By Dr. Brown
Content note: This article discusses sexual assault and sexual coercion.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the Cornell 7.
Partly because I’m a clinical psychologist and certified sex therapist. Partly because I’m a woman. And partly because I have my own history of sexual assault.
So yes, this one hits close to home.
But I don’t want to write another article explaining to women why we’re angry, scared, disgusted, or triggered by this story.
Women know.
I want to talk to men.
Not to tell you that you’re responsible for what happened at Cornell because you’re a man.
And not to reassure you that you’re one of the good ones because you believe you would never do something like this.
I want to ask something much more useful:
What does it actually mean to be a safe man?
Because I don’t think “I would never rape someone” answers that question nearly as completely as we like to think it does.
What happened at Cornell should horrify us.
A former Cornell student has accused seven members of Chi Phi fraternity of drugging and sexually assaulting her in 2024. Her civil lawsuit describes hours of sexual violence while she was severely intoxicated and includes messages from a fraternity group chat in which men discussed sexual access to her and invited others to participate.
A criminal court has not determined the guilt of the seven men named in the lawsuit, and several deny wrongdoing. The district attorney initially declined to prosecute and has now reopened the investigation and said the case will be presented to a grand jury.
That is the legal status of the case.
It does not mean there is no evidence.
There are messages. There was a university investigation. There were disciplinary findings and sanctions. The lawsuit says some consequences included essay writing, while Cornell says essays were not anyone’s sole consequence and confirms that suspensions and expulsions also occurred.
We can accurately describe what has and has not been established without pretending that the only intellectually responsible reaction to what has become public is emotional neutrality.
What we have seen is fucking horrifying.
And it exists within a much larger problem.
In Cornell’s own 2025 survey, 35% of undergraduate women who responded reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact during their time at Cornell. Among Greek-affiliated undergraduate women who responded, the figure was 52%. Cornell appropriately cautions that the survey had a low response rate, meaning those percentages cannot simply be generalized to every Cornell student.
But zoom out beyond Cornell and the picture doesn’t become particularly comforting.
National data tell us sexual violence is common. Approximately one in five U.S. women has experienced rape in her lifetime, and broader definitions that include sexual coercion and unwanted sexual contact capture even more women.
So when women react viscerally to a story like this, it isn’t because we have suddenly discovered that sexual violence exists.
For many of us, the story is horrifying because we already knew.
The poisoned doughnut analogy doesn’t go far enough
There’s an analogy I like to use to explain why “not all men” isn’t particularly reassuring.
Imagine someone gives you a box of doughnuts.
They tell you some are poisoned.
Most aren’t.
But they can’t tell you which ones.
Technically, “not all doughnuts are poisoned” is completely true.
It also doesn’t make you particularly eager to take a bite.
The analogy is usually about uncertainty: women cannot look at a man and know with certainty whether he is safe.
But I think Cornell exposes a bigger problem with the analogy.
We’re not only worried about which doughnut contains the poison.
We’re watching what all the other doughnuts do while someone is being poisoned.
Will one warn you?
Will one stop it?
Will one get help?
Will one believe you when you say something is wrong?
Or will it watch?
Laugh?
Stay quiet?
Decide it isn’t its business?
Explain afterward that the poisoned doughnut is actually a really good guy?
Tell you that you’re overreacting?
Ask whether you’re sure you didn’t knowingly eat the poison?
That is where the metaphor stops being funny.
And that is where the definition of a “safe man” gets considerably more complicated.
Safety is bigger than “I didn’t do it”
Most of our conversations about sexual violence focus on two people: a perpetrator and a victim.
Real life happens in social systems.
There are friends.
Roommates.
Fraternity brothers.
Coworkers.
Teammates.
People at the party.
People in the group chat.
People who see someone becoming dangerously intoxicated.
People who hear the joke.
People who notice the interaction getting uncomfortable.
People who know their friend has a history of pushing boundaries.
People who get a weird feeling and decide they don’t want to get involved.
Those people matter.
Research on bystander intervention backs this up. People are more likely to intervene when they believe their peers would support intervention. Fear of social consequences, including being seen as a “snitch” or ruining another man’s sexual opportunity, can make intervention less likely.
The good news is that bystander behavior can be taught. Programs designed to help people recognize risky situations and intervene have been shown to improve actual bystander behavior.
In other words:
Men can make other men safer.
And men can make environments safer.
That requires more than personally abstaining from sexual violence.
It means being willing to become inconvenient.
Sometimes being a safe man means making another man uncomfortable.
It means saying:
She’s too drunk.
Back off.
That’s not funny.
Why are you talking about her like that?
I’m checking on her.
No, I’m not leaving her here.
What the fuck are you doing?
It means risking being called dramatic, whipped, soft, a cock-block, a snitch, or whatever other insult gets deployed when a man violates the social agreement to protect another man’s access to a woman.
If women’s safety disappears the moment protecting us becomes socially uncomfortable, that isn’t much safety at all.
Now for the harder question
There is another reason I don’t want to divide men neatly into Rapists and Good Men.
That binary lets too many people stop thinking.
Research on sexual perpetration has repeatedly found a gap between behavior and labels. In one line of research, roughly 1% of respondents acknowledged perpetrating “rape,” while behaviorally specific questions identified rape-consistent behavior at substantially higher rates.
That finding matters.
Because someone can sincerely think:
I have never raped anyone.
And never ask:
Have I ever behaved sexually in a way that violated someone’s autonomy?
Those are different questions.
So I want to ask men something uncomfortable.
Not as an accusation.
As an inventory.
Have you always treated another person’s sexual autonomy as more important than getting what you wanted?
Have you kept asking after someone said no?
Have you tried again ten minutes later?
Have you interpreted the absence of a forceful “no” as a yes?
Have you continued when someone became quiet or still?
Have you assumed that because someone came home with you, got naked, or started having sex, they had agreed to everything that followed?
Have you initiated sex with someone whose intoxication should have made you stop and check?
Have you gotten angry after being rejected?
Sulky?
Cold?
Withdrawn?
Have you made a partner feel guilty because it had “been too long”?
Have you acted as though being married or partnered gave you some degree of entitlement to sex?
Have you made your disappointment unpleasant enough that saying yes became easier than continuing to say no?
Have you ever looked back on a sexual experience and realized that the other person was considerably less enthusiastic than you wanted to believe at the time?
If one of those questions makes you uncomfortable, stay there for a minute.
You don’t have to immediately decide you’re a monster.
You also don’t get to make the discomfort disappear by deciding you’re a good person.
Look at the behavior.
That’s how people change.
Because consent isn’t a personality trait.
Neither is safety.
“But she didn’t say no”
This deserves its own conversation.
Human beings do not respond to threat exclusively by fighting or running away.
Freezing is real.
Tonic immobility, an involuntary state involving fear and inability to move or speak, is well documented in sexual-assault research.
Someone becoming still is not evidence that everything is fine.
Someone failing to fight you off is not evidence of desire.
Someone going quiet is not enthusiasm.
And someone consenting to one sexual act has not consented to every sexual act that might follow it.
This is why good sexual ethics require more than searching for the technical absence of a “no.”
You should care whether the person you’re touching is actually with you.
Participating.
Responsive.
Comfortable.
Choosing.
Because if your standard for sex is “Well, they didn’t stop me,” we have a much bigger problem than vocabulary.
And then there is what happens afterward
Let’s say you have examined all of that and feel confident:
I have never sexually violated someone.
Good.
We’re still not finished talking about safety.
Because now I want to know what happens when a woman tells you that somebody else did.
Does she get:
Jesus Christ. I’m so sorry.
I believe you.
Are you safe?
What do you need?
Or does she get an investigation?
How much had you been drinking?
Why did you go upstairs?
Why didn’t you leave?
Why didn’t you scream?
Why didn’t you report it immediately?
Are you sure that’s what he meant?
He’s always been nice to me.
That doesn’t sound like him.
There are situations where evidence needs to be investigated and facts need to be established.
Your partner crying in your kitchen is not a courtroom.
You can emotionally support someone without appointing yourself judge and jury.
And sometimes the invalidation is much smaller.
A woman tells you the Cornell story is frightening and you immediately remind her that most men aren’t like that.
She tells you she’s uncomfortable walking somewhere alone and you explain why the neighborhood is statistically safe.
She says a man was creepy and you point out that maybe he was just being friendly.
She says she’s scared and you start debating whether she should be.
Maybe you’re right.
Maybe she isn’t objectively in danger.
But you’ve just taught her something anyway.
When I feel unsafe, this person may need me to prove it before he’ll help me feel safe again.
That matters.
No, emotional invalidation is not the same thing as sexual assault.
Of course it isn’t.
But if we’re asking what makes someone feel safe enough to be deeply vulnerable with another human being, emotional responsiveness matters.
A lot.
This follows women home
This is where my sex-therapist brain enters the conversation.
I work with couples who genuinely love each other.
The male partner may be kind. Attentive. Nonviolent. Faithful. Loving.
And his female partner still cannot seem to completely let go during sex.
Sometimes she doesn’t initiate.
Sometimes desire disappears halfway through.
Sometimes she needs a tremendous amount of emotional connection before sex sounds remotely appealing.
Sometimes she freezes.
Sometimes she can’t explain why her body seems to be saying no when cognitively she knows:
I love this person.
I trust this person.
This person would never rape me.
And understandably, her partner can feel confused or rejected.
But sexual desire doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
One useful model in sex research describes sexual response as involving both excitation and inhibition. In plain English, your brain has things that press the sexual accelerator and things that press the sexual brake.
Context matters.
Stress matters.
Relationship dynamics matter.
Feeling watched, pressured, disconnected, resentful, overwhelmed, or unsafe can matter.
And sexual vulnerability is extraordinarily vulnerable.
You’re naked.
Someone has access to your body.
You’re allowing yourself to become absorbed in sensation.
You may close your eyes.
You may relinquish some control.
You are trusting another person to notice your responses and care about them.
So yes, a woman can know that her partner would never assault her and still have a nervous system that has learned to maintain some degree of vigilance around sexual vulnerability.
Especially if she has been assaulted before.
Especially if she has been pressured before.
Especially if she has watched what happened when other women spoke up.
Especially if the man she loves tends to debate her feelings instead of reassuring her when she’s afraid.
That doesn’t mean every woman with low desire is traumatized.
It doesn’t mean every sexual problem in a heterosexual relationship is men’s fault.
And it certainly doesn’t mean a loving male partner is responsible for violence committed by other men.
It means something much simpler:
Sexuality has context.
And women do not enter relationships without one.
Women have been collecting data our entire lives
We learned which parking garages to avoid.
We learned to watch our drinks.
We learned to text when we got home.
We learned to walk each other to cars.
We learned to pretend we had boyfriends.
We learned that sometimes mentioning another man’s ownership of us worked better than simply saying we weren’t interested.
We learned to smile while rejecting someone because anger might make him angry.
We learned that being rude could be dangerous.
We learned that being nice could be interpreted as interest.
We learned to check the back seat.
We learned to share locations.
We learned to make sure our friend didn’t leave with that guy.
And some of us learned much worse lessons firsthand.
Then we watched what happened when women told.
Who believed them.
Who didn’t.
Who asked what they were wearing.
Who asked why they drank.
Who worried about ruining his future.
Who remained friends with him.
Who said he had always seemed nice.
Who said there were two sides to every story.
Who simply didn’t want to get involved.
So when a man says:
“But I’m safe.”
He may genuinely mean:
I would never intentionally hurt you.
And she may genuinely believe him.
But her definition of safety may be asking considerably more.
Will you notice when I’m uncomfortable?
Will you care before I can perfectly explain why?
Will you stop if my body changes even if I haven’t found the words yet?
Will you believe me when another man scares me?
Will you protect my humanity when there is nothing in it for you?
Will you challenge another man when I’m not even in the room?
Will you still be safe when being safe costs you something?
Those are different questions.
So let’s talk about “not all men”
Yes.
Not all men sexually assault women.
But if that is where the conversation ends, we have learned almost nothing.
The relevant question isn’t whether every man is poison.
It’s whether women can reliably know which men will hurt us, which men will enable the men who hurt us, which men will stay silent, which men will minimize it afterward, and which men will actually help make us safer.
When women talk about that fear and a man responds:
“Not all men.”
the conversation suddenly requires the woman to reassure him.
No, no. I don’t mean you.
I know you’re different.
I know most men are good.
Now the person expressing fear is managing the feelings of the person who wants distance from the thing she’s afraid of.
That’s why the phrase lands so badly.
It answers:
“Am I personally a bad man?”
when women are asking:
“Can I count on men to help make us safer?”
Those are not the same question.
Safety is something you do
This is ultimately why I am writing this to men.
Not because I think every man is dangerous.
And not because I think declaring yourself one of the good ones accomplishes very much.
I think men have tremendous power here.
You create safety when you care whether your sexual partner is enthusiastically participating rather than merely not stopping you.
You create safety when “no” doesn’t have emotional consequences.
You create safety when hesitation makes you curious rather than persuasive.
You create safety when you notice intoxication and choose protection over opportunity.
You create safety when you interrupt the conversation.
When you call out the friend.
When you don’t laugh.
When you check on her.
When you make sure she gets home.
When you refuse to participate in the group chat.
When you refuse to let everyone else pretend they didn’t see what they saw.
You create safety when a woman tells you something frightening and you resist the urge to explain why she shouldn’t be frightened.
You create safety when a survivor tells you what happened and your first concern is what she needs, not whether you have enough evidence to issue a verdict.
You create safety with your partner every time you show her that her boundaries, anger, fear, pleasure, hesitation, and vulnerability can exist without becoming something she has to manage for you.
And sometimes creating safety means looking honestly at your own past behavior and realizing:
I don’t like what I did there.
Then taking responsibility.
Learning.
Changing.
Repairing where repair is appropriate and wanted.
And becoming safer.
That possibility matters to me.
Because if our only framework is good men versus monsters, everyone who doesn’t identify as a monster gets to stop examining himself.
And women cannot afford that.
The question I want men to leave with
If your reaction to the Cornell case is:
I would never do something like that.
I hope you’re right.
But I don’t think that’s the most important question this story asks of you.
Ask yourself:
Have I always treated another person’s sexual autonomy as more important than getting what I wanted?
Would I intervene if another man didn’t?
Would I believe a woman I love before she could prove every detail?
Would I challenge another man if doing so cost me socially?
Does my partner experience me as emotionally safe when she’s afraid?
Am I still safe when safety requires something from me?
Those questions are harder.
They’re also much more useful.
Because women cannot solve sexual violence by becoming increasingly skilled at avoiding it.
We cannot perfectly identify dangerous men.
We cannot dress correctly enough, drink carefully enough, communicate clearly enough, watch our cups closely enough, travel in large enough groups, share enough locations, or learn enough self-defense to eliminate the risk.
And we should never have been assigned that job in the first place.
We need men in this with us.
Not defensively.
Not performatively.
Actively.
Because being a safe man isn’t something you declare about yourself.
It’s something the people around you learn through what you repeatedly do.
Sources:
- Associated Press. (2026, September 30). New York Gov. Hochul pushes for investigation into Cornell’s handling of a 2024 gang rape allegation. Associated Press.
- Cornell University Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault. (2026). Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault: Final report. Cornell University.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024). Appendix: Measures of sexual victimization. Sexual Violence Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.
- Mujal, G. N., Taylor, M. E., Fry, J. L., Gochez-Kerr, T. H., & Weaver, N. L. (2021). A systematic review of bystander interventions for the prevention of sexual violence. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 22(2), 381–396. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524838019849587
- Anderson, R. E., Doctor, H. N., & Piggott, D. M. (2023). Measuring sexual violence perpetration acknowledgment: Testing the effects of label and response format. Aggressive Behavior, 49(5), 499–508. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.22086
- Marx, B. P., Forsyth, J. P., Gallup, G. G., Fusé, T., & Lexington, J. M. (2008). Tonic immobility as an evolved predator defense: Implications for sexual assault survivors. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 15(1), 74–90. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2850.2008.00112.x
- Janssen, E., & Bancroft, J. (2023). The Dual Control Model of Sexual Response: A scoping review, 2009–2022. The Journal of Sex Research, 60(7), 948–968. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2023.2219247
- Bhuptani, P. H., Mayer, E., Chan, G., & Orchowski, L. M. (2024). Child sexual abuse, adolescent/adult sexual violence, and sexual functioning among college women: A systematic review. BMC Global and Public Health, 2, Article 29. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44263-024-00060-7