutions like Cornell are specifically designed to manufacture injustice, while obscuring that motive from public scrutiny: global economic injustice, environmental injustice, structural social injustice.
To look closely at the structures that caused these young men to behave the way they did when a young woman was vulnerable would require us to look closely at what empowers graduates of these institutions to create economic structures that exploit vulnerable communities; technologies that exploit vulnerable ecosystems; corporate structures that suppress evidence of grave consequences for the planet in favor of extractive hierarchies that privilege those most willing to ignore the truth of those consequences.
The Cornell 7 case doesn’t represent an aberration — a bad frat, a bunch of kids violating a personal boundary. It represents the very training ground for capitalism, functioning as designed — a roomful of men who have an unspoken agreement, that’s been reinforced since before they were born — find the exploit, confine it, invite your friends in, ignore the consequences, joke about it afterwards, and profit. Just look at the circles where the brave women who reveal this training program are so vilified — just notice where the statements of “she shouldn’t have been drinking,” or “she gave consent” are coming from.
The text message “free p•••y” to a group of male college students is functionally identical to the internal email to the corporate board, saying “I found a loophole that allows us to circumvent an inconvenient law;” functionally identical to the slide deck describing a technology that allows a vulture capitalist class to bypass the need for a highly educated and unionized workforce, with rights and agency to demand that those rights be respected, while increasing man’s already poisonous carbon footprint, and undermining the water table; functionally identical to the message from the CTO that identifies the means to extract a mineral in an unregulated part of the world that enables that technology; functionally identical to the message from the CFO of the major healthcare provider outlining a new way to deny care to millions while maximizing profits. Free p•••y, indeed.
And what is the modern corporate workplace but a fraternity, whose members snort ketamine off the bodies of workers and rape them into unconsciousness, who see workers as expendable, and send them to HR when they complain about the ways they are treated? “We’ll handle this internally. They applied to this job. They wanted to work here. We denied them benefits, sure, but they showed up to work the next day.” Handling it internally is functionally identical to making sure that the Jane Does don’t unionize.
So no, the Cornell 7 case does not represent an aberration: it’s the system functioning as designed. The internal investigation is simply about spin — “how do we keep ourselves from appearing vulnerable, from exposing our own weaknesses? there’s a whole fraternity that’s relying on our keeping the structure that enables them under wraps.”
And we all participate in it, in one way or another. Many brave women are telling similar stories to Jane Doe’s, and many people are saying “I am Jane Doe” to prevent her from being doxxed. That is necessary in the case of one individual whose life has been altered irrevocably by one night of fraternal indiscretion. But until we recognize the fraternity that is our workplace, our bank, our healthcare provider, our educational institution, our technology partner, our very system of justice in this country — and until we are all willing to say “I am Jane Doe,” and demand justice on one another’s behalf, and on the Earth’s behalf, the same story will make headlines for a couple of weeks, and then everything will return to business as usual. The system, functioning as designed.
Signed,
Mother Earth, aka Jane Doe