Remember the Duke Lacrosse Team Rape Hoax of 2006? A stripper by the name of Crystal Gail Mangum accused three members of the university’s lacrosse team of raping her after a party for which she had been hired?

In the end, it was proven that the three young men accused were not just not guilty, but factually innocent, but not until after huge publicity, condemnation of the accused by a large group of faculty members, and, of course, the very lovely Amanda Marcotte adding her 2¢ many times.

Well, we’re seeing something similar at Cornell, and the public relations assaults by the activists have begun. I will admit it: I checked Miss Marcotte’s Salon postings, but it seems that she learned something from the rotten egg on her face twenty years ago: she hasn’t weighed in on this case, at least not yet.

But that hasn’t stopped her from screeching about the rape accusations against Braden Peters, AKA Clavicular:

Clavicular’s arrest is a perfect example of this issue. He rose to fame as a “looksmaxxer,” which is a spin-off of the larger incel community. Incels believe that men are entitled to women’s sexual attention, and that feminism is an aberration because it allows women to live independently of men, instead of having to trade sex for survival. Looksmaxxers like Clavicular take it a step further, trying to game out strategies to reassert sexual dominance over women. Like Andrew Tate, a lot of the looksmaxxer discourse skirts the law by focusing on manipulating and tricking women into sex. But the implication of overt coercion is always bubbling beneath the surface. After all, if you feel that you are owed sex by women, rape becomes less like a crime and more like recompense.

I admit to being confused as to how a man trying to look his best, and advocating that for other young men, is somehow “a spinoff of the larger incel community,” but Miss Marcotte does see conservative men as all being potential/probable incels, or involuntarily celibate, because she cannot understand how any woman would agree to copulate with them, even though the famously liberal Washington Post reported that conservatives really are, on the whole, better-looking than liberals. She had already published an article entitled Divorce him already, Usha, claiming that “JD Vance and his wife really seem to loathe each other,” while also laughably claiming that Salon, her publisher, is “a journalistic outfit,” a rather callous call to make the then three Vance, and now four, children fatherless, only to wax wroth when Mrs Vance, along with Karoline Leavitt and Katie Miller, announced their pregnancies at about the same time. It seems that her #TrumpDerangementSyndrome has a Vance Derangement Syndrome component as well.

Looksmaxxing, as described in a very biased manner by Wikipedia, is men doing what they can to improve their physical appearance to be attractive to women. It primarily involves dressing well and hitting the gym, though the Wikipedia article tries to add more things to it. But as Miss Marcotte trashes it, to her mostly female audience, isn’t she ignoring that women have been ‘looksmaxxing’ for as long as we know anything about it, to be attractive to men? In a photo taken from her Twitter bio several years ago, Miss Marcotte is obviously wearing lipstick and eye makeup and big hoop earrings, something women have been doing for centuries, but is that not looksmaxxing on her part?

Naturally, the author uses her attack on Mr Peters to condemn every conservative male out there. If you are Republican, if you are conservative, if you, Heaven forfend!, voted for Donald Trump, you are guilty, guilty, guilty!

I take no position at all in the alleged Cornell gangrape case: there has been far, far, far too much heat on this on the internet, drowning whatever the known truth is in a flood of social media posts both condemning the accused and claiming that the alleged victim is lying. Twitter is full of complaints that the accused haven’t been expelled, but the accused are just that: accused but in no way proven guilty. Perhaps Cornell’s administration recalls the rush to justice that turned into a rush to injustice in the Duke lacrosse case, and don’t want to make bad mistakes by acting prematurely.