In February, a gaggle of males on a sports activities discuss 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 had been 2007 once more, and the discuss present banter was a short 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 title, however later shared the clip on X to his 3.2 million followers (the publish remains to be up, as of April 3). Barstool Sports activities persona Jack Mac then promoted a meme coin named after the woman in query: Mary Kate Cornett, a first-year faculty scholar. 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 faculty 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 sort of factor you’ll examine on a feminist weblog on the time. It has all of the beats of a basic aughts slut-shaming: an nameless teenage woman, the boys on a chat present utilizing her humiliation as idle chit-chat, the best way that chit-chat picks up and runs rampant till the woman is getting nameless threats from strangers. It’s very Swiffer Woman, by 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 compelled to apologize to followers and scramble to avoid wasting her Disney profession when non-public nude images of her had been leaked. It’s mainly all of the episodes that the discuss 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 enables such gossip to flourish.
Certainly, an individual would possibly suppose, we’ve moved previous this sort of nationwide slut-shaming by now. We stay in a post-MeToo world. The tradition should have moved previous the sexual humiliation of stripling women.
But in a manner, the Ole Miss story is the sort of factor that’s been a very long time coming. The suitable has been thinking about reviving Bush-era raunch (suppose Ladies Gone Wild) and purity tradition (suppose: 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 girls, whose our bodies inside this technique are all the time managed by males.
As sociologist Bernadette Barton confirmed in her 2021 e-book The Pornification of America: How Raunch Tradition is Ruining Our Society, raunch has turn 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.”
“Now 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: scorching or not.”
The ideology claims all scorching women 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 girl a certain quantity of cultural forex, which is why the suitable likes to crow that scorching women vote for Trump and solely ugly women are liberal. But being a scorching woman additionally opens her as much as the potential of the sort of vicious, extremely sexualized humiliation and harassment that Cornett is dealing with. That’s the ideology that allowed the suitable to assert an apolitical determine like Hawk Tuah Woman as a MAGA image, and on the identical time to smear Kamala Harris as “the unique Hawk Tuah Woman.”
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 all the time what was lurking below the new women for Trump jokes.
