Make New York Post a Preferred Source A protester holding a "Justice For Jane Doe" sign at a rally at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, on Oct. 5, 2026. AP Photo/Adrian Kraus “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
Political strategists from Niccolo Machiavelli to Winston Churchill to Rahm Emanuel have promoted that notion — and now it’s having another moment, as leftist activists and candidates latch on to the “Cornell 7” rape case as a means of advancing their own ends.
And while these opportunists wield Jane Doe as their latest cudgel, they’re closing their eyes to how their own ideology fueled a culture that reduces women to mere sexual objects.
Early Monday, Cornell University campus activists shattered windows and graffitied an administration building with messages like “Smash the Patriarchy” — all, they said, “for Jane Doe.”
Their manifesto ordered administrators to “resign and turn power over to the students,” while also (of course) denouncing the university’s relationship with Israel.
But the students were just following the lead of politicians like Gov. Kathy Hochul and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, both of whom have seized the chance to turn the case into a culture-war issue ahead of November’s elections.
They contend that Jane Doe has been exploited, and their answer to that alleged sexual exploitation is political exploitation.
Last week AOC used a town hall appearance in Ithaca to pour kerosene on the outrage flames, going well beyond Doe’s civil complaint by claiming that “seven men drugged and gang-raped” the young woman after they “lured her into a frat house, drugged her with ketamine, and took turns gang raping her for seven hours.”
Hochul, embroiled in an increasingly competitive reelection campaign, has inserted herself into the legal proceedings, removing the local district attorney and installing Attorney General Letitia James (also, what do you know, seeking reelection) to investigate.
Surprisingly, The New York Times delivered a more nuanced account, reporting that Doe came to describe the encounter as rape only after people on campus began joking about it — and after she was disinvited from the fraternity’s Halloween party “for her own good.”
The legal questions here are many, and courts will eventually rule on whether the incident was criminal rape or merely debauchery.
Either way, it reveals troubling truths about a generation whose understanding of sex and consent has been profoundly shaped by pornography.
How did so many young people arrive at a conception of sex in which human beings are viewed as nothing but props in somebody else’s fantasy?
For years, the left has told young people that pornography is entertainment, sex work is work, and virtually anything sexual is healthy as long as everybody consents.
Then we handed children smartphones containing a limitless library of porn to teach them the rest.
In a recent update to his best-selling book “Boys Adrift,” parenting expert Dr. Leonard Sax took a critical look at how pornography and artificial intelligence have changed the way young men experience sexuality.
“Researchers recently found that 45% of the most popular videos on Pornhub include at least one act of physical aggression against women,” he wrote.
An equal percentage of videos depict men ejaculating on a woman’s face — as the women appear to enjoy the experience.
When Sax gives seminars to young men on sexuality and explains that real-life women don’t actually clamor for such encounters, “high school boys are amazed to hear this.”
These depictions are translating into shocking levels of real sexual violence: A 2025 survey of US college students found that 64% of women, 29% of men and 56% of transgender and nonbinary students had been choked during sex.
And they are changing young people’s expectations of sex — as users of pornography increasingly find that sex itself is insufficiently stimulating.
As a result, rates of erectile dysfunction have skyrocketed among Gen Z: While rates for men under age 40 traditionally hovered around 3%, they’re now near 18% for men ages 18 to 24.
Now the same progressive feminists who promoted a “sex-positive” culture that stripped away all moral guardrails are grappling with the fallout — but instead of practicing some introspection, they’re using this debacle as a political weapon.
It’s not yet clear whether a crime in the legal sense occurred at Cornell.
But the cultural crime happened long before that night in 2024.
We taught a whole generation to ask whether sex was consensual, but we forgot to teach them that sex is not violence, and that the person they have sex with is a human being.
We told kids consent was the one and only rule, then let Pornhub provide their sex-ed curriculum.
Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars.
