This article contains descriptions of allegations of sexual assault. Read the rest of GQ’s special report on Cornell here and here. 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.
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”: The song comes on and the brothers start yelling “Ho! Ho!” All the brothers link arms and join in a circle.
Then the whole circle moves around so fast that the shortest members are lifted off the ground. The “Ho!”s continue until the circle loses control and the entire group piles on top of each other, squashing the smallest members […] For a bunch of guys who were always so full of nasty, ugly, homophobic remarks, they seemed to enjoy jumping around on top of each other very much. In some cases, there have been homosexuality-detection rituals in fraternities that are not only implicitly anti-gay but deeply homoerotic.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
