Content warning: This article contains references to sexual violence.
In October of 2024, when the sexual assault of Jane Doe occurred at Cornell, the local prosecutor decided against bringing charges due to the “limited” amount of evidence. Now, two years later, a wealth of evidence from Snapchat group chat messages and secretly recorded phone calls has made the case finally worthy of national headlines.
Prior to the scrutiny of the public eye, Cornell saw fit to assign three of the accused to write an essay as their punishment for gang raping a woman. At a collegiate level, these men are practically being given permission.
The Cornell 7 case, as with far too many cases of sexual violence, has been made into a convenient ground for political dispute. Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace recently posted to X, “IDK who needs to hear this, but a consensual gangbang is not a rape”, obviously in reference to Jane Doe.
In 2025, Trump proposed a nearly 30% budget reduction for the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women. In September, the Trump Administration proposed an $810 million budget cut for education and health-related programs. At the federal level, victims are being failed.
How, even in a predominantly progressive environment like Cornell, are these systemic failures still to be expected? Maybe they just follow the leader.
When the president has racked up about 18 sexual assault allegations and publicly mingled with Jeffrey Epstein for 20 years, what reason would men have for thinking they couldn’t follow suit and get away with it? A leader inherently gives his inferiors permission to act as he does.
Social Media Enablement
Social media has played a (surprisingly) positive part in rallying for Jane Doe.
Even so, I have to remind myself that with hyper-personalized algorithms, it’s easy to scroll through a perfectly curated feed and think everyone shares your opinion. Right-wing users will be shown mostly right-wing content – basing their POV of the world on the content they’re shown, they’d think the whole world is right-wing.
Still, bigotry is everywhere. My IG apparently isn’t sufficiently tailored yet; I scrolled for five minutes and saw Trump urge Iran to bomb my hometown, Shane Gillis’ recent SNL monologue, and a street interview with a boy saying he wishes he was the 8th of the Cornell 7.
It almost feels intentional that socials are so full of aestheticized fraternity culture. Granted, it’s recruitment season, so there’s bound to be more content, but I can’t help but feel weird scrolling from a Cornell 7 update to a viral #frataesthetic vid.
Maybe I’m just missing something, but I don’t think the offensive houses and even more offensive actions of frats are particularly deserving of a TikTok edit. It’s just another
Fraternities
Frat culture feels, to me, like a small-scale reflection of general gender constructs. Men are cooler if they’re in a frat, especially highly ranked houses. Women, on the other hand, are apparently “easier” if they’re in a sorority, especially higher-ranking houses.
Men with high body counts are studs; women with high body counts are sluts. See the resemblance?
A guy friend of mine was once so excited about a girl he met. He said she wasn’t in a sorority and was “undiscovered” by frat men, implying she was more valuable to him because she was “uncharted territory.” But wasn’t he a frat man, “discovering” this woman? I honestly didn’t know what to say to him.
And yet this Greek life system, which has led to an undeniable amount of sexual violence and drug abuse, is practically worshipped by men and shrugged off by universities.
One of my closest friends is an executive member of a fraternity. When I sat down to speak with him, I asked, “Does your chapter do anything to educate its members on sexual assault prevention?” He explained to me that each fraternity is required to attend a prevention workshop, mandated by the Inter-fraternity Council (IFC), once per quarter.
As for unauthorized actions, he said older members drill it into new members at initiation to “be a gentleman” to girls: walk them home at night, interfere if you see an issue, and so on. But what caught my attention was when he explained that when you’re a part of Greek life, your personal actions represent not only your character but your entire organization.
So, when one frat member is a rapist, the entire chapter is… Research has shown that Greek life and sexual aggression have a positive correlation, so the whole sentiment feels a bit ironic to me.
On a side note, it was interesting to me that my friend felt like his chapter was roughly 60% conservative, even at a predominantly liberal university. Findings have shown that men involved in Greek life tend to lean more conservative than their non-affiliated counterparts.
I see a lot online that indicates a trend in a strange, fictitious correlation between conservatism and masculinity. This offers men a gateway to a more “traditional” style of thinking, something we do not need them to regress to.
Accountability
The University of California assigns its students sexual assault “training modules” to their students to define terms like sexual harassment, sexual violence and bystander intervention.
These modules imply that students need to be taught what is and isn’t “okay”; I feel like we know the issue isn’t a lack of knowledge. Sexual violence is never an accident, it’s a conscious enactment of a power imbalance, one that universities like Cornell seem to want to protect based on the perpetrators’ supposed “punishments”.
I’d love nothing more than to see men be the ones to write these articles, engage in the debates, and initiate the conversations about sexual violence… using their gender and status for good for once. Many of them never will. Silence is too convenient for their social life.
These men don’t realize they are inadvertently betraying their mothers, sisters, and girlfriends because they can’t fathom straying from the ways of their brothers. We know this now, thanks to the 57 silent men in the Cornell Chi Phi group chat. Men feel a false sense of security because they weren’t physically in the room.
And even if a man sat down to read this article, how many would be reading, rolling their eyes, and thinking it’s all just “not that deep”?
If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual assault, help is available.
National Sexual Assault Hotline: (800) 656-4673
UCSB CARE Confidential Advocates: (805) 893-4613