The Cornell Case Shows Gen Z Is Moving Away From an Ethics of Consent

By now it’s unnecessary to rehearse the lurid details of the Jane Doe lawsuit, which have been aired en masse amid the upsurge in student discontent that, at first glance, looks much like the other post-#MeToo protests we’ve seen.

But the discourse around the Cornell case stands out for something new: a narrative emerging among young people that more than just consent is required to make a sex act ethical.

Theoretically, the details of Jane Doe’s situation — scuzzy weekend party, seven-man orgy in a frat, a Snapchat message asking “Shop still open?” — could sit comfortably alongside even the “enthusiastic consent” standard propounded by the latest wave of consent activists.

And indeed, the original police filing was not classified as a rape precisely because Jane Doe’s initial statement appeared to describe an encounter that was, according to the Tompkins County district attorney, “voluntary, conscious, and consensual.”

But op-eds in student newspapers around the country evoke language that would not be out of place in an introductory Kant seminar. In the Cornell Daily Sun, a student says fraternities function as “a market, where women are seen as commodities.” A Dartmouth contributor lambasts frat culture where brothers “humiliate and degrade” and that teaches “men to treat women and each other like subhuman objects.”

The emerging picture is of a sexual ethic that cannot be satisfied simply by one liberal-autonomous agent assenting to the action of another. The new ethic requires upholding the dignity and respect of the human being involved. Respecting women is incompatible with drug-fueled orgies where the “shop” is “open,” regardless of how consensual said orgy may or may not be.

In New York University’s student paper, Colette Yehl criticizes the currency of “dehumanizing” sexual language that shows the gap between consent-based standards and true mutual respect. The commonplace “What’s your body count?” is not “an explicitly harmful question,” but still “blatantly dehumanizes” those involved. A few decades of sex positivity may have erased most of sex’s taboo, but “openness about intimacy hasn’t translated into greater respect for sexual partners.” In short, “It’s not embarrassing to demand that we treat each other as actual human beings.”

The tension around consent monoculture is borne out in miniature in Jane Doe’s own story. After the fraternity party, she texted Male Number One that none “of the sexual stuff was illegal” and “everyone needs to grow up cause sexuality and sex … is changing and stuff like this is going to become more common … I’m also really open minded tho.”

But the sex-positive talking points had lost their appeal by the time she encountered a narrative which identified her violation as gang rape. In the transcript of her interview with the police, she expressed sadness that a man she was interested in was using her, and said: “I was a sex doll for all intents and purposes, which is sad.”

Jane’s situation also reflects many of the contradictions internal to “consent”: What is the value of this concept if it can be “taken back” retroactively; if we are so rarely in the situation of clear-thinking, perfectly informed yes/no robots; if it doesn’t seem to adequately cover situations of straight-up exploitation?

To many observers, it’s hard to imagine that a compromised situation like Jane Doe’s could be consensual, with the swirling factors of inebriation, social pressure, and false consciousness; and if an act seems to fail the consent test even before accounting for participants’ actual willingness, how helpful can “yes means yes” really be?

Consent is a legal standard, not a comprehensive ethical guide; that’s why it is right for a county attorney to invoke it as the reason charges weren’t pressed, and why it can feel impoverished to use it as the sole criterion to judge the Doe case. There is no number of video variations on the desirability of Darjeeling that can account for the icky feeling evoked by even some ostensibly consensual sex acts.

In 2022, the Washington Post columnist Christine Emba advocated for moving beyond the consent-based sexual ethic, on the grounds that consent is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Endlessly haggling for a stricter definition of consent would not answer “how to conduct a relationship that affirms our fundamental personhood and human dignity,” and in the meantime young women are left grasping for a way to adequately express what feels wrong in situations much more multifaceted than simple contractual claims.

It’s that very conceptual gap which, Emba noted, leaves us starved for language outside that of consent to describe acts as wrong: “Since we have made it effectively impossible for anything apart from nonconsent to be wrong, we end up framing issues in that prevailing standard — the consent given wasn’t the right kind, we say: It wasn’t verbally affirmative or visibly enthusiastic.”

This shortage of vocabulary is garbling the way young people talk about the Cornell case. We’d be much better off if we framed Jane Doe’s experience not as wrong-because-nonconsensual, but as wrong: wrong because her dignity wasn’t respected, wrong because she was being used as “a sex doll” rather than being treated as a full human being.

The impact of adding a language of dignity alongside the language of consent cannot be overstated. A generation in which students begin to reach for “dignity,” “respect,” “humanity” as criteria for interpersonal ethics is a world apart from the nothing-but-consent ethic we’re leaving behind. It is a generation that possesses the tools to identify what is intrinsically wrong with pornography, degrading sex acts, and, most significantly, a whole culture of casual hookups.

Make no mistake: To say that not all consensual sex is created equal, and that we should reach for relationships that respect each other as two human beings rather than two (or more) experience machines, is not to say that our disciplinatory institutions should punish those who fail to meet this standard. We need objective standards, like statutory definitions of consent, to regulate what is and isn’t legal, but the legal does not exhaust the scope of the ethical.

Raising the banner of real, humane relationships grounded in mutual respect; articulating a vision of gender relations where men and women trust each other in spite and through their differences — these are the tasks that fall to culture creators from thought leaders, to mentors, to friends in a 2 a.m. dorm room. The culture will keep moving toward an ethics of dignity, but only if we make it so.

Yona T. Sperling-Milner ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Pforzheimer House and normally writes satire. To be clear, this piece is not intended as satire.