Women everywhere are talking about Cornell. Why aren’t men?

A young woman. A group of young men. An institution that should have protected her. A society that blames her. The allegations of rape at Cornell University are maddeningly familiar—and so is the aftermath.

Last week, actor Florence Pugh shared a lengthy Instagram post about an alleged sexual assault at the Chi Phi fraternity house in 2024. She called out Cornell for “protecting” seven students, who are accused of drugging and raping a female student at a party. (According to documents obtained by The New York Times, only two of the seven young men were expelled. Others received lesser sanctions, ranging from suspension to being ordered to study sexual harassment and write “reflection papers.”)

Pugh’s anger, alongside an outpouring of emotion from women across the world, has turned this case into an international news story. All seven men have denied wrongdoing, and none have been criminally charged, but after the unnamed woman filed a civil lawsuit in September and accused Cornell of failing to hold those involved adequately accountable, New York state prosecutors have reopened the case.

On Instagram, Pugh said that this is a moment where women “need our men to be as horrified and as sickened as us.” But looking at my social feed, it’s been difficult to see much evidence of that. From the two female student journalists at The Cornell Daily Sun who broke the story about the lawsuit, to those who have drawn attention to it since, women’s voices have forced this story onto the news agenda, yet male content creators and celebrities have been reticent to do the same. As a journalist, I’ve found myself dismayed at the lack of coverage in men’s publications, which have a remit to cover modern masculinity. It shouldn’t be down to Pugh, or the many thousands of women who have posted about Cornell, to make people care about a story like this. Men can and should be contributing to the conversation, but so far, we’re failing to meet the moment.

When confronted with this type of story, I suspect that some men might be afraid of saying the wrong thing, or of making this “about them” at a time when so many women are sharing their own experiences. Switching to “listening mode” is an understandable reaction, but the unavoidable truth is that a story like this is about men. It’s about how they behave and permit their peers to behave. It’s about the fact that, if a woman ever gets too drunk or makes any of the silly decisions that are a rite of passage in youth, there are men who will take advantage of her. And even if she behaves perfectly, at all times, there will still be a situation where she finds herself at the mercy of a man—or a group of them.

Aside from a small minority of content creators, the silence from men online is both glaring and jarring at a time when misogynistic voices are so loud. Since the MeToo movement’s mainstream breakthrough in 2017, a wave of “manosphere” influencers have become a powerful presence on the internet. These grifters profit from peddling the narrative that it is men who are being persecuted and oppressed, with algorithms rewarding the most extreme content, beaming misogyny into the minds of young men. And they’re becoming more politically influential as the Trump administration openly courts their approval.

The Cornell story contains traces of the digitised world. CBS News obtained evidence of a Snapchat group chat where details of the alleged assault were advertised as it was happening. Dozens of fraternity members were sent disparaging messages about the young woman, advertising her body as “free” to use and even sharing a picture of her. Not a single one intervened.

Aside from a SMALL MINORITY of CONTENT CREATORS, the SILENCE from MEN online is both GLARING and JARRING at a time when MISOGYNISTIC VOICES are so LOUD.

As distressing as these details are, I think what’s most triggering is how old-school this all feels. The media spends a lot of time talking about how young men today are disillusioned with the economy and the changing expectations on them. However, the so-called Cornell Seven were privileged students at an Ivy League school that educates judges, business leaders, and politicians. The allegations paint a very recognisable picture of men acting with impunity, knowing that the levers of patriarchal power will shield them from consequences. It’s a story we’ve seen play out so many times, which has now been passed down to the generation who grew up in the aftermath of MeToo. And like clockwork, there are already voices blaming the accuser for putting herself in a compromising position, or for waiting almost three weeks to report the alleged assault (even though delayed reporting is statistically very common) It’s all so predictable.

As a gay man—and just to be clear, we do also contribute toward misogyny—I often think about the special bonds that we form with the women in our lives. At the deepest level, this derives from us both having to coexist in a world with men who might harm us. We both know what it’s like to modify our behaviour, to cautiously cross the street and turn our headphones off, to text each other that we got home safe. For me, though, the Cornell story underlines a key difference: the fear of being raped, which Pugh says lives in the body of women everywhere, is not a weight that I carry day-to-day.

These types of nuances are why it’s so important to really sit with a story like this and think about how it relates to your own life. In my social circle, I’ve been surprised by the number of my male friends—who skew younger, urban, and progressive—who tell me that they haven’t done the basic labour of actually reading the reports. This is an indictment of the current media landscape, where we’re fed enough snippets, infographics, and clips to feel like we know the full story. And it’s also another way that misogyny thrives—the tacit acceptance of it, as if it’s just something that happens that isn’t worth delving into or spending much time unpacking.

Social media doesn’t mirror real life, but it’s not totally disconnected from it, either. I know that it might seem childish to insist that men should be posting about this story, or that men’s magazines—which manage to publish several pieces whenever Timothée Chalamet slightly changes his hair—should be covering it. Yet the reluctance to so much as perform an interest feels even more damning when you consider that “speaking out” online is actually the easy part here. The far more difficult conversations need to happen in real life, where too many men still shy away from challenging misogyny. When there’s a personal cost involved—for example, calling out the guy in the friend group who makes misogynistic “jokes,” or the guy who everyone knows acts like a creep when he’s drunk—then the silence often becomes even louder, just like it was on the fraternity Snapchat group that night.

I know that there are many men who are truly sickened by this story, even if they aren’t posting about it on Instagram or talking about it with their friends. But the noticeable lack of public condemnation only gives more power to a type of prejudice that spreads through normalisation. In a situation like this, men saying nothing has the same function as saying “boys will be boys.” There is complicity in the silence.

Images: Getty Images

This article originally appeared on harpersbazaar.com/US in October 2026.

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