The ‘Cornell 7’ and the problem with how to raise our boys
Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today.
“I’m building this carefully, and it will take time. I’ve already received names, photographs, documents, messages, and other information related to the case,” reads the website. “Before publishing those materials, I want to make certain that every identity is correct, every photograph is of the right person.”
The publisher of the above is former South Park writer Toby Mortion; the website is TheCornell7.org, a currently unpopulated site that awaits information about the young men now known by that label. The so-called Cornell 7 case — which exploded after a civil suit was filed in New York by a woman who was allegedly gang-raped at the university in 2024 — has gone unexpectedly viral over the past few days.
Actress Florence Pugh has written about it on Instagram, and then written again, accusing the site of censoring her post. AOC has spoken about it in Ithaca. Cornell released a milquetoast statement, then released another one pushing back against the idea that five out of seven of the men involved were asked to simply write essays. The Tompkins County district attorney, who originally declined to pursue the case as a criminal investigation, has now reopened it. And a Snapchat exchange allegedly from the night of the gang-rape has been acquired by CBS, which shows men asking each other, “Shop still open?” and replying, “Yea.” For the avoidance of doubt, the “shop” here was the drugged woman, and “open” meant available for rape.
The case has reignited conversations about rape culture and has prompted fury at misogynistic norms. It also feels depressingly familiar. I remember writing a similar piece about the Brock Turner case in 2016, when a promising Stanford swimmer — because aren’t they all promising young men? — was accused of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind a dumpster at a frat party. Turner was convicted, but not before his father spoke in support of him, using a sentence that is seared permanently into my memory: he was saddened that “20 minutes of action” would come to define his son's life.
Even after conviction, Turner served just three months in prison. His victim, Chanel Miller, later publicly gave up her right to anonymity and released a 2019 book titled Know My Name. And everything that she mentioned in that memoir made clear that she’s the one who’s been given a life sentence after “20 minutes of action,” not Brock.
Two of the men involved in the Cornell 7 case were expelled from university and their fraternity was permanently banned. The majority of those men, however, went on to graduate and many of them work in prestigious roles for high-profile companies (one of them, an employee since 2022, has just been fired by Wells Fargo.) The woman who accuses them of gang-rape dropped out after she reported the assault.
When I think about this case and the fact that I am now a woman raising a son in America, I feel like screaming into a pillow. I grew up in the not-very-distant time of “young girls who get in bad taxis end up getting raped” public service announcements on the subway and comparisons made between short skirts on teenage girls and unlocked doors on houses that invite burglars. I vividly remember a dinner at an ex-boyfriend’s house when his mother casually told me over spaghetti that girls who go out dressed a certain way shouldn’t “wonder why they get raped,” as though rape were a weather phenomenon one might get caught up in and not a criminal act with a human perpetrator.
In some ways, we’ve moved on. It’s nice to see Florence Pugh stating what should be obvious: that men need to talk about rape for us to stop it, rather than just women. We at least like to pretend that it’s men who are responsible when they rape people in public discourse in 2026. We are more likely than we were in 2016 to say that ask that men call out rape jokes and misogyny among themselves, to have the arguments at the dinner table, and so on. Because we know that misogyny festers among closed ranks, we know that trying to shut it down among those ranks is important. But unfortunately, simply stating that fact doesn’t necessarily make it likely to happen.
These closed rooms are clearly part of the problem: fraternities are a very American, very problematic part of the college experience, complete with military-style hazing, mafia-like internal processes, and bizarre, over-the-top performances of gender (the same goes for sororities.) Single-sex socialization has a lot to answer for, and sexist attitudes also fester in single-sex schools. And of course, now we have the manosphere: men who seek to tempt younger adolescents in with promises of domination over girls and women. Some of these men, like Andrew Tate and his brother, have international arrest warrants out for rape and human trafficking. Despite this, they still have huge online followings and high-profile followers.
What are the parents of the Cornell 7 thinking today? I keep thinking about it, but I can’t even bring myself to properly imagine. And I can’t tell you the number of men I spoke to while I was pregnant with my son who told me that they were either relieved they were having girls or sad that they were having boys, because they themselves believed that a boy would be a “nightmare” to raise. Implicit in these conversations was also the idea that the alternative to their nightmare vision of a boy was a pliant, sweet little daddy’s girl. Implicit, also, is the idea that the grown fathers are afraid of, or disgusted by, facets of their former adolescent selves. It’s easier to ignore that feeling entirely than it is to be forced to examine it by the appearance of a son.
Socially, the bar is still kept extremely low for boys and extremely high for girls.
Girls are said to be more socially and emotionally advanced and their impulse control is said to develop quicker, even though there’s no actual scientific evidence for this. Boys start out in school being told they’re behind, even though they aren’t. They are then soothed to the tune of “boys will be boys” when they act out, when they are aggressive or destructive, or when they get in fights with their peers. Meanwhile, girls are expected to behave like little adults, acting as diplomats in the home and in school, and told off harshly when they make silly, age-appropriate mistakes.
We then carry these expectations into adulthood, where women who cry are seen as manipulative, childish and disingenuous. Either that, or they’re seen as “too emotional” to lead a team or a country, while men who have aggressive outbursts avoid this label entirely, as if anger weren’t as much of an emotion as sadness.
I believe in the kind of parenting that holds your child to a high standard. I expect my son to be hardworking, to be kind and to be polite. I expect him to mix with girls and with boys, and not to see girls only as romantic prospects but as complete human beings. I also expect him to challenge authority — because telling your child not to blindly follow authority figures means that when the “authority” is a frat leader, they know that they’re still allowed to push back.
Unfortunately, authoritarianism and hero-worship among men has come back in fashion for a large section of the population. While Pete Hegseth postures about “war fighters” and invites Jake and Logan Paul to speak to the military, he also spends a lot of time talking about — and modeling — obsequious deference to a leader, no matter what that leader says. Watch any Oval Office announcement or go to any MAGA event and you’ll see the same careful deference, the same glorification of an army-style mentality that preaches following your superior over the top of the trench if he says so.
But teaching a child to blindly follow anyone is deliberately neutering them, and disempowering the people around them. You can’t expect the first time that they challenge authority to be when someone says something sexist at a party. Knowing how to recognize bullshit is a skill and it needs to be developed through years of talking about how everybody has the capacity to be wrong.
Obviously, this teaching is only useful if your son is “one of the good ones.” It’s also important to recognize that all of us have a capacity to be and raise people who do bad things. Because if we believe rapists are monsters, then we will never believe the images of the unnervingly sweet-looking young boys who wrote in a group chat about a woman like she had no humanity. We will, instead, say that the woman must be wrong, she must be lying; indeed, she must be the bad person herself for even implying that such nice young men might do such a thing.
There is no easy answer to a society that allows the Cornell 7 case to happen. If there were, I certainly wouldn’t be qualified to give it. But there are moments — at the dinner table with our sons; in school with them; over the phone with them at college — and spaces — fraternities; the military; campus police forces and university committees populated entirely or mostly by middle-aged men — that we clearly need to examine harder. Because vigilante online justice isn’t right and it isn’t good enough, and it’s a sad state of affairs when thousands of women across the world seem to agree that it’s all they really have.
