The gang rape at Cornell University is what’s been in the headlines this past month. That’s not because a woman student there was gang-raped by seven men, but it is because the woman raped, Jane Doe, is suing the rich and famous University, revealing that it’s not the best place to send your children, especially your daughters. The headline of Moira Donegan’s column in The Guardian captured it exactly: “The horror of the Cornell rape case is how ordinary it is.”

Our current culture wallows in the hatred of women, among a list of others. It’s now cool to hate women loudly and proudly. It’s sport to degrade us via any media, it’s even OK to rape us and to limit our lives in any and every possible way. Rabidly misogynist “influencer” Nick Fuentes made this clear when he coined the phrase: “Your body my choice. Forever.” The Guardian reports another outrage: “The Trump administration has gutted Title IX protections…and limited the definition of what constitutes sexual harassment under it. Just this week [of Oct. 3], Trump announced that universities no longer have to investigate assaults on students that take place off-campus. (The Cornell case occurred at a frat house [off campus].)”

As evidence that frat boy attitudes become attitudes of predatory men in power, just look at Ohio Senate candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s gutter-level campaign ad dredging up the mother of his opponent, Amy Acton. Still in denial about the proven fact that Acton’s stepfather raped her as a child, the mother calls her a liar–and Trump and JD Vance defend the ad.

What was surprising was that the Cornell news created such an outpouring, because this happens ALL THE TIME. Every part of it: the cruelty, the lies, the poor investigation, the paltry sentences on the rapists, the threats to Jane Doe’s life for standing up for her rights, the absurd law which absolves the crime of rape, even gang rape, if the woman can be said to be willfully drunk. If a woman willfully got drunk and was robbed or run over by a car, the law would still go after the culprit. But rape? Clearly, she asked for it. And, after all, it’s only sex. What’s the big deal? Why ruin a boy’s future over that?

THE VICTIM IS BEING BRUTALIZED AGAIN

Jane Doe is in for a horrible trial where it will be she who is brutalized again. It’s already started: her home was swatted and police ended up pointing guns at her family. FOX news commentator Megyn Kelly, who seems to have forgotten how Trump made sexist remarks about her body, made fun of Jane Doe’s on air, and of course Doe’s email was hacked. Then Trump felt the need to pile it on, saying he feels “badly for whoever” State Attorney General of New York Letitia James is “looking at, because they won’t get a fair shake.” Yes, let’s worry about those poor boys that urged their fraternity brothers to get “free pussy” and their frat bros who asked is the “Shop still open?”

Importantly, two articles written by women students for their college papers, one from Yale and the other from Harvard, asked what would have happened if one of those 57 men on the fraternity’s snapchat had gone to that room and told the men there that what they were doing was a crime, a dehumanization, that they should stop immediately, and if they didn’t he’d call the police? Yes, indeed, why didn’t that happen?

Jessica Valenti put it this way in her blog: “That’s what makes the ‘not all men’ refrain so hollow: it doesn’t much matter if only a small number of men hurt women if the vast majority of ‘good’ ones are unwilling to do anything about it. That’s part of what’s driving women’s outrage right now. It’s not just the constant horror of explicit sexual assault. And it’s not just the institutional and systemic failures. It’s the men.”

‘IT’S THE MEN’

That’s part of what’s new about the aftermath of this particular gang rape. It wasn’t just the rapists, it was all those men, not just the ones that piled on, but the ones who stood by and did nothing. Nor was this the only example.

On Oct. 8 a woman was brutalized at a University of Chicago fraternity house in a bathroom. When the trapped woman’s friend went looking for her, she found “a small group of men cheering outside a locked bathroom door in the basement…” She said: “They were saying things like, ‘When’s it my turn’ and, ‘I want to go in there.’ ” Again, none of the men who knew what was going on did a thing to try to stop it. The friend had to fight them to get in the door, where she found her friend on the floor saying, “Make it stop” and “Get me out of here.” When the rapist fled, she chased him—by herself—while he maintained that “She wanted to.” Again, the dehumanization is contemptible.

‘CONSENT’ DOES NOT EXIST IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY

Non-stranger rape calls into question the whole concept of “consent.” Its meaninglessness has become clear. It will mean nothing until women have become free, and are comprehended as human beings. As long as women are told from birth who they are, who they should be, what their role is, rather than determining that for themselves, “consent” is just a lie.

It’s not just a lie for women, it’s everyone, it’s just worse for women. Sticking with fraternities, look at pledges who will literally kill themselves with alcohol and other means rather than stand up and say how dangerous and ridiculous the whole pledge ritual has become. Or what of the men who knew what was happening at Cornell and U of C was wrong but were afraid to come out and say it? When the whole society is telling you that you have to consent, it’s not consent.

Fifteen-year-old Lyric Brazell, a student at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago, where students walked out on Oct. 8 in protest over the Cornell rape, told Block Club Chicago: “I told my teacher and a friend [that I had experienced sexual harassment], but it didn’t really extend any further than that because I didn’t want to seem uncool or like I was exaggerating. That’s why a bunch of people don’t say anything. That’s why this is so important.”

IS THIS A TURNING POINT?

What’s happening now that gives hope that this rape may actually be a turning point when other brutal rapes in the past changed very little,¹ is that there is a new consciousness about the need for new human relationships. We see that in the realization that too many men don’t see women as human beings; the comprehension that they too are victims of a society that tells them what they should feel, who they should belittle and whose approval they should seek. There is a consciousness now—at least among women and some men—that something is terribly wrong with the human relationships in our whole society.

While women in other countries—India, Pakistan, Turkey, France, Ireland, Argentina—have taken to the streets in the thousands and for weeks after brutal rapes and femicides, that has not happened in the U.S. until this month in 2026.

Rallies, demonstrations, and school walkouts happened in over 40 states on Oct. 8 in more than 150 events. They were titled: #StopSexualViolence: From the Frat House to the White House National Day of Action. Large demonstrations took place from New York to Anchorage, Alaska. New York included one where over a thousand students, sexual abuse survivors, and others rallied. At Louisiana State University a woman who said she was raped by an LSU football player said: “LSU does really protect their athletes, especially their football players.” In fact almost all male athletes seem to have a get-out-of-jail-free or rather a never-go-to-jail-at-all-card for charges of rape. Students at Cornell didn’t wait for Oct. 8 to begin protesting.² Athena Holloway, who helped organize those protests, spoke out on Oct. 5, saying: “Hope is what allows us to imagine something better than what we have now. So it’s our responsibility to carry that hope forward, to turn it into movement.”

Lincoln Park High School student Bianca Guerrero, a freshman, expressed the same notion about the demonstration at her school. She said: “I think this is the kind of stuff that can change the world. If this inspires people around the world to do something similar, I think that’s really important.” She’s right. This is the kind of thought that can impel a movement. Now’s the time.

–Terry Moon for the
National Editorial Board of News and Letters Committees

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1 It isn’t as if outcries over horrible, even deadly rapes haven’t happened before, and many were thought to be a “turning point.” Remember the unconscious woman raped behind a dumpster by Stanford star swimmer Brock Turner? She wrote a terrific unprecedented statement about how that had ruined her and the judge gave Turner six months in jail so as not to have “a severe impact on him.”