What ‘Free Pussy’ Means for Men

That one detail from the Cornell University chat history stayed in my mind for weeks. The frat house chat where one of the rapists gleefully announced ‘free pussy’ to the other 57 members of the fraternity, after posting a picture of the naked drugged Jane Doe, inviting anyone to join in. Also, the fact that the one who texted that ‘you can just come and whip it out’ was her friend, the one who invited her over and presumably the man she trusted the most. It breaks my heart.

And the fact that none of the 57 men in the group chat bothered to say anything remotely critical or to call the police. At least report it to the campus authorities, anything.

But my mind keeps returning over and over to the ‘free pussy’ detail and its horrifying bluntness. Because it reveals so much about the patriarchal mindset that animates misogynistic men and that dooms them to sad little lives (besides traumatizing the women unlucky enough to get involved with them, of course). How so much of the inner lives and thoughts and goals and priorities for these men keep revolving around the idea of ‘free sex’.

So I want to dive a bit into what these men mean by that. What did the Cornell 7 mean by ‘free pussy’, besides the obvious dehumanization of referring to a person by reducing her to her genitalia. What made this such a universal male language that the rest of that sordid group chat understood immediately and made them instantly decide that ‘yes, this is an obviously good thing, there’s nothing questionable here’. The universality of the appeal of ‘free pussy’.

This isn’t a new observation for me, of course. There’s the old saying that sounds horribly like an overgeneralization, but it captures some of what I want to say in a deeply disturbing way. I’m sure you’ve heard it before. It goes something like ‘women fake orgasms to obtain a relationship, and men fake an entire relationship to get orgasms’. It sounds horrible but I know a lot of women will recognize the truth behind it.

Not because women innately don’t like sex with men, but because we often feel compelled to accept bad patriarchal sex scripts that leave us feeling bad or worse just to try to preserve a mediocre connection. Whereas men who seem to do everything right and bypass most of our red flag detectors often turn out to just be performing a nice guy persona and to fake entire relationships just to get laid.

‘Free Pussy’ Reveals that Basic Human Decency Is Often Just a Performance. So Are Feelings, or a Seeming Relationship Investment.

This is way more common than you might think. It’s why so many women experience a sudden turn with their partners once sex happens. It’s why so many men suddenly find it hard or boring to continue behaving as warmly after sex happens in a relationship, because they are already getting the only or main thing they actually wanted. They only continue investing effort afterwards when the woman starts showing signs that she might leave, and even then they are investing that effort begrudgingly and manipulatively.

Women are often expected to treat men’s romantic behavior as evidence of their feelings, while also being warned that our own perceptions are unreliable. We’re told that if he takes us on dates, remembers details about us, listens to our problems and talks about a future together, we should recognize that he’s investing in the relationship. But these behaviors are so often instrumental.

Someone can learn to perform attentiveness without developing much interest in the person they’re supposedly attending to. Men can learn which gestures make a woman feel chosen, secure and loved, then deploy those gestures to obtain access to her body. The performance can be convincing precisely because the woman is responding to the ordinary signals through which human beings communicate interest and affection.

This is part of what makes the sudden change so destabilizing. Women can spend months wondering whether they misread the relationship, whether they were too demanding, whether they somehow ruined something that was good, especially when they were taught to interpret a man’s attention as something you should feel lucky to receive.

The ‘free pussy’ mindset makes this dynamic particularly ugly because it reveals the possibility that what looked like mutual intimacy was just an instrumentalization. She thought they were building something together. He was just completing a transaction, with affection as the price of admission. Once he got what he wanted, the transaction was over, even if nobody ever told her that was the arrangement.

This is why they often keep track of sex so carefully in their relationships while joyfully discounting anything else like, for example, all of the disproportionate emotional and domestic labor that women do for them. And also why they continue to view women’s submission as the ultimate goal of a ‘good’ relationship.

It’s all extremely transactional and sex is the only currency they care about. Sometimes they weaponize their bad moods in order to