In February, a bunch of males on a sports activities speak present casually unfold a salacious and unfaithful rumor in regards to the intercourse lifetime of a teenage woman on nationwide tv, leading to her being humiliated and relentlessly harassed. It felt as if it have been 2007 once more, and the speak present banter was a quick pause earlier than our nation’s busy schedule of constructing enjoyable of Britney Spears’s breakdown.
On ESPN’s bro-y The Pat McAfee Present, the titular McAfee launched a section on NFL draft picks by gossiping about an undergraduate rumor he’d heard: {that a} sorority woman on the College of Mississippi had cheated on her fraternity boyfriend along with his father. McAfee didn’t point out the younger girl or her boyfriend by identify, however later shared the clip on X to his 3.2 million followers (the put up continues to be up, as of April 3). Barstool Sports activities character Jack Mac then promoted a meme coin named after the woman in query: Mary Kate Cornett, a first-year school pupil. Cornett denies the rumor, however that hasn’t stopped it from spreading like wildfire.
As reported on the New York Occasions’ The Athletic, because the rumor unfold, the harassment Cornett skilled ratcheted up. She needed to depart her school dorm and transfer into emergency housing after campus police mentioned she was in danger. Somebody despatched in a false tip to the police to have a SWAT crew despatched to her mom’s residence. Cornett’s voicemail and textual content message crammed up with degrading messages from strangers calling her a whore and telling her to kill herself; related messages have additionally reached her 89-year-old grandfather. Cornett now says she intends to pursue authorized motion in opposition to McAfee and ESPN. ESPN and McAfee have declined to remark to The Athletic and different information shops.
There’s one thing so 2000s about this story — the type of factor you’d examine on a feminist weblog on the time. It has all of the beats of a traditional aughts slut-shaming: an nameless teenage woman, the lads on a chat present utilizing her humiliation as idle chit-chat, the way in which that chit-chat picks up and runs rampant till the woman is getting nameless threats from strangers. It’s very Swiffer Lady, through which a graphic tape an eighth-grader made for the boy she had a crush on went viral. It’s very Vanessa Hudgens in 2007, when she was pressured to apologize to followers and scramble to save lots of her Disney profession when non-public nude pictures of her have been leaked. It’s mainly all of the episodes that the speak present hosts of the 2000s have by now apologized for. The one half that’s actually new is the memecoin and the right-wing ecosystem of X that permits such gossip to flourish.
Absolutely, an individual may assume, we’ve moved previous this sort of nationwide slut-shaming by now. We stay in a post-MeToo world. The tradition will need to have moved previous the sexual humiliation of sweet sixteen ladies.
But in a manner, the Ole Miss story is the type of factor that’s been a very long time coming. The appropriate has been involved in reviving Bush-era raunch (assume Ladies Gone Wild) and purity tradition (assume: the obsession with Britney Spears’s virginity) for years now. Purity tradition and raunch tradition stroll hand in hand. The sexual objectification of raunch is enforced by the inflexible shaming of purity. Each are united by the obligatory objectification and humiliation of ladies, whose our bodies inside this method are at all times managed by males.
As sociologist Bernadette Barton confirmed in her 2021 ebook The Pornification of America: How Raunch Tradition is Ruining Our Society, raunch has develop into basic to the self-conception of the post-Trump proper. Barton notes the variety of pro-Trump memes that “explicitly hyperlink provocative feminine our bodies with Trump paraphernalia,” or that “distinction ‘horny’ conservative ladies with ‘ugly, unfeminine’ liberal ones.”
“Not are misogynists confined to the outdated dichotomy framing ladies as virgins or whores,” Barton observes. “Raunch tradition has facilitated a brand new sexist dichotomy: sizzling or not.”
The ideology claims all sizzling ladies as their very own and calls for that they place themselves on the service of males, for his or her amusement. Taking over this place permits a lady a certain quantity of cultural foreign money, which is why the proper likes to crow that sizzling ladies vote for Trump and solely ugly ladies are liberal. But being a sizzling woman additionally opens her as much as the opportunity of the type of vicious, extremely sexualized humiliation and harassment that Cornett is dealing with. That’s the ideology that allowed the proper to assert an apolitical determine like Hawk Tuah Lady as a MAGA image, and on the identical time to smear Kamala Harris as “the unique Hawk Tuah Lady.”
The purpose of it’s to degrade, to dominate, to make it clear that intercourse exists to gratify males. Humiliating an nameless teenager for enjoyable is the pure endpoint of this ideology. It was at all times what was lurking beneath the recent ladies for Trump jokes.
