This article contains descriptions of allegations of sexual assault. Read the rest of GQ’s special report on Cornell here and here.
I grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, 10 minutes from frat row, a strip of filthy, dilapidated mansions long since demolished and bought by UMass. When I was a child, I went trick-or-treating there and received rolls of toilet paper for my trouble. Then, as a teenager, I went there because it seemed like a place where nobody would stop me from drinking, or otherwise try to protect me from anything. It was a kind of slumming, an escape to a decrepit environment mostly beyond the reach of the law. The first time I hung out with people who drank themselves sick, it was at a frat party. My first rock show and mosh pit too. Driving around town, my friends and I chauffeured hitchhiking frat boys from one party to another. The town was full of people who liked to criticize rich people, but frat boys and other students actually threw stuff at rich people. As a longstanding winter tradition, UMass students marched onto the campus of small, elite Amherst College, pelting students with snowballs, but also, reportedly one year with rocks, obliging Amherst College’s president, the following year, to threaten to call in the state police. But to me, their apparent lawlessness made them exciting, the local equivalent of Vikings.
Later, I wrote a book of short stories about frat boys, interviewing many of them in the course of my research. So when news spread that a woman had filed a civil lawsuit alleging a horrifying gang rape had taken place at the Cornell chapter of the Chi Phi fraternity in 2024, people asked me how such a thing might have happened.
Much of the Cornell affair is shocking. But it’s especially repugnant that the young men in question, who have denied wrongdoing, apparently wanted to have sex with a woman who was, according to the plaintiff’s account, so far gone on alcohol and ketamine that she could barely be considered conscious. “I was a sex doll for all intents and purposes,” Jane Doe told a police interviewer, according to reporting by The New York Times. Her intoxication, according to the lawsuit, was extreme. Indeed, it could have been a kind of coping strategy: “My thought was, if I do ketamine again, maybe I will pass out,” she’s reported to have told officials. And what was happening inside the minds of the men? The suit includes a photograph of a Snapchat group, where one of the brothers texted other active members to “pu” (“pull up”) for “free pussy.” What could make a man advertise an intoxicated woman’s body for the apparent purposes of sharing her with his male friends?
Since Jane Doe’s civil lawsuit was filed, much has been written about hazing rituals in general, which some pundits argue socialize members to be violent toward pledges, and women. But there is also a blend of homophobia and homoeroticism that has a long history in American fraternities. The anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday, in her 1990 book Fraternity Gang Rape, related the account from a woman who lived in a frat house for a summer and described a “circle dance” that took place, invariably, to the Doors’ song “L.A. Woman”:
