Seven Cornell Fraternity Brothers Are Accused of Rape. The Times Blames ‘Men in Groups.’

Do men in groups regularly commit sexual assault? Not in my experience. But one might come away thinking so from a guest essay in Tuesday’s New York Times, headlined “What Makes Men in Groups Behave So Badly?”

The author, Kate Manne, teaches philosophy at Cornell, and her subject is the Chi Phi Snapchat chat from the night of October 19, 2024, that has since gone public. More than fifty fraternity brothers were told there was “free pussy” upstairs. Somebody posted a devil emoji. Somebody else asked, “Shop still open?” Seven of those men are now accused of raping the woman in that room. They deny it. Nobody denies the chat, which is indefensible, disgusting, and entirely worthy of a thoughtful column.

As is often the case with columns, Manne’s essay is far more nuanced and careful than her headline. She writes about “many” all-male groups and describes a chain that starts with one entitled creep issuing an invitation. But the headline did emerge from one of her own paragraphs, and the rhetorical questions under it drop every qualifier. Run the same headline with any other group in the subject slot and one alleged crime as the proof. The Times wouldn’t touch it.

I came across the column because Joyce Carol Oates posted a link on X Tuesday, noting that it was “painful to read.” She added:

The proverbial “band of brothers” was supposed to be a strong emotional bond for positive, productive behavior like helping one another under fire in wartime, heroic selflessness, sacrificing one’s own safety for the good of others. but here, it is something of the reverse: literally “ganging together” against a helpless person regarded as an object.

She then asked a question the column completely overlooks: Is such behavior exclusively male? No, she concluded. She cited the seminal work of Stanley Milgram, which found no real difference between men and women willing to shock a stranger because a man in a lab coat said so. The lynching photographs from the early 1900s are full of women, some of them grandmotherly. Rape culture is male, Oates wrote. Ganging up on a helpless victim is not.

That’s a critically important distinction, and it lets a lot of air out of Manne’s argument.

Manne is absolutely right about the chat’s ugly, revealing nature. Nobody typed the word “no” in the published excerpts. There IS something about being in that group that made silence feel safe. She cites a former student, Diego Estrada, who ran a fraternity and effectively admits it. Asked what he’d have done that night, his first thought was whether he’d still be president.

I was in a fraternity in the late ‘80s, and I have mixed feelings about the experience. My father passed away Labor Day weekend of my freshman year, when I was a 17-year-old pledge, and I can decidedly say that the quasi-group therapy effect of male bonding and feeling part of a crew was remarkably important to me. I also saw firsthand the ill effects Manne wrote about, having once intervened in what started as a seemingly consensual group sex event with a woman and looked like it could easily have turned into a Chi Phi event. It did not. I’m not a hero; I’d long forgotten about it until recently and probably should have handled it better, but I did what I did.

Where Manne goes off track is the math. She cites a 2007 study that found men who join fraternities are three times as likely to commit a sexually coercive act as freshmen, a category that runs from unwanted touching to rape. From that she concludes fraternities “take men and turn them into rapists.”

That study’s author, John Foubert, said no such thing. He found fraternity men were more likely to offend, but he wanted a bigger sample because his came from first-year men at one mid-sized public university. No number is acceptable when it comes to the sexual assault of women. But three times a small number is still a small number, and most fraternity men never do this. Manne read a study about risk and wrote a column that assigns the guilt to an entire sex.

Manne concedes that Cornell’s ban on fraternity parties will probably work about as well as Prohibition did, then proposes a bigger ban: abolish all fraternities. What she fails to explain is why that wouldn’t just push the same behavior somewhere else. Most of her own examples of men ganging up on women have nothing to do with Greek life. Even Cornell’s president said the problem on his campus goes beyond fraternities.

There is a national discussion about whether fraternities should still exist, and that’s a healthy debate for us to have. I don’t personally believe all fraternities should be banned forever, but we need a nationwide reckoning that restates the moral rectitude so many of these institutions pledge to honor, but all too often fail in the worst and ugliest ways. If fraternities endure, they MUST be held to a much higher standard, one they fail all too often, at awful and unacceptable cost.