The World Is a Frat House and We Are All Jane Doe

There’s a lot of righteous anger right now towards fraternities and it was long overdue. Some of the greatest feminist voices I follow and respect are calling for reforming frat houses, others are calling for abolishing them altogether. As Celeste Davis argues, none of the frat reformation solutions are going to work. Or, as Kate Manne argues even more straight to the point, just ban the fucking frats.

Rape on campuses is an age-old problem that keeps returning to the public eye every now and then, although sadly only when a particularly egregious incident happens to make it to virality. Ms. Magazine first published a report about it 41 years ago, discussing the phenomenon of date rapes. The time that passed only made the problem worse, because now it’s not only date rapes, it’s also gang rapes. Just as misogyny overall has only gotten worse and more virulent. Thanks, pornography and manosphere.

The fraternity house is actually a very useful vehicle when you are trying to understand patriarchy. Strip away the quasi-respectable language, put a group of young men in a house together, give them a hierarchy, a reputation to protect, a private social world largely organized around other men, and then watch what happens when a woman’s safety collides with the interests of the group. The architecture of patriarchal entitlement in all its brutality becomes unusually easy to see.

That is why the details surrounding Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity have produced such an intense reaction. A student identified as Jane Doe alleges that she was drugged and sexually assaulted by several fraternity members in 2024. She later filed a civil lawsuit naming seven fraternity members, Cornell, the fraternity, a local bar and her sorority. The criminal investigation, which initially did not result in charges, has now been reopened, with New York Attorney General Letitia James appointed special prosecutor. The men accused have denied wrongdoing, because of course they did. And the sexist corners of the internet are having a field day victim-blaming, of course.

But the part that interests me most is what happens when we zoom out of the particular case.

And once you understand that, you start seeing the same architecture everywhere.

The frat house is only the miniature

We tend to talk about sexual violence as though the central problem is the existence of individual men who are unusually dangerous.

There are, of course, individual perpetrators. Some men drug, assault, rape women. Some men deliberately exploit intoxication or vulnerability. Those men are responsible for what they do.

But the rapist is an individual. Rape culture is collective.

A sexual assault does not happen in a social vacuum. There are people who know the perpetrator. There are people who hear things during or afterward. Sometimes, there are 57 men present in the group chat where the rapists are advertising ‘free pussy’ and inviting more to join in and not one of them calls the police or says anything mildly critical.

There are people who see something happening and decide whether to intervene, and more often than not, they don’t. There are people who decide whether the woman is believable, and more often than not, they think she’s not. There are people who decide whether she is going to become a problem for the group. There are institutions deciding whether the incident is going to become a scandal.

And those people don’t have to rape anyone themselves to become part of the environment that protects rape. This is why I find the endless discussion of whether ‘all men’ are violent so politically useless. Sure, maybe all men aren’t rapists. But what matters is what men do when another man’s behavior threatens a woman’s safety.

Do they interven