by Stephen Soukup
The Cornell Seven case reflects a deeper cultural collapse, where the Sexual Revolution, pornification, and the loss of moral boundaries have made exploitation increasingly commonplace.
At this point, no one can say anything for certain about the “Cornell Seven” case except that bad things happened, and no one will receive justice. The first of these is painfully obvious. Even if everything was consensual and legal, the young woman (Jane Doe) put herself in an extremely foolish and dangerous position, while the boys (certainly not men, by any stretch of the imagination) behaved monstrously, participating in or facilitating her sexual exploitation. The second should be just as obvious, although nearly all observers will pretend otherwise. Like everything else in our politically obsessed society, this case of sexual exploitation has morphed into a case of political exploitation, with the usual suspects lining up on both sides of the issue, using it to score ideological points and make partisan gains. In the end, the events of October 19, 2024, will capture the public’s attention for a moment, and then, just as quickly, they will be forgotten. Politics, as it has become its wont, will ensure that justice is denied and substantive societal reflection is never even contemplated.
Let me be clear about this from the start, lest anyone doubt it later. Everyone involved in the events at Chi Phi fraternity is responsible for his or her own actions, which places a considerably greater onus on the fraternity brothers. It is unpopular to say such things these days, but men and boys have a moral responsibility to protect women and girls. At the very least, they have a responsibility not to enable their harm. The moral failures of that evening were multiple and spread among all parties, but the boys especially should have done better—much, much better.
All of that said, everyone involved is also a product of the society in which they live and were raised, and to be blunt, that society is depraved. This is a metaphor I overuse, I know, but the way in which our society became depraved is very much like Mike Campbell’s bankruptcy in The Sun Also Rises. It happened in two ways: “gradually and then suddenly.”
The gradual aspect of this corruption might, for lack of a better term, be called the “sensatization” of our culture. In many ways, the history of the last century-and-a-half is also the history of Western civilization’s “sensate” stage. The “Sensate Society” is a notion introduced by a Russian anti-Bolshevik intellectual named Pitirim Sorokin, who was expelled from his homeland, settled in Minnesota, and eventually founded Harvard’s Sociology Department. In brief, Sorokin argued that all civilizations pass through three stages: the ideational stage, which is organized around the transcendental and in which faith is the most prevalent of human qualities; the idealistic stage, in which human aspirations are recognized, but the society operates through the rules and institutions of the established order and its moral framework; and the sensate stage, in which the shared identities, the taboos, the traditional customs, mores, and, of course, the morals of a society collapse, leaving the culture entirely dependent upon and obsessed with the materialistic. Sorokin put it this way:
If a person has no strong convictions as to what is right and what is wrong, if he does not believe in any God or absolute moral values, if he no longer respects contractual obligations, and finally, if his hunger for pleasures and sensory values is paramount, what can guide and control his conduct toward other men? Nothing but his desires and lusts. Under these conditions, he loses all rational and moral control, even plain common sense. What can deter him from violating the rights, interests, and well-being of other men? Nothing but physical force. How far will he go in his insatiable quest for sensory happiness? He will go as far as brute force, opposed by that of others, permits. His whole problem of behavior is determined by the ratio between his force and that wielded by others.
Over the course of the last 150 years, the sensate society has clearly and inarguably taken root. In the 1960s, the last of the traditional prohibitions, those surrounding sex, were finally and permanently demolished.
Throughout Western history, sex has been one of the most enduring touchstones of social dissent, which only makes sense, given that it is the most enduring object of the taboos of the Western religious establishment. From time immemorial, it seems, anyone who wished to oppose the “powers that be” in the West also encouraged a free, open, and non-procreative approach to human sexuality, knowing full well that breaking the bond between the pleasure and the responsibility of sexual intimacy would also break the social bond of the masses to the old-line establishment.
All of this is to say that the sexually rebellious Baby Boomers were not particularly unique in Western history, nor were they especially to blame. Their rebellion did, however, happen to occur at a critical cultural moment and under critical social and demographic conditions. Given the size and social power of the Boomer cohort and the decades-long, gradual erosion of society’s moral foundations, their insurrection took on added significance and permanence. The Sexual Revolution became the Boomers’ signature cultural achievement, representing a definitive victory against the establishment and against the traditional moral code as well.
The next quarter-century saw various fits and starts in sexual “liberation,” along with dramatic increases in various sex-related social travails—from single parenthood to teen births, from divorce to sexually transmitted diseases. By the 1990s, the Baby Boomers who started the revolution had come of age and had also come to power—warts and all—bringing with them the cultural predilections of an unmoored and unsteady cohort. “Liberation” was secured. Sex and the supremacy of sexual gratification, which had long prevailed in the generational subculture, became the ascendant values of the broader culture, establishing the sensate society more completely.
As for the “sudden” transformation of society—the “pornification” of society—it followed the sensatization of society almost immediately. Once the Sexual Revolution and its “values” (such as they are) had become ascendant, the pornification and dehumanization became inevitable and irresistible.
Among the most valuable and long-lasting contributions of Second Wave Feminism—which began in the early 1960s, along with other long-overdue and necessary efforts to promote human and civil rights throughout the entirety of American society—was its attempt to compel society to treat women as the moral and intellectual equals of men, not as mere physical objects. Part of this attempt, of course, was feminism’s battle against pornography and its clear and destructive objectification of women.
In the late 1970s, feminist activists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon did their best to ensure that ending or at least curtailing pornography would be one of the principal goals of the feminist movement. These second-wave feminists rightly understood that the “business” of sexual gratification was also the business of exploitation. And in this “business,” women in particular are used. They are objectified. They are treated appallingly. Worse still, in pornography, everything about women, except their sexuality, is discarded as irrelevant. Dworkin described pornography as “a process of dehumanization, a concrete means of changing someone into something.” “We say,” she continued, “that women are objectified. We hope that people will think that we are very smart when we use a long word. But being turned into an object is a real event, and the pornographic object is a particular kind of object. It is a target. You are turned into a target.”
By the early 1990s, however, as the Boomers were taking power and the Sensate Society was becoming entrenched, feminism’s Second Wave was being undermined and displaced by its Third Wave. This Third Wave had been building for some time, and the line of demarcation between the two waves is fuzzy at best. Nevertheless, the Third Wave became much larger and more forceful after the elections of 1992, the so-called “year of the woman.” Third-wave feminism focused explicitly on sexuality, on the “emancipation” of female sexuality, and on the use of sexual license to acquire and use power. In this context, abortion became the near-exclusive policy goal of the movement, while issues like pornography were unequivocally flipped on their heads.
Again, this process had been underway for some time, and its efforts transcend the imagined boundaries between the waves. For example, the Second Wave radical activist Ellen Willis helped set the stage for the Third Wave by urging women not to let the anti-pornography effort turn feminism into a “single-issue” movement. “As we saw it,” Willis later wrote, “the claim that ‘pornography is violence against women’ was code for the neo-Victorian idea that men want sex and women endure it.”
It is worth noting here that the rise and entrenchment of the Third Wave were the result of many factors and the efforts of many people. One of the most overlooked factors was the work done by a woman whose professional bio notes that “She has used her influence and resources to work for equal rights and opportunities for women, serving on the board of the National Women’s Political Caucus, and then being instrumental in the founding of three powerful women’s organizations [including] EMILY’s List, which raises money for pro-choice, Democratic women political candidates….”
That woman is Christie Hefner, the daughter of Hugh Hefner. Christie Hefner became the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Playboy Enterprises, Inc. in 1988. Ms. Hefner’s bio also notes that she is “widely acknowledged as having developed the strategies for reinventing Playboy Enterprises as a successful global multimedia corporation.” Fancy that.
Obviously, this isn’t to say that Christie Hefner caused the establishment of Third Wave Feminism or the pornification of society. Far from it. She was a small cog in a very large machine. And that very large machine depended heavily on the rise of the internet. Nevertheless, Hefner’s participation is emblematic. Her father, of course, claimed that he “was a feminist before there was such a thing as feminism.” And as the historian and writer Carrie Pitzulo noted:
Playboy took a progressive stance on women’s rights throughout the 1960s and 1970s and was particularly vocal in support of abortion. Evidence of this position can be found in the magazine’s articles and editorials as well as in the charitable donations of the Playboy Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the magazine, which contributed thousands of dollars to abortion rights organizations before Roe v. Wade overturned antiabortion laws in the United States. In addition, the Playboy Foundation provided the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) with funds for its work on women’s rights and helped fund day-care centers for working mothers….
In short, then, the pornification of society is, at its heart, defined by the merger of the feminist movement with the “Playboy lifestyle”: readily available, consequence-free sex, without apologies; sexual empowerment as a core human virtue; a belief that sexual encounters should be both ubiquitous and uninhibited; and the dehumanization of one’s partners, be they flesh and blood or digital.
To reiterate: none of this excuses what happened at Chi Phi fraternity two years ago. It does, however, explain it, at least in part. More to the point, it warns that the depravity on display in the case of the Cornell Seven will not and cannot be solved simply by introducing “institutional reforms,” as the university’s president proposes. This is a much bigger problem. It is a consequence of the Sensate-Pornographic Society.
Stephen Soukup
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/10/05/the-cornell-seven-and-the-sensate-pornographic-society/
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