Men, we need to do better.
What the Fuck?
I typically try to stay out of politics with this page. But with the state of the world right now, I feel a responsibility to say it plainly: what the fuck.
Seven then-members of Cornell's Chi Phi chapter — the "Cornell 7" — are accused of drugging a fellow student with ketamine and gang-raping her for nearly four hours in October 2024. The chapter was shut down. Cornell's own Title IX process expelled two of the men, suspended two more, and cleared two others. The local DA declined to bring criminal charges in 2024. Two years later, after the survivor filed a civil lawsuit, that DA reopened the investigation and the case is headed to a grand jury — while the New York Attorney General now reviews how Cornell handled the whole thing in the first place.
That's not an isolated horror story. It's the tip of the iceberg. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 80% of sexual assaults against college students are never reported to police — a higher unreported rate than assaults against non-students. Separate research on campus sexual violence finds that roughly 1 in 8 students will experience some form of sexual violence during college, and nearly 1 in 3 undergraduate women will experience nonconsensual sexual contact before they graduate. Only a minority of survivors — about 30% of women and 18% of men — ever seek help from campus resources at all.
Sit with that. Four out of five college survivors decide it isn't worth reporting. What does that say about a culture, and a justice system, where the people who are supposed to protect you are the reason you stay quiet?
Chi Phi's mission statement says the organization exists "to build better men through lifelong friendships, leadership opportunities, and character development." Read that again next to everything above. That's not the profile you'd expect from men accused of doing this to another human being. Speaking from my own experience with fraternity culture in my short time at KU before I left for the Navy, I can say plainly that some of the most entitled, morally hollow people I've ever met wore Greek letters. I'm not saying every fraternity is like this — there are chapters that actually live out what they claim to stand for. But I've seen enough to know there's a real strain of entitlement running through parts of that world: a bunch of grown men who have never once been told "no" and never had to sit with the consequences of hearing it. We cannot keep accepting "these things happen" or "think about his future" as a response to what happened to her. There is no version of this where those men should be walking around free right now. The schools and the fraternities that claim these missions have to actually be held to them — not just when it's convenient, not just in a brochure.
This doesn't start and end with seven guys in their twenties. The fact that this keeps happening, case after case, campus after campus, points to something broken in the culture that produced them. These men acted like they were entitled to her body, and that entitlement doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from fathers who never taught them what consent actually means, or what it looks like to respect a woman as a full human being and not an object. It comes from a manosphere that feeds them exactly that message at scale — the Tate brothers, currently sitting in a Miami jail fighting extradition to the UK on rape and human-trafficking charges, and Braden Peters, the "looksmaxxing" influencer known online as Clavicular, currently facing rape charges after allegedly drugging and assaulting a 17-year-old girl. I'd bet money some of these men had that content in their feed. And it comes from the roughly fifty other "friends" who were reportedly in that house and did nothing. Every one of them carries a piece of what happened to her.
Which brings me to the part I actually have some authority to speak on: bystander intervention. In my friend group, we hold each other accountable — professionally, emotionally, morally. If someone's actions start drifting from who they claim to be, we say something. We don't let each other coast down a bad road, and it's not a big dramatic intervention every time — most of the time it's just one guy saying "hey, that's not you" before it becomes a pattern. That's the whole job. It's not complicated. Psychologists have a name for what happens when that doesn't exist: the bystander effect — the more people who witness something wrong, the less any one of them feels personally responsible for stopping it. Fifty guys in a house and not one of them broke that pattern. That's not an accident. That's the predictable result of fifty guys who never had anyone in their life teach them where the line is, or what it costs to look away from it. There should never be a question of right or wrong in a moment like that — and if there is, the failure happened years before that night did.
What this all comes down to, for me, is a failure of honor and integrity at every level. The fathers who never had the hard conversation. The fraternity and the school that apparently thought a written essay was an acceptable consequence for some of the men involved. A justice system where, nationally, roughly 4 out of 5 college survivors never even file a report because they don't expect it to matter. We need to do better than this, full stop. Men need to be held accountable regardless of their GPA, their "potential," or how upstanding they look on paper. This has to end, and it is on us — the men who didn't do this, who wouldn't do this — to be the reason the culture actually changes.
So here's what I'm asking of the men reading this: stand firm in what you know is right, even when it costs you a friendship. Be the guy in the group chat who says something instead of the guy who screenshots it later and does nothing. Make it socially unacceptable, in every room you're in, for anyone around you to talk about women the way this culture has trained so many men to talk about them. If our institutions won't hold this line — and right now, it's fair to say they haven't — then it falls to us to hold it ourselves, inside our own circles, starting now. To the men who let this happen by staying silent: you know who you are, and you have to live with that. And to everyone who's been affected by this, in any form — it is my mission, with this page, to help build men of honor and integrity again, because somewhere along the way, a lot of us clearly lost the plot.
