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Please be forewarned: this post contains graphic descriptions and discussions of sexual violence. As always, this is long, but I’ve broken it down into hopefully well-described sections in case you want to focus on particular areas.
Last week, a woman identified as Jane Doe, a former Cornell University student, filed a 100+ page civil lawsuit in New York’s Supreme Court in which she described being drugged and sexually assaulted by seven other students for hours during a Chi Phi fraternity party in 2024. The filing includes screenshots from a Snapchat group, “Chi Phi Activities,” in which one of the men announced that “free pussy” was available for anyone interested. The plaintiff was drunk when she arrived at the party, so incapable of consent.
On Tuesday, the Cornell University Daily Sun ran an editorial titled “Cornell Won’t, We Will,” condemning the school’s response to the allegations and to the students involved. The editors list the names of the seven men identified in the lawsuit and address them directly: “We know who you are and we refuse to let you benefit from this University’s concealment,” a direct callback to the University’s own assertion that “Only those who perpetrate sexual violence benefit from its concealment.” The fact that it’s an opinion piece gives the student board a little more First Amendment latitude than might otherwise be the case, but it takes bravery to do what they did. Under New York law, engaging in sexual conduct with a person who is incapable of consent is a criminal offense classified as a felony, but only if the person is not voluntarily incapacitated (as clearly and expertly explained here by Jill Filipovic). In this case – voluntarily or involuntarily, or a combination of these- no criminal investigation was pursued and no charges were brought against the seven men, which, as we all know, is par for the course.”
The civil suit names the men, the University, the fraternity’s national and local chapters, a sorority, and a local bar that served her alcohol. At the same time, she was underage and seeks monetary damages to be determined at trial.
Michael I. Kotlikoff, who was then-interim President of Cornell, called the allegations “serious and deeply disturbing.” A task force was convened. The school issued temporary suspensions for each of the seven defendants. Federal student-privacy laws bar the school from providing details on its decisions, but two of the men have since been expelled, and some were given a chance to make up for their conduct by submitting essays to the university. Yeah. Last fall, the Faculty Senate voted 80-16 to criticize the school’s use of temporary suspension publicly.
In the meantime, Cornell’s own survey shows that “nonconsensual sexual contact” on campus has risen since 2023, with one-fifth of cases occurring in fraternity spaces.
An estimated 20-25% of women in American colleges experience some form of sexual assault during their time in school. Similar assault rates have been found among same-aged women whether or not they attend college. Recent national crime data, however, provide a direct comparison, finding that women enrolled in college have a 74% higher risk, with women in residential dorms facing three times as much risk as commuter students.
Rape-prone cultures are different from rape-free ones.
Something about campus life creates risks beyond simply being young. What we know, with little doubt, is that certain male status networks, fraternities — lower- and uppercase “f” — generate higher risks and increase the incidence of sexual assault. This doesn’t mean that they have to generate these risks, however, just that as they currently exist, many of them do.
So what results in differences that matter and reduce sexual violence?
In 2014, I called anthropologist Peggy Sanday to ask her this question and to talk to her about her more than 40 years of studying how cultures around the world think about and treat rape. At the time, she was a Professor Emerita of Anthropology at University of Pennsylvania.
Sanday is perhaps best known for identifying cultures as “rape prone” and “rape free.” Based on her study of more than 150 tribal societies, she identified what makes a society or culture “rape prone,” “rape free,” or something between the two. It still may come as a surprise to some that “rape free” is even a possibility. She found that in rape-free cultures, women have far more authority, status, safety, and freedom. When a woman says no, a man stops, an idea that many people struggle to think men are capable of. If a man proceeds to rape, he might, for example, be exiled. Rape-prone cultures, on the other hand, treat rape as an entitlement in a system that revolves around masculine contests and hierarchies.
After her decades-long global ethnographic studies, she turned her sights on American college campuses, studying roles, initiations, party behaviors, hazing, gender attitudes, pornography, male bonding rituals, and more across institutional settings — Greek systems and also athletics. She compiled her findings into an influential book, Fraternity Gang Rape,first published in 1990 and rereleased in 2007, with ongoing work in between. In it, she described how and why some fraternities are rape-prone while others are rape-tolerant or rape-free. She found that fraternity gang-rape shows recurring patterns in which a group of men targets one “party girl,” typically a woman who is already vulnerable.*
Vulnerability, though, isn’t equally distributed among women. A statistic such as “20 to 25% of women” fails to reflect disparities between women. Low-income, transgender, nonbinary, disabled women, and ethnic and racial minority women almost always face significantly higher rates of assault. Rapists can count on their being disadvantaged by status and restricted access to resources, meaningful barriers to pursuing accountability. What’s notable about fraternities is that they tend to be racially and ethnically homogeneous and to do the work collectively of not only institutionalizing male-dominant gender segregation but of enforcing hierarchies of race, class, ethnicity, religion, and more among men. So, in historically white, wealthy fraternities, for instance, it’s peer women — white, middle- and upper-class: same-social-circle academic competitors — who face higher risks.
Rates of violence against women are significantly higher on Division I campuses than at Division II, III, or universities with no athletic programs. Game days at top college football schools are associated with a 28 percent increase in area reports of rape. Fraternity men, like athletes, are three times more likely to commit assaults. Furthermore, in Greek systems, fraternity men have been found to actively engage in controlling and dictating the sexual reputations of younger sorority women by dividing them into “buddies” or “slutties,” creating a code for who is fair game.
Both fraternity brothers and athletes tend to score higher on hyper-masculinity. They are more likely to support control over women and sexual permissiveness, two factors that predict rape myth acceptance. Men who hold these attitudes self-select into fraternities, and post-induction socialization, peer dynamics, and house cultures compound these attitudes over time. Women in sororities are also significantly more likely to believe in rape myths and experience much higher rates of non-consensual intercourse in which someone is under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
The Cornell case, which included a recruitment/initiation via group chat, is a textbook example of Sanday’s findings on fraternity gang rape. She described what happens in all-male groups and hierarchies where group norms and mandates subsume individual beliefs and behaviors. Jane Doe is a textbook “party girl” — new, drinking, easily incapacitated.
Sanday proved, however, that rates of rape vary significantly across Greek systems and schools, describing a UPenn fraternity where everyone drank but social norms and masculine expectations meant rape was not an issue.
Sanday’s work has its critics — she did, after all, work in her field for more than 60 years — but other and more contemporary researchhas consistently pointed to similar culture-specific conclusions regarding campus cultures, Greek systems, and how rape is perceived and treated by a society, including the effects and uses of alcohol and drugs as tools of entitlement. On campuses, fraternities are a risk factor, both for perpetrating and being assaulted – including, intra-fraternally, for men.
The Red Zone: a raping season
The Cornell gang rape took place in mid-October 2024, in the middle of what’s called The Red Zone, the period between the start of the semester and Thanksgiving, during which more than an estimated 50% of on-campus sexual assaults are perpetrated.
Many people think of privilege and entitlement in positive terms, such as discrete additive benefits, but they are primarily defined by something else: the elimination or reduction of obstacles and costs that others incur. Is the Red Zone an entitlement?
Just before my daughters were about to set off for college, we got emails from their high school offering a self-defense class for new graduates, $100 a person. Only girls and their families got the emails. The message seemed clear enough: before sending your daughters off to college, make sure they can fight off aggressors. My knee-jerk instinct was to ask: who do girls have to defend themselves against? Mainly boys like the ones they grew up with. Boys were not also being offered a class, at a rate of $100 per person, but by the logic of the offer, they were the ones who might be accidentally or purposefully assaulting someone. All worry instead tends to focus, as preparation, on the possibility of false allegations, despite their rarity.
I understood why a self-defense class made sense and appreciated the effort. However, the class, as well-intended as it was, made me angry. The offering was yet another example of an institutional default: expecting young women to privatize the cost of preventing their assaults instead of preparing men, holding them accountable, or, in this case, suggesting they incur an actual financial price to supplement their education, socialization, and college preparation.
Less than 1 in 3 college men learn about sex, consent, or how to avoid raping or being accused of raping someone before arriving at school. If they do, it’s usually in a fairly cursory, maybe scolding way by a worried parent.
A report released earlier this year by It’s On Us found that 58% of college-age men surveyed had no formal exposure to information regarding consent or sexual communication. Most said they got the information they depended on from media and pornography. LGBTQIA+ men were more likely than straight men to have gotten any information at all, often by seeking out information online. Black men were also more likely than men from other racial and ethnic groups, usually in a trusted community setting; however, not in school or through a formal effort.
Yesterday, media reported on a case at Louisiana State University in which criminal charges have been brought against a football player. The school’s Office of Civil Rights & Title IX investigated the alleged rape ruling that a “forcible” rape had occurred and that the player was responsible, but his punishment — two semesters of suspension — was appealed and reduced to four semesters of probation after the review board decided there was no “malice” or “force” but rather “an error in judgment.” The victim, a freshman at the time, says she was offered $1,000 in exchange for not filing an official criminal complaint, which she chose to do after learning the man was back on campus.
“Let me assure everyone,” said the president of LSU in a statement after the complaint was file, “that this incident has been handled professionally and that LSU has strictly followed our policies, procedures and best practices, including the Title IX process, to guide our actions to date.” The issue is not that the school didn’t do these things but rather that it in fact did them and the outcomes remained so undesirable and clearly, to the victim, unjust. I personally know multiple women who did not want to press criminal charges against their rapists and who agreed not in the belief that their assailants would not be on campus with them when they returned to school only to find that they, in fact, were allowed back contrary to initial agreements.
The fact that there is a name for a known risk period, mainly for women on campus, should shock people, but it doesn’t seem to move sufficient numbers to drive widespread protest or action. It barely elicits a shrug beyond, perhaps, momentary conversational outrage or discomfort, as parents and schools talk about sending children to college.
The woman raped at Cornell is no longer a student at the school. She is seeking compensatory damages for the painful disruption of her academic life and “the loss of educational opportunities.” Multiple defendants named in the lawsuit, however, are still actively enrolled. Roughly 35% of students who experience rape on a college campus either leave temporarily or transfer, with 10% dropping out of college entirely.
I guess that’s one way to gender balance a campus population. Experts and administrators are publicly agonizing over men’s flight from higher education but seem willing to tolerate communities, behaviors, and campus environments where persistent sexual violence is essentially a tool that is informally filtering and expelling women students. Survivor pushout like this works across many sectors. This does not constitute a crisis because what makes a crisis legible is threatened masculine entitlement.
Alcohol is not a cause of rape; it’s a tool used by rapists.
It’s not possible to have a conversation about rape on campuses without alcohol being front and center. However, alcohol is not a cause or an incidental circumstance in sexual violence. It doesn’t change a person’s character; it amplifies preexisting beliefs. Its use combines in specific ways with perpetrator characteristics such as hostile masculinity and a propensity to be sexist and believe rape myths.
The very inconvenient fact is that a woman who gets drunk probably doesn’t believe she deserves to be raped, but a man who gets drunk might very well believe she does.
Here’s an interesting fact about inebriation: the way people behave when they’re drunk is culturally shaped; it’s not based only on some universal effects of alcohol itself. As with other forms of altered mental states and cognition, social norms shape how people express them.
Just as anthropological research has demonstrated that altered mental states—including schizophrenia and drunkencomportment—are expressed through cultural models that produce violent voices in the United States but benevolent ones in Ghana and India, alcohol-induced disinhibition is not a biological universal.
Biology provides structures that alcohol interacts with, but culture does some heavy lifting, influencing how people will act and what they will believe. High blood-alcohol levels severely impair executive functioning and risk assessment capacity across populations, but what happens afterward, disinhibition, shows up in incredibly varied ways.
The US is recognized as a culture that treats inebriation as license. People get very loud and antagonistic; maybe they fight or say things they wouldn’t typically say out loud. They might rape other people or look away when someone else does. This is not to say this expression of inhibition and altered mental state is universal or monolithic, because clearly it isn’t, but it is a recognizable cultural norm.
Here, broadly a rape-prone place, sexual aggression or plain aggression seems to be a given.
In one third of reported sexual assault cases, studies show, victims are either drunk or otherwise incapacitated. Within that category, both victims and perpetrators are drinking in 89% of cases. Serial offenders — ”undetected rapists” — commit more than 85% of assaults that involve alcohol, with only a small percentage of men, roughly 6%, meeting legal definitions for having raped someone or attempted to. Two-thirds of these men are repeat offenders, averaging six assaults. They know that the fact of alcohol can easily be used later to discredit their victims. Up to 70% of repeat perpetrators do this intentionally. Alcohol is usually one among any number of available tools, including intimidation, power, drugs, anonymity, and status itself.
The tools may change, but the license stays the same. Alcohol- and drug-facilitated assault“ — the name for what happens when a victim is intoxicated and has impaired cognition or physical functioning — is a term of art.
No one sits down and tells children, “This is how you can act when you get drunk,” but they don’t have to. They learn by default, and what they learn often reflects the roles and rules they’re socialized into, and the culture is happy enough to create a zone of exception — the period of inebriation — in which people either look away or suspend social accountability. It is notable, however, that in Sanday’s and others’ research, participants and spectators both talk about assaults of women using the language of fun – “party games,” “trophies,” and “entertainment.” They consistently express cruelty as enjoyable leisure, not coerced, reluctant conformity. This goes beyond masking despair with a visible laugh or pretending to be having fun.
The issue on campus isn’t “a woman got drunk and something bad happened to her”; it’s, chances are far more likely, “a man set out to find a person who is drinking and knows it will be harder for that person to say no, resist, or be believed later.” Anti-feminists and misogynists prefer to focus on a victim’s culpability rather than on perpetrators’ decision-making process and incentives, however.
The absurdity of the latter position is clear when you a) suggest imagining that boys and men should expect to be raped every time they get drunk, b) understand that people who rape consistently use alcohol and drugs strategically, and c) realize that our high rates of alcohol consumption don’t automatically result in high rates of sexual violence generally. There are infinite scenarios in which very drunk people simply aren’t raping other very drunk people.
So, yes, alcohol often plays a role, just not in the way that rape mythologizes want it to.
Humiliating women at scale: A rape takes a networked village
Today, it’s an everyday experience to see news about rape that demonstrates the following: what used to be private acts of sexual violation – in bedrooms, dressing rooms, offices — are now collective, overtly fraternal, very public spectacles, designed to put women’s humiliation on display and to manufacture a superficial but blunt-force male solidarity.
The dynamics Sanday identified inside certain fraternity houses, for example, don’t require physical proximity or alcohol to apply. They’ve efficiently scaled into digital ecosystems, such as the ‘burnerverse,’ where, as reported in Wired by E.J. Dickson, hordes of anonymous men coordinate humiliation, nonconsensual image distribution, and doxxing of women, operating with the same collective impunity. A man the victim doesn’t know even shared a cryptocurrency token with her name on it and encouraged people to “put your children’s college savings into this.” It had a market cap of $11,400.
Meanwhile, the woman spiraled. Her parents became targets, with people texting them cruel messages and recording calls to share on X. She was forced to quit her job after her employer was contacted. People were placing bets on whether she would kill herself or start an OnlyFans. By then, her content had been viewed more than 8.5 million times, and it was early days. She did eventually try to end her own life.
People on Burnerverse networks are not on campuses where targeted women go to school. They probably aren’t all drunk. They aren’t confused. They’re free to do what they are doing.
Media, however, still tends to portray rapists as monsters and outliers and in sensationalized stories, even when they mark the “ordinariness” of perpetrators. The problem is, however, less about individual “bad guys” and more about the broader culture they know they can rely on, the environments that provide excuses, plausible deniability, and freedom from accountability.
Occasionally, an excellent long-form investigation will scrutinize what’s happening at scale within a certain subculture. When you string these together, however, it’s clear that institutions built around male competition, hierarchy, and dominance create zones of access for rapists. Fraternities can often be one of these zones, but so can military facilities, religious institutions, athleticorganizations, field work sites, elder carefacilities, and more.
The Wired investigation, along these lines, surfaced at least 10 other women who were harassed and doxxed by users of a loosely connected network known as the burnerverse, made up of “burner” accounts on X. These networks are adjacent to and overlapping with others where anti-feminism and misogyny are deafening and where sexual violence is a regular feature.
This week, for instance, Braden Peters, aka looksmaxxing intel-influenced Manosphere influencer Clavicular, was charged with raping, drugging, and serving alcohol to 17-year-old Alexsandra Mendoza, an Instagram influencer (with roughly 250K followers). Peters was 19 at the time of the alleged incident.
In cases where age gaps are narrow, defense arguments typically try to describe encounters in terms of peers partying or experimenting, but this approach ignores power and, in this case, how platform imbalances, male status, and chemical incapacitation all generate severe asymmetries, independent of age.
Clavicular has 1.5 million followers online, and his livestreams are regularly viewed by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, mostly men. During the 2025 Twitch session cited in the case, he told her to lie about her age and served her vodka as she visibly became inebriated. In a civil suit filed earlier this year, she describes him injecting her face with a fat-dissolving substance, Aqualyx, without telling her that it wasn’t FDA-approved and suggesting “that methamphetamine had been added to the injection mixture.” After the broadcast, they had sex several times. She woke up to him having sex with her. She did not ask him to stop, but she also did not consent and then left. He is denying all charges.
Rape-prone cultures use male audiences to validate cruelty to women as normalized entertainment. Cornell students updated their fraternity brothers’ pictures, and an invitation in Snapchat, the Burnerverse gamified and monetized a woman’s sexual abuse with bets and memecoins, and Clavicular turned getting a girl drunk into a six-figure livestream, like a subscription tier for his audience.
Mendoza’s age is relevant for another reason. I want to be clear that the focus of this piece is on what happens to girls at the stage in life in which they become adults and so, fair legal game. There’s justifiable rage about Epstein’s abuse of children, but people’s outrage over child victims of sexual assault shrinks the closer a girl gets to womanhood. Concern for children, particularly among men, seems, often, to come directly from people’s sense of patriarchal ownership of children and from authoritarian, carceral impulses, not from any genuine care for the person victimized or for a desire for justice. This is why an authentic and disruptive capacity for solidarity with women, especially free and independent women, fails to materialize.
Women still need whisper networks because accountability is not a standard we can rely on
I am pretty sure many readers of the Cornell paper’s op-ed were shocked to see the seven men’s names printed in plain sight, especially parents and administrators. The names, however, had already appeared in legal documents and were reported by multiple outlets, including the same student paper. The difference, though, was what the editors did: they named the men and addressed them directly.
Men in fraternities seek each other out based on being men, often in ways that exclude, disadvantage, and hurt women, but when women group men based on being men in the same way to name the exclusions, disadvantages, and harms — often to help other women avoid these — society and the law balk.
This was the case, for instance, with the 2017 Shitty Media Men list. It was an informal and, even according to its creator, Moira Donegan, an imperfect tool, where women anonymously named men who had either harassed or assaulted women. It was a whisper network, only in a spreadsheet. In the roughly 12 hours it was live, 70 men were named. The response was a full-scale counteroffensive: one man filed a million-dollar-plus defamation suit against Donegan and “Jane Does 1-30,” trying to unmask the women on the list. The lawsuit lasted more than five years and ended in 2023 with a settlement.
Now compare that to Cornell, fraternities broadly, or even the Burnerverse. In the latter, an anonymous network of men online has doxed, sexually abused, humiliated, and financially exploited many, many women, terrorizing women more broadly in the process. There are far fewer institutionalized, legal frameworks — such as the newly minted 2025 TAKE IT DOWN Act — available to victims or to women, the ultimate targets, to fight back against this amorphous horde of miscreants or counter this collective harm. In the case of the Burnerverse, X, no surprise, has opted out of the voluntary industry hash-matching takedown system designed to reduce similar incidents.
This is why women have always had and continue to have whisper networks. The medium changes — from lipstick and Sharpies on bathroom stalls, to spreadsheets, to dedicated apps and Facebook groups — but the practice doesn’t, because the failures these networks are compensating for persist.
If our society were truly worried about anonymous, unverified, informal collective accusations, then shouldn’t there be a powerful response to the Burnerverse, where the harms are not only real but being broadcast with glee — doxxing, freely distributed nonconsensual sexual images, coordinated cruelty, harassment of women and their family members and employers?
The primary difference, it would appear, is the gender of the people doing the naming and the harming and the gender of the people being named. Sure, it’s easier to sue one person over one Google Doc than to pursue legal actions against an amorphous, anonymous, multi-node network, but this doesn’t explain the comparative difference in parental anxiety, legal reasoning, or social and media outrage. Where are the op-eds, the mainstream defensive movements, the congressional panels, the media reckonings, the professional consequences for participants?
Fairness and due process for people accused of assault are vital, and public concern about how due process is administered is legitimate. But the people, institutions, legal instruments, technologies, and cultural apparatuses mobilized for years against one woman and an anonymous woman’s 12-hour-old spreadsheet are mute in the face of a massive, diffuse, malicious and documented network of anonymous men doing measurably greater, infinitely more sustained harm. Go figure.
What is the bar for schools, parents, counselors, coaches? What standards should institutions be held to? What about, say, airlines?
Take, for instance, another news item this week: a woman on a United flight had to sit next to a man masturbating while looking at her. She told flight attendants and stood for most of the flight. Flight attendants instructed her to return to her seat for landing and eventually offered a $100 flight credit. No one talked to him or asked him to stop. Police did not meet him at the gate despite public masturbation. As the woman herself pointed out, people have been sanctioned and disciplined on flights for far less.
A school isn’t a commercial provider of transportation or a court of law, but the power it has to shape its culture and hold students accountable to moral standards is immense.
This is evident at Cornell, where the gap between the school’s own assessment of a “serious and deeply disturbing” incident and a lack of clarity and meaningful consequences has been glaring; why a member of the institution’s taskforce could say that “the charge was never for us to solve the problem.” Even under the current administration’s revised and restrictive 2020 Title IX rules, the university is to consider the preponderance of evidence and doesn’t need airtight, forensic, definitive proof of a gang rape to hold a fraternity responsible for the environment it creates on campus. Yet, the school’s own paper pointed out that the most basic academic disciplinary problems have more formal and transparent processes than rape adjudication.
It just feels that systems are still more invested in protecting men’s reputations and systems of power than women’s lives.
And I know, women are also aggressors, they also hurt other women, they believe in rape myths, they are eager sisters in hate. That’s not what this article is about, not because it isn’t a factor, but because women are not engaging in Cornell-scale, Burnerverse-scale, Clavicular-scale patterns of coordinated, gender-based, performance-validated, institutionally-shielded violence and harm. Women’s individual failures, white supremacist violence, and patriarchal trading can rarely produce anything like these in either frequency or scale without men’s institutional support and investments. They definitely can’t form global networks that work like cartels to institutionally protect themselves and other women.
The closed-loop protection racket
Assault and sexual assault are so prevalent in the Greek system that insurers won’t insure fraternities. They are considered a high-risk class because of decades of litigation costs related to sexual assault claims, the second most common claim type for frats (assault and battery is the first). When frats do get coverage policies typically exclude crimes, explicitly citing sexual misconduct. Alcohol-related violations are also commonly excluded.
Because of this profile, fraternities have to self-insure, collectively funding through an entity like the Fraternity Risk Management Trust, an instrument members pay into. The amazing thing about this setup is that in the case of criminal findings, excluded from coverage, financial risks flow to individual men’s families’ homeowners insurance policies, not upstream to local fraternities or their national organizations.
The hard problem admissions officers, parents, and administrators are reluctant to address is that the very structure of fraternal institutions—their values, organization, and hierarchies—produce higher-risk environments for everyone, a situation worsened on college campuses by both notable deficits in men’s sexual education and institutional reluctance to disrupt the financial relationships that these networks sustain.
Schools and Greek systems often operate within parameters that resemble regulatory capture. Take Cornell’s disciplinary process, for instance. It depends on internal processes and systems that are significantly, structurally dependent on the resources of the entity it’s trying, in the case of this rape, to judge and discipline. Fraternities’ influence isn’t limited to party cultures or social impacts on students. It can and does include school board memberships, strong donor presences, professional and mentoring pipelines, and real political influence.
Nonetheless, schools like Cornell must maintain the image of neutral oversight even as they negotiate outcomes to protect broader fraternity interests and investments. Administrators, trustees, and often the disciplinary organization can even be drawn from the same systems, networks, and resources as the body or people being investigated. Schools are entwined with and often facilitate Greek life. A school like Cornell may not own the buildings that fraternities are housed in, but they might provide spaces for events and alums gatherings, staff, and other resources to members of Greek systems. They have leeway, but they exercise it with extreme caution and typically under extreme circumstances. Meanwhile, institutional resources, housing decisions, alum donor support, fraternity professional networks, wealth accumulation, and self-insurance structures actively promote and protect predatory environments.
The overall effect, one that no one entity or person is responsible for, is a virtually closed-loop system of patriarchal protection where not only are spaces and times set aside as zones of exception, but the bulk of sexual assault financial burdens ultimately falls — financially, socially, politically, emotionally, psychologically — on victims who want to and choose to pursue justice. Not schools, not fraternities, not insurance companies, not donors.
Men’s homophobia and rape on display
Male homosocial desire, the intense intimacy between men that can occur in patriarchal cultures, is perpetually swamped by dire homophobic anxiety — a terror of sexual contamination that can be temporarily alleviated and resolved through the shared, performative consumption of a woman’s body. Men can bond intimately through the mutual use of the woman’s body; her subjugation becomes a path to validating collective heterosexuality and to buy belonging into that collective.
In the Cornell, Burnerverse, and Clavicular cases, for instance, the alleged rapes and collective consumption were not hidden; in fact, they were openly displayed.
Neither anxiety, peer pressure, nor algorithmic manipulation, however, is an excuse. Men are not passive victims of group dynamics. Men’s widespread silence and complicity with other men are what make zones of exception where women are unsafe possible.
Very little empirical evidence shows that men who intervene suffer long-term consequences for objecting to egregious behavior in other men. Pluralistic ignorance, mistakenly assuming peers agree with crude behavior instead of acting based on conscious, fear-based calculation, is a huge problem, and men also tend to overestimate other men’s sexism and misogyny. They make choices and, too often, those choices punish women.
The law will never be a sufficient solution, but right now it’s the problem.
In all three cases discussed here, legal and criminal approaches mainly ignore or absolve people who let the raping happen and who profit from it happening.
Legal processes create a specific double bind: they demand anatomical proof of bodily penetration to establish a felony harm, yet they also redirect scrutiny toward a victim’s credibility and capacity to consent. Despite years of evidence proving the role of orchestrated incapacitation, this remains an easily exploited “gray area” that rapists rely on to produce plausible deniability. The process mainly subordinates truth to narrowly defined, clinical terms and disparately distributed carceral outcomes.
None of it is built to acknowledge the degree to which rape is not remotely just about penetration – which is, after all, a standard built around how rapists, mainly men, experience the act. If this were not true, then legal standards would acknowledge victims’ pain, shame, anxiety, disgust, isolation, and loss of self, of security, of income, of trust in others, of sexual pleasure, of academic or professional life.
Due process and rules of evidence are important to prevent the risk of arbitrary and subjective punishment, especially in a supremacist society that leverages white women’s purity and fragility to punish Black and Brown men lethally.
However, what we have now is far less a neutral defense of civil liberties and far more a risk-management system that uses due process principles to protect men’s and institutions’ reputations and build a wall around male social, economic, professional, and political capital. It’s in this context that rapers and people who seem to have no issues with rapers are granted perverse and perverting rights of free speech, both as individuals and in corporations.
What stands outside of the law are the very people who could disrupt and end the harm but don’t: at the party, in the group chat, on the social media platform, or the team bus. The ones who look away, clap, laugh no matter how uncomfortably, cheer, film, watch the film, share the film, take the screenshots, gamify the rape, coin the crypto, own the platforms. It absolves the parents, the coaches, the teachers, the administrators, the bosses, the legislators, the politicians, the media.
I know none of this is the law’s job, but apparently it’s no one’s job.
Everyone is harmed, so why doesn’t everyone want to talk about this?
Even if you don’t believe the men involved were rapists or you think the woman shouldn’t have gotten drunk and gone to a frat house, you should still want to know why, at most schools still, an academic cheating scandal is subject to higher evidentiary standards, formal processes, well-defined resolution timelines, and clear consequences while an hours-long, publicly discussed gang-rape gets…a task force that announces, “the charge was never for us to solve the problem.”
In its processes and conclusions, Cornell didn’t communicate its position to students, however. It sent clear messages.
To the men involved — or any others, fraternities, sports teams, and parents of boys who might be inclined — it said that even in the face of a person making compelling, “serious and deeply disturbing” allegations, in the face of evidence, the cost of raping is negligible. No one questions that the woman was there. It’s documented. What the school communicated was that they either could do or would do nothing to seriously confront people, an institution, and a culture that produces men who bond over forcing themselves on an incapacitated woman. These men advertised her availability publicly. She remembers, among other graphic details, men pouring and snorting ketamine off of her body and another demanding she snort ketamine off of his penis.
This translates, in Sanday’s framework, into an incentive: men can rely on being safe and even gaining a perverse status despite or even because of their casual and vicious treatment of a woman.
To women, to victims, to survivors, to future students, to parents and high school administrators, well, the school is saying women are on their own, especially if they choose to party. Do what you must, but you actually can’t count on the school to protect you (or your children) or to act, especially today, in the face of financial and federal-level pressure not to.
Many students are fed up and clear about what’s going on. They understand better than most adults what the terms of engagement are.
“A university’s obligation to the physical safety of its students,” wrote the editorial board of the Cornell Sun yesterday, “is not one commitment among several, to be weighed against reputation or litigation exposure. It is antecedent to everything else the institution does. Cornell exists to teach and to educate, and instruction presupposes a student capable of receiving it, which presupposes, in turn, a student who is not afraid to attend their lecture hall. Safety is not adjacent to the educational mission — safety is, in fact, its precondition.”
This equation is essentially one in which women’s safety continues to be compromised to ensure men’s presence, higher status, and future potential.
Today, for instance, more and more schools are offsetting plunging application numbers and the ever-growing gender gap in enrollment by appealing to men on the basis of masculine bonding tropes and fraternal network systems: sports, military-style recruitment, man camp activities, and more. Unreformed, most of these recruitment mechanisms are known contributors to men’s greater hostility to women and linked to higher rates of sexual violence and rape myth acceptance. Boys are struggling, arguably a function of misogyny, in fact. But society is failing them long before they have to apply to college. Colleges responding to these failures by deepening risks for women doesn’t solve the problem of male flight from education; it only contributes to the unhelpful belief that what is happening to men and to women are unrelated.
Even as institutions move in a direction that increases risks for women on campuses, however, women are suing schools and leagues. A 2020 case argued that the organization knew male student-athletes posed a documented, heightened risk to women and failed to supervise or discipline them accordingly. A group of women filed a suit against the NCAA for negligence, unsafe environments, and inaction in the wake of their assaults.
College sexual assault is a microcosm
Many people think that campus sexual assault isn’t serious enough compared to authoritarianism, war, AI, and climate crises — the world has so many other emergencies.
These issues are not separate ones.This isn’t about isolated dysfunction at one school or small world node on the internet.
The specific configuration of identities, relationships, and expressions of power that define rape-prone patriarchal cultures operates far beyond the bounds of college campuses. It’s about patterns of impunity. What I’m describing is closed loop of institutional self-preservation, power, and elite freedom from accountability. The mechanisms evident in cases of sexual violence — diffusing moral culpability and liability, protecting influential and powerful classes of people, forcing victims to absorb costs as individuals — are the same as those we see across corporate and political institutions that pervasively externalize the costs and violence required to maintain unaccountable power and a life with no limits for a few.
Accountability isn’t completely absent, it can and does eventually happen, but it’s so rare as to be ridiculous. Yesterday, for instance, Harvey Weinstein was resentenced for assaulting Miriam Haley. Weinstein himself understood how to use alcohol to assault people, but he argued that he never drugged women “like Bill Cosby.” He also leveraged physical intimidation and power asymmetries. But think of what it took in both his and Cosby’s cases – hundreds of women, tens of millions of dollars, decades of assaults, victims’ careers and lives ruined. Think of all the men squirreling their way back to accolades.
For those who think there are “bigger issues,” as I’ve mentioned before here, women’s secure and free participation in civil society and political life measurably decreases corruption, anti-democratic movements, and civil physical conflict. We know that women’s security in any institution or society is a better predictor of that society’s stability and peacefulness than any other factor. Most of us just don’t raise our children to become adults who care.
So many are making change; why not support them?
Change has to start in early childhood, at family dinner tables, in schools, on sidelines. It has to infuse media, narrative, and the structure of our technology.
Already, within living memory, the entire issue of sexual violence has been transformed by feminist thinking and movements. Organizations like I Have a Right To, MeToo, EducateUS, Futures without Violence, RISE,Men can Stop Rape, It’s On Us, A Call to Men, Advocates for Youth, SafeBAE, Green Dot, and others exist. They didn’t even fifty years ago. There are also two new books I’d recommend:n one by Jackson Katz , a pioneer in violence prevention and understanding masculinities and the role of men in ending rape: Everyman: Why Violence Against Women is a Men’s Issue and How You Can Make A Difference and Talk to Your Boys by Christopher Pepper and Joanna Schroeder.
“At the end of the day,” explains Susan Prout, a co-founder of I Have The Right To, “the issue of sexual violence is a civil rights issue. We aim to educate all community members that we all benefit from creating cultures of respect and safety.”
Also, I know this is late but still worth sharing, Survivors’ Solidary March protests are taking place around the nation today, information here for time and locations and future actions are in the link.
I’m grateful for the work being done every day, but more of us have to do it. Colleges can’t be expected to fix a problem that starts long before students walk through their gates. All parents have a vested interest in safe campuses, but without early childhood socialization that teaches mutual care, consent, empathy, and respect for other people before students ever set foot on a campus, what we are left with is ignorance, conflict, anger, corruption, cruelty, and fear.
Look where that’s led us.
This essay was originally published at the Substack Unmanned.
