Cornell University's campus in Ithaca, N.Y. Lessons about consent are not nearly enough in a culture that views the degradation of women as a group bonding exercise, or the knocking-out of women as a source of pleasure, Rachel Giese writes.Lauren Petracca/Reuters
Rachel Giese is JOBFlocks’s Culture and Life Editor. She is the author of Boys: What It Means to Become a Man.
An acquaintance reached out shortly after the news broke that a young woman identified as Jane Doe was suing several entities, including Cornell University, the Chi Phi fraternity and seven members of Chi Phi, who she alleges raped her while she was intoxicated in October, 2024. Was I as furious as she was, my acquaintance asked. I’ve raised a son and wrote for more than a decade about masculinity and the rising backlash against gender equality. I answered her honestly: I feel hopeless.
There’s been some comfort, some sense of redemption, in the outcry over the alleged crime and the university’s negligence in addressing it: “I am Jane Doe” rallies at Cornell and at other schools; a swell of coverage about campus sexual assault following the dogged reporting of the Cornell Daily Sun; concerned dads posting videos teaching their sons about consent; bans on parties at fraternities.
But the Cornell case has sparked discussions about a form of sexual violence that is more pernicious than these protests and actions can address: group assault as ritual and the obliteration of women’s agency as a turn-on.
Cornell president faces angry faculty over school’s handling of sexual-assault allegations
In a Snapchat group, Chi Phi members shared a photo of Jane Doe, and one man wrote, “Like you can walk in and whip it out.” Later another asked, “Shop still open?” To the fraternity members, this was a game of group bonding: men performing for one another to demonstrate their manliness and loyalty. Jane Doe was reduced to a prop.
The Cornell case doesn’t just resemble other high-profile cases in which a group of men – frat brothers, hockey teammates – allegedly assault a woman while texting others to join and watch. It also has hallmarks of sleep rape, which was exposed through the trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men in France in 2024, on more than 200 counts of raping Mr. Pelicot’s then-wife, Gisèle, while she was drugged unconscious.
These horrors are not isolated acts. A CNN report from earlier this year uncovered an online network of millions of users creating and consuming “sleep content” of men engaging in sexual acts with women who appear to be unconscious. One site, hosting more than 20,000 such videos, had 62 million visits in February alone.
Lessons about consent are not nearly enough in a culture that views the degradation of women as a group bonding exercise, or the knocking-out of women as a source of pleasure. In these cases, it’s not that men didn’t have the language for consent, it’s that they didn’t want it in the first place. The annihilation of a woman’s humanity is the point.
Even the rise in consent videos, in which men film women saying they agree to sex, aren’t as much genuine efforts to have a caring conversation about boundaries and mutual fulfilment than they are cynical attempts to secure legal protection. And when sexual assault cases do go to trial, it’s much more likely that a victim will be challenged on her state of mind, her language, and her actions than the perpetrator will be on his.
The violence that met Jane Doe two years ago didn’t begin in that frat house. It began on a campus where more than 35 per cent of female students reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact that involved physical force, or threats of force, according to a 2024 poll. It began in a culture in which manosphere influencers, like self-proclaimed misogynist and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate and looksmaxxer Clavicular, who was recently charged with rape, drugging someone for sexual intercourse and procuring alcohol for someone under 21, have millions of young men following them. It began in a world in which AI and tech-enabled sexual violence like deepfake abuse is escalating and rarely prosecuted.
At a protest at Cornell, Professor Julia Chang quoted the work of the Black feminist scholar bell hooks to describe how sexual violence is a structural as well as individual problem. “Males as a group,” she said, “have and do benefit the most from patriarchy. But those benefits come with a price. In return for all the goodies men receive, they are required to dominate women.”
It’s heartbreakingly predictable that every step toward gender equality will be met with insistent backlash. And it’s not only a tragedy for girls and women, but for the boys and men growing up in a culture that still, in so many ways, teaches them that their manhood is so fragile that it must be maintained through denying the humanity of girls and women, and of themselves too.