At Cornell University in 2024, a female student, identified in court documents as Jane Doe, accused seven young men in the fraternity Chi Phi of drugging and gang-raping her. The men denied wrongdoing during Cornell’s investigation, maintaining that the sexual activity was consensual; the allegations are now the subject of a criminal investigation. Some of these men, according to reports, were offered the opportunity to mitigate their punishment by writing essays.

What horrified the public was not merely the alleged gang-rape, but the upwards of 50 Chi Phi brothers who were reportedly alerted to it in their Snapchat group chat, and invited to partake in “free pussy.” “Shop still open?” one brother allegedly asked. Here, once more, was proof of what feminists were called fear-mongers for saying: that many men, for all their claims otherwise, still do not see women as equals, which is to say, as human beings. We have pounded on their doors, and just a few generations ago they let some of us into their clubs: admitted us into their schools, hired us into their workplaces. But not without mockery, not without harassment, not without routine sexual violence to warn us that we’re still, after all, in their house, on their terms. I have grown tired of waiting for boys to grow up. Instead of awaiting male repentance, or the end of the world – whichever comes first – what if we could tear their houses down?

The American university experience, for women of my generation, remains inseparable from the threat of sexual violence. For many, it is practically a coming-of-age rite. We all know the statistics. Maybe you, like me, are part of them: the one in five, or one in four, college women, depending on which source we cite. I think at least once a week about the ‘red zone’: the term for the first months of college, from the start of freshman fall through Thanksgiving break, where the majority of sexual assaults occur. As a concept, the ‘red zone’ takes my breath away: the open acknowledgement that the college learning curve involves violence for some, victimhood for others. If people in power were actually committed to ending sexual violence – which I am not, truthfully convinced they are –- they would challenge the structures that enable it, especially when men are young. Ending fraternities is an obvious, overdue step: they are a place of concentrated male power and minimal accountability, where boys control access to alcohol and parties and can use that power to exclude, exploit, and sexually assault women. 

“Ending fraternities is an obvious, overdue step: they are a place of concentrated male power and minimal accountability, where boys control access to alcohol and parties and can use that power to exclude, exploit, and sexually assault women”

Perhaps the Cornell case has given you war flashbacks to a different, widely-discussed campus sexual assault, at Stanford University in 2015. I attended college three years after Chanel Miller’s courageous testimony under the name “Emily Doe” went viral. I can quote passages of it by heart. I came of age during what Rebecca Solnit called the “insurrectionary year[s]” of the 2010s, amid mainstream conversations about sexual terror against women prompted by the Isla Vista shooting, Brock Turner’s case, the rising manosphere and the #MeToo movement. In the 2020s, we’re experiencing a backlash against feminism for going too far. As it turns out, we didn’t go far enough. The struggles of the 2010s raised awareness among women, prompted better sex education and conversations around consent. These were generous reforms, teaching men to consider, even prioritise, the needs of women – the kind of reparative work we’ll need if we are ever to accept women as meaningful, equal parts of civic life. But these reforms were not enough to challenge the power structure at the heart of male violence. The boys are too comfortable. There is power that grows and thrives in frat houses, boys’ clubs, their algorithmic echo chambers and YouTube channels. All the world is a locker room, the sort of place – to borrow Donald Trump’s 2016 defence of his Access Hollywood comments – where pussy-grabbing is dismissed as an everyday joke.

That is not, to be fair, how fraternities see themselves. If you asked a fraternity apologist, he’d presumably claim fraternities, far from being cesspools of male entitlement, are all about brotherhood: a site of “prestige” and “camaraderie,” as the professor Nicholas L. Syrett explains in The Company He Keeps, a history of white male fraternities. But this in-group of white boys, Syrett goes on to explain, defined their masculinity by excluding, in various decades, poor people, Catholics, Jewish people, Black people, women, then Asians and Latinos and everyone else, some of whom tried to create their own exclusive spaces, such as sororities and ethnic fraternities. 

Fraternities are, ironically, a safe space for men at a moment when gender itself feelsmore polarized and politicised than ever. Sometimes, rarely, I do feel for young men. Especially young men of colour, who find themselves increasingly represented in Greek life, and who made up almost half of the seven accused at Cornell. Sometimes I think of what the sociologist Erving Goffman wrote in 1963: “There is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports.” “Unblushing” is a charming way of describing the ability of men to carry themselves like the centre of the universe. But theirs is not the only universe, especially as women and queer people claim more space in public life. In such circumstances, do men need safe, protected spaces to be “unblushing?” 

“To challenge fraternities is to challenge the conception of American universities themselves, to ask who exactly they intend to serve. They were not built with most of us in mind, but they do not have to remain that way”

The problem is what certain fraternity cultures can make possible when that guard comes down. Frats, places where boys let loose on alcohol, can result in the obliteration of themselves and others. 2020, the pandemic year, was the first in decades that nobody died of hazing at an American university. Once upon a time, in an older America, in those wig-wearing, pot-shitting, slave-owning years when white men had their schools to themselves, fraternity manhood, as Syrett showed, could imagine itself intrinsically, humanistically, defined in opposition to “boyhood” and youth rather than marginalised communities. But that is no longer the case, and never actually was. We can see what happens when groups of young men build identities around hierarchy and exclusion. There is no fraternity today without the long lines of freshmen outside parties on Friday nights, waiting for someone to let them in. There is no fraternity without the opportunity to turn some of them away. The Cornell lawsuit describes the logical conclusion of that access and entitlement: an incapacitated woman’s body advertised in a fraternity group chat as openly free food. 

To challenge fraternities is to challenge the conception of American universities themselves, to ask who exactly they intend to serve. They were not built with most of us in mind, but they do not have to remain that way. We could commit to the process of democratising our institutions, our big shared house, which is supposedly the whole gist of America. It is time to abolish fraternities, a word I use intentionally, connecting it to movements to abolish slavery, prisons, and the police. Abolitionist movements share openly an uncomfortable idea: that justice does not mean diversifying or reforming unsafe spaces, but challenging their existence altogether. In doing so, abolition asks us to reimagine our idea of “safety.” In this case, safety does not lie in isolating women from men, allowing men to hoard power, or enabling cultures in which sexual violence can be minimised or concealed. A world without fraternities asks young men to live alongside their classmates as equals, not superiors. To look at us, every day, in our eyes. That is the whole point of college, a time of challenge and transformation — you come in as a child, you could leave as anybody at all. It’s a last line of defence before boys turn into men.