“Raise the son who gets the Cornell ‘free pussy’ group text and calls the cops,” was a version of the viral post that took hold of all my algorithms yesterday.
Sure. Yes. Of course.
But. Bear with me when I say: This is a breathtaking fallacy. This is the “I’m With Her” liberal version of the good guy with a gun fantasy. And this is going to be uncomfortable for anyone with a kid in a fraternity to hear: If your son finds himself in a group that would send a “free pussy” text, it’s too late. The group is the disease, the text is the symptom.
If the imagined Hero Son in this scenario is receiving this text, written out, in writing, by one of his friends, he is part of the insidious chokehold of college rape culture. And he will be in the same position as all 57 men who got the message and did nothing. Not because they ultimately stayed silent after wrestling with the horror of this grotesque misogyny from one of their brothers. Because they thought it was fucking funny and were fucking stoked.
There were 57 sons, 57 men on the group text. I’m going to say something about fraternity brothers that many of you will immediately begin to qualify with counter examples. No frat bro, not even “one of the good ones,” is calling the cops on his friends. No frat bro is in any way intimating that he in any way disapproves of anything his fellow frat bro says, no matter how racist or misogynistic or homophobic or outright fucking rape-announcing.
Here’s why.
If your son is getting the group text, he’s already within an outright sadistic ritual-bonded brotherhood of men who have seen each other puke naked in a basement while chanting three Greek letters until their voices went hoarse. He’s not going to blink twice when “free pussy” is written out in a group text because “free pussy” was the phrase this group felt comfortable enough to say amongst each other that they PUT IT IN WRITING.
“Raise the son who gets the ‘free pussy’ group text and says ‘Fuck this’ and calls the cops?” Game out that scenario. You raise a deep-cover sleeper cell agent you name Scott and teach him lacrosse and roid him up and send him to a D-1 school where he will PLEDGE loyalty to a keg-based brotherhood. He is accepted by the “free pussy” guys. They love him.
Then, after months of gaining their trust and infiltrating their home and parties and sharing meals with them and pissing himself laughing with them at their jokes and doing their coke and ketamine and drinking their alcohol and passing out on their couches and ignoring the stumbling women climbing up and down their stairs at night, one day he will get a TEXT. And this TEXT will make him rise up and turn his backwards trucker hat FRONTWARDS and wag his righteous finger to the heavens and recite bell hooks and pick up his phone and CALL THE POLICE to say, “Sirs, this is Agent Alpha. The boys are clowning. Take em down.”
The viral post, with which I heartily agree in principle, might as well say “Raise the son who kills baby Hitler.”
It bears repeating, when it comes to the “free pussy” group text: The group is the problem. The text is the symptom.
Raise the son who makes frat culture irrelevant. We need to raise a generation of sons who look at the blueprint of frat culture and laugh at those rapist losers. We need to raise a generation of sons that make the entire notion of fraternities obsolete.
The shift must be seismic for this campus rape cycle to end, and the good news is research has identified a clear problem with a practical solution if we are to pretend college campuses are places where not getting raped matters as much as male bonding. And it’s breathtakingly clear cut. We can abolish something that has an established track record of resulting in rapes: Fraternities, the socially condoned epicenters of college rape culture. Abolish frats.
“But it’s a brotherhood of friendship and service that has roots in tradition —” fuck you, Brendan, go play outside.
Fraternities are rape incubators and this is backed by hard, peer-reviewed evidence.
According to a longitudinal study by the NIH published in 2022 titled “Selection and Socialization Accounts of the Relation between Fraternity Membership and Sexual Aggression,” researchers found that frats cause rape.
Here’s the conclusion:
“Analyses revealed three key findings. Fraternity membership was prospectively correlated with sexual aggression in years one and two of college (socialization effect), controlling for selection effects, when the two prospective paths were constrained to be equivalent. Second, more frequent binge drinking and sociosexual attitudes prior to college prospectively correlated with an increased likelihood of joining a fraternity (selection effect), and both selection variables indirectly correlated with future sexual aggression via fraternity membership. Third, fraternity membership was associated with increased binge drinking and perceived peer sexual aggression (socialization effects).”
Another study, published in 2007, found that fraternity members are THREE TIMES as likely to rape as other men on college campuses. As brilliant writer Jessica Valenti put it in a Guardian article in 2014, “frat brothers rape 300% more.”
If your son is in the frat group text, your son is an accessory to a culture of sexual aggression, and we need to shift the culture for change to happen. Raise a generation of sons who understand these facts, these finding. Raise a son who wants nothing to do with this sociosexual repression inferiority complex chaos brotherhood of performative übermasculinity.
We cannot abolish straight men. There are good ones. Keanu Reeves. Mandy Patinkin. The elderly Ukrainian barber who cuts my son’s hair. And that’s it.
But we can do what universities in America will not do: Make fraternities memberless. In every sense of the term. Rape happens everywhere. But it happens in fraternities, just like the one at Cornell, a disproportionate amount. So as outlandish and killjoy as it sounds to single fraternities out this way, we need to collectively agree to single them out this way. Make this kind of poisonous, conquest-driven version of male friendship obsolete.
And it starts by making each kid know how the story ends. How that no matter how awesome they are at water polo or how much Natty Lite fucking slaps, the moment they set foot in a fraternity they are part of a huge fucking problem for women just like their mothers.
Women who went to a college that had a whole quad just for frats. Women who put on their light blue, sequined dress from Forever21 they bought just to go to their first real college party. Women who waited in line at the door in the freezing New England October, shivering because their roommate said not to wear a jacket, that it would just get lost. Women who got picked by the bouncer, a guy they knew from Poli Sci, a guy who made a stupid point about Hobbes earlier that afternoon. Women who, to this day, remember how the guy said “She’s a YES!” and how other frat members at the door cheered for them as they were allowed into the house, beaming, chosen, the prettiest they’d ever felt.
Women who walked into the house and the windows were covered in garbage bags and the whole room smelled like sweat and beer and Old Spice. Women whose friend, so beautiful in her black dress and black eyeliner that made her look like a French cat, was already inside, already drunk, and pulled them onto the dance floor. Women who watched their friend get taken away into the scrum, how there were suddenly five of them around her, cheering and jumping in place just like they’d cheered at the door. Women who shouted at the guys “WHERE ARE YOU TAKING HER?” and everyone laughed.
Women who tried to follow her, who pushed aside another guy they knew from their dorm, a nice guy, who gave them a look like “She shouldn’t have gone with them.” Women who drank the beer in the red cup and then drank the “jungle juice” the Hobbes guy from the door poured for them with a black plastic ladle, which struck them as domestic, sweet, Martha Stewart in a pit-stained Oxford and khaki shorts. Women who, minutes later, held the soaking wet arm of the couch when the floor started to wobble. Women whose lower back was held, cradled by Hobbes. Women who were asked, “You good?” and women who nodded, trying to seem good.
Women who smelled his neck, sweat, beer, Old Spice. Women who felt his hot breath on her neck, heard him panting in her ear. Women who panicked. Women who felt something they had not felt since they were a little girl when there was a sound in the closet in the night, the feeling that they did not know was happening, but whatever it was, they might die. Women whose adrenaline, somewhere deep from an ancestor, spiked. Women whose feet, in the cowboy boots their mother bought them, hobbled across the sticky floor, wrist pulled from behind, but the crowd the crowd the crowd the unst unst unst undulating crowd in the scattering lights delivered them to the door and not the stairs. The door and not the stairs.
Women who burst through the door into the same freezing air and as their knees fell to the grass in the middle of the quad with the house wobbling and pulsing behind her, women who wept, so tired, so angry, so alive.
Raise your son to know that.
"If your son finds himself in a group that would send a “free pussy” text, it’s too late." Exactly this.
This is so perfect that it's breaking my heart.