On Thursday 24 July, five former World Junior Hockey players were acquitted by Ontario Superior Court Judge Maria Carroccia following an eight-week sexual-assault trial that should never have seen the inside of a courtroom. In Canada, the trial rapidly became a prurient media circus, so all Canadians—including those, like me, who felt only fremdschämen for all concerned—have been privy to the lurid details of a consensual group-sex session in a hotel room back in 2018. And how do we know that the sex was was consensual? Because the young female complainant, known only as E.M., recorded a video on the night she had sex with all five defendants, in which she laughed: “It was all consensual. Are you recording me? ’K, good. You are so paranoid. Holy. I enjoyed it. It was fine. I’m so sober—that’s why I can’t do this right now.”

On the night of the incident, the defendants were in London, Ontario, for a Hockey Canada gala. E.M., who was twenty years old at the time, met them at a local bar and then accompanied one of them back to his hotel room for what she still agrees was consensual oral and penetrative sex. The defence alleged—and the prosecution denied—that it was E.M. who suggested that other players be invited to the hotel room because she wanted “a wild night.” She did acknowledge that she was naked when they arrived and that she did not put her clothes on. The defence argued that E.M. then invited all of the young men present to have sex with her and that she consented to every sex act that followed. The prosecution countered that she was drunk, intimidated, and coerced and that the video she recorded exonerating the defendants was actually proof they had done something wrong, which is why they told her to record it.

The feelings and state of mind of the complainant were central to the trial, and her consent video was hotly debated in court and in the press. Did it prove consent or did it suggest the opposite? Did she really want to consent or not? Did she consent at the time but regret it afterwards? Did she not consent but say that she did? Did the young men somehow know or intuit that she didn’t consent, or that she was conflicted? If consent can, as the prosecution contended, be “withdrawn at any time,” does that “anytime” include seven years after the fact? And if so, what would the implications of that kind of legal precedent look like? The case was a lot less like a traditional he said/she said affair than a she said/she said instance of confusion, excitement, danger, and regret.

There was also some procedural drama along the way. A mistrial was declared by Justice Carroccia just three days after the jury was selected following an inappropriate interaction between one of the jurors and a member of the defence team. A new fourteen-member jury was duly empanelled, but they too were subsequently discharged after a juror complained that a member of the defence team had mocked her. Rather than restart the trial a second time, both the defence and the prosecution agreed that the case would be heard and decided by Justice Carroccia alone.

If the defence assumed that a female judge was likely to rule in their favour, they were to be disappointed. In her judgement, Carroccia concluded that, “on the totality of the evidence,” it was E.M., not the defendants, who had been the sexual instigator and “aggressor.” She had masturbated in front of them, demanded “Is anyone going to bang me?,” and even called the young men “pussies” for their reluctance to have sex with her. Given the evidence heard in court, the judge decided it would be prudent to treat the complainant’s account with scepticism:

It also causes the court concern that the complainant acknowledged that where she has gaps in her memory, she filled those gaps with assumptions. This causes concern in relation to the witness’s credibility and her reliability. The complainant also gave a vague answer when it was suggested to her in cross-examination that it was easier for her to deny the deliberate choices she made on June 18 and 19, 2018, than to acknowledge the shame, guilt, and embarrassment about those choices. She did not deny the suggestion, she said: “I don’t know. I’m kind of struggling to understand that” and went on to explain that she blames herself and that other people should be held accountable, but it was “a combination of things.”

There is no reason to default to a standard of believing a woman when copious evidence disconfirms or casts doubt on that woman’s account, including surveillance footage, text correspondence, competing witness testimony, and the internal inconsistencies of her own statements. “On several occasions,” Carroccia added, “the complainant referred to her evidence as ‘her truth’ rather than ‘the truth,’ which seemingly blurs the line between what she believes to be true and what is objectively true.”

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That this particular case was decided by a female judge ought to have made it harder to argue that the outcome indicates institutional bias or misogyny. Nevertheless, indefatigable activists gathered outside the courthouse to express their displeasure with the verdicts and their unshakeable solidarity with E.M. “Over the last few weeks and five cross-examinations in court, E.M. has faced almost every harmful and victim-blaming sexual assault myth in existence,” complained the Ontario Coalition of Rape Crisis Centres in a statement.

Canada’s National Hockey League, meanwhile, responded to the verdicts with exactly the kind of institutional cowardice we have come to expect of risk-averse organisations navigating culturally contentious issues. By the time E.M.’s allegations became public, all five defendants were playing for the NHL and their contracts elapsed during their subsequent suspension. But now that they have been cleared of legal wrongdoing, it is not at all clear that their careers and professional reputations will be allowed to recover. A curt NHL statement released after the verdicts read:

The allegations made in this case, even if not determined to have been criminal, were very disturbing and the behavior at issue was unacceptable. We will be reviewing and considering the judge’s findings. While we conduct that analysis and determine next steps, the players charged in this case are ineligible to play in the League.

But most ordinary observers, I expect, are likely to agree with Justice Carroccia’s clear and convincing decision.

I find the defendants’ account of E.M.’s behaviour that night eminently believable. The hockey players and E.M. herself both described the “porn-star personality” she adopted throughout the night, and she behaved exactly as someone enacting her own porn-star fantasy would behave. But her retrospective confusion and humiliation also strike me as authentic. It may be that she encouraged and wanted wild sex on one level but felt ashamed of her desires on another; that she wanted and didn’t want dangerous sex; that she wanted and didn’t want an exciting night; that she wanted and didn’t want to push her limits. I am sympathetic to this confusion, even though I reject entirely her attempt to make five young men pay for her own poor judgement.

Young women are taught that sexual freedom is not only available to them without judgement, but that it is also desirable to them as feminists. Everything is permitted, so long as it is consented to. But what young women might not understand—and what E.M. appears to have discovered the hard way—is that we sometimes consent to things that we don’t want, and sometimes we discover that we want things we probably wouldn’t actually consent to. Sexual desire can be like that. There are parts of us that want more, and parts of us that want less, and parts of us that are turned on by the things that we don’t want, and so we end up wanting them. These urges can occur at the same time even though they contradict each other. Worse, sometimes what we want in a hot minute we later discover we should not have wanted at all. This is called regret. We have disordered wills, and part of becoming an adult is realising this.

The sexual revolution liberated women to explore their desires and to dabble in promiscuity if they wished to do so without fear of social stigma. But regret was one of the least contended-with consequences of this change—the realisation that not every choice made with this newfound freedom would be wise. Women evolved to be sexually choosy, so they are more likely than men to feel used or even degraded after casual sex. E.M. seems to have had an experience of this kind. Apparently intoxicated by her hedonistic pursuit of pleasure, she behaved like a woman who craved sex, walking among five young men naked, pleasuring herself in front of them, and making no attempt to leave. At no point did she say that she did not want or consent to sex. (When she did say “no” to more spanking, the young men desisted.)

But why would any self-respecting woman behave in this way in the first place? Well, because the politically incorrect truth is that women sometimes want to be degraded during sex. This desire for humiliation might sound strange, especially since modern feminism insists that women want the opposite—to be respected, and respected most of all during sex. But respect is not very hot. It is the opposite of hot, it’s moral. And if sex is going to be memorable, it needs to be either passionate and tender—an emotional expression of deep love—or passionate and sinful. Hot sex has a flavour of transgression. Occasionally, this occurs when a woman adopts a domineering sexual persona and humiliates men. But more commonly, transgression is found in a woman’s desire to be dominated, even to the point of degradation.

It may even be that modern feminism is partly responsible for this perversity. Because women have insisted upon being respected with such vehemence and for so long, denigration is now all the more arousing for being taboo. It feels powerful to transgress a moral imperative. When all other prohibitions surrounding sex have been flipped into moral duties, the only rules left to break are feminism’s own. Transgressing them allows us to be daring and bold and bad.

But there is something deeper and almost certainly innate in a woman’s sexuality that desires humiliation in sex. Pearl-clutchers on the Left and Right will scold me for pointing this out, but the fact that many women desire the very thing we’re supposed to condemn doesn’t make that desire any less real. Our sexual ecstasy emerges from deep within us, and to access it, a woman sometimes has to slough off the weight of her personality, her decency, her morals, her self-respect, and even her agency. A woman’s sexual bliss is amoral, or even anti-moral. It is by freeing herself from her socially constituted self with its jealously guarded rights and dignities that a woman’s sexual nature finds its truest expression. If a woman is going to reach the bottom of her desires, her social nature will have to be excised first. If she is going to be free to feel her body, she will first have to let go of her mind.

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This is why sex is more dangerous for a woman than it is for a man, even in the age of expanding and expansive notions of consent. Women feel the emotional effects of sex more than men, both the good and the bad, not simply because we want to feel treasured and adored—which we do!—but because we also want to get past that tenderness to something more liberating; something rougher and baser. It is precisely because we desire transgressive sex that we risk the consequences of feeling used, tarnished, coerced, and discarded. To pretend, as feminism has, that women can have casual sex without high stakes is to ignore the character of female sexuality and—worse—to promote mediocre sex as the best that can be hoped for.

Contemporary feminist ethics have failed women, because they refuse to treat sex with proper reverence and women with proper complexity. They are more interested in treating women as perpetual victims than empowering them with a sophisticated understanding of their sexuality. Feminists condemn men when they misbehave but they have taught women that as long as they consent, they can misbehave all they want. That, we are given to understand, is what equality means. And if a woman feels degraded afterwards, it is not because she desired to feel that way at the time, it is because a man somehow made her feel that way against her will. But it’s not men who want women to be either the angel or the whore. We are already both. That is why, with the right person, sex that is entirely wrong can be so right. 

Sex is a high-wire act. Women have been told that the only safety net they need is effective birth control and consent. But that is to ignore the existential and exciting element of risk. Contemporary feminist notions of sexual agency have a blind spot for this desired humiliation as well as for the internal confusion of a woman’s erotic desires, to say nothing of the self-instruction offered by regret. This blind spot does not exist, as some do, due to oversight. Rather, feminist notions of sexual liberty must remain wilfully blind to women’s desire for degradation because it has divorced sex from love.

In love, a woman’s desire for sexual degradation can be fully indulged. The beloved is entirely free to be treated as a sexual object and as an insatiable whore. She can experience the thrill of a sexual high-wire act, secure in the knowledge that if she falls off the wire she will be caught, not by a net of ideological neuroses, but in the tender arms of her lover. She is unmade by her most exquisite desire for depravity and then brought back to herself, cherished and honoured and elevated.

One might think that being treated with tenderness after being treated as a sexual object mitigates the sexual humiliation and debasement which she desires. In fact, the opposite is true. She can indulge in her most shocking sluttishness because there is no internal conflict, no self-division, and no inner confusion of wanting and yet not wanting to be treated as a pure sexual object. Her soul is whole, and she embraces her humiliation as a kind of freedom. Within the security of the relationship, she experiences neither regret nor resentment by allowing her lover to use her for his pleasure. And in love, a man expresses a profound trust in his partner by allowing his dominating instinct free rein, which then feeds back into her feelings for him. In love, savagery and the sweetest tenderness lie entwined in a tangle of drenched sheets.

For E.M., who lunged on to the high-wire with abandon and no safety net, humiliation was inevitable. Although she professed that she had enjoyed herself in the hotel room, she was already calling one of the hockey players a “jerk” in text messages to her friend as she left later that night. The pornographic fantasy of being used by a group of men is one thing to imagine and another thing to act out with real human beings. The problem with people is they are themselves instead of what one might want them to be. Both E.M. and her partners discovered that real life is not the same as pornography, where everyone is a professional and the sex is an artifice staged for the viewer’s pleasure.

The evidence presented at trial suggested that E.M. wanted a night of hot fucking; the kind of gang-bang familiar from hardcore pornography. The group of nineteen- and twenty-year-old young men, meanwhile, thought they were participating in a pornographic fantasy of their own. In reality, E.M. was just a horny naked stranger who wanted sex, and she was being demanding not pliant. Robbed of their sexual initiative, the young men were probably self-conscious and unsure of what they wanted or what they should be doing. The whole experience was likely quite awkward and not all that hot. So, they ordered food, told jokes, and engaged in some desultory sex. But it probably felt considerably less erotic in practice than they might have imagined.

E.M., on the other hand, seems to have been embarrassed that she wasn’t the centre of attention that she thought she’d be and that these five young men weren’t going out of their minds with desire for her and had to be provoked into action. What she described as her “frustration” occurred at the end of the night, when she was left alone with the hockey player she had first slept with and he asked if she was “going to leave anytime soon.” This is what made her angry and call him a jerk. “This comment,” Justice Carroccia remarked in her opinion, “made [E.M.] feel like he was not treating her respectfully. This annoyed her. She felt he was being rude. She agreed with a suggestion made to her that she called him a jerk at this point. [He] did not walk her to the door, he got into bed to go to sleep.” In other words, after her slutty adventure, E.M. wanted the reassurance of some loving intimacy—to be treasured and appreciated and to wake up the next morning in her lover’s arms as he stroked her hair. She wanted sexual debasement followed by tenderness and she got neither. Real people are such disappointments.