The Boys We Refuse to Raise: Cornell and the Myth of the Rite of Passage

The Boys We Refuse to Raise

This month, a former Cornell student filed a civil lawsuit alleging that seven Chi Phi fraternity members drugged and sexually assaulted her in 2024. The university has disputed claims that the accused students were merely assigned essays as punishment, noting that its disciplinary process also resulted in suspensions and expulsions. The criminal investigation has since been reopened, and Governor Kathy Hochul has called for an independent review of Cornell's handling of the case.

The courts will determine what happened and who is legally responsible. But there is a larger question the courts cannot answer for us:

What kind of boys are we raising, and what kind of men are our institutions helping them become?

Whatever the outcome of this particular case, the cultural conditions around it are painfully familiar.

And they did not begin inside a fraternity house.

The initiation we keep mistaking for manhood

For generations, certain male spaces have sold young men a counterfeit version of masculinity.

Endure humiliation. Drink until you cannot think. Prove you can tolerate pain. Prove you are sexually dominant. Prove you will protect the group.

Never embarrass another man.
Never betray the brotherhood.
Never be the one who says, This has gone too far.

We call these rituals bonding, tradition, brotherhood, boys being boys.

Psychologically, something much more consequential can be happening: a young man is being taught to outsource his conscience to the group.

He learns that belonging depends on compliance rather than character. His moral compass becomes relational: If the men around me approve, perhaps it cannot be that wrong.

That is not maturation.

It is regression.

Healthy development requires differentiation—the ability to stay connected to other people without surrendering your values, judgment, or humanity to them. Adulthood means being able to stand inside a group and still say no.

No, I will not humiliate him.
No, I will not touch her.
No, she is too intoxicated.
No, this is wrong.
No, I do not care if all of you are doing it.

A man who can only find his courage when surrounded by other men is not powerful.

A man who loses his conscience when surrounded by them is dangerous.

When brotherhood becomes shared moral escape

Wrongdoing committed collectively has a particular power.

Alone, a person has to confront himself. Inside a group, responsibility gets diluted.

Someone else started it. Everyone was laughing. Nobody stopped it. It seemed normal at the time.

When everyone carries a fragment of responsibility, each person can convince himself he carries very little.

That is one of the darker functions of group complicity: it does not only distribute harm. It distributes guilt.

The group becomes a psychological shelter from conscience.

Afterward, silence becomes another initiation. Now everyone knows something about everyone else. Loyalty is no longer built on mutual respect but on mutually protected transgression:

I protect you because you can expose me. You protect me because I can expose you.

The group calls it brotherhood.

But brotherhood built on the degradation of someone outside the group is not brotherhood.

It is complicity with a dress code.

The masculinity of arrested development

We often describe young men who behave destructively as though they simply lack discipline.

Sometimes the problem goes deeper.

A person cannot develop psychological adulthood if everyone around him keeps shielding him from the emotional consequences of his behavior.

Accountability does something developmentally essential.

It forces us to encounter guilt and tolerate shame without falling apart. It teaches us that another person's pain exists independently of our intentions, that we must repair rather than defend, and that wanting something does not entitle us to it.

These are not punishments inflicted on a developing person.

They are development.

When parents, schools, coaches, fraternities, athletic programs, or universities repeatedly rescue boys from consequences, they interrupt that process.

The boy grows older. His résumé expands. His access to power increases.

But emotionally, he can remain remarkably young.

A child asks, How do I get out of trouble?
An adult asks, What did I do? Who did it affect? What am I responsible for now?

Those are very different questions.

Shame that is never metabolized gets handed to someone else

Healthy masculinity requires the capacity to feel vulnerable without converting that vulnerability into domination.

For some boys, vulnerability is treated as intolerable almost from the beginning.

Fear, sadness, and tenderness are coded as weakness. Being corrected feels like emasculation. Being told no feels like an injury to the self.

So the young man learns to evacuate those feelings somewhere else.

Fear becomes aggression.
Shame becomes contempt.
Rejection becomes conquest.
Insecurity becomes sexual performance.
Vulnerability becomes control.

And women can become the screen onto which all of those unwanted feelings are projected.

This is why conversations about masculinity cannot stop at teaching boys to "respect women."

We have to teach boys to tolerate themselves: disappointment, embarrassment, not being chosen, sexual frustration, and the word no without experiencing it as annihilation.

A person who cannot tolerate his own vulnerability will eventually look for somewhere to put it.

Power gives him somewhere.

Privilege can protect immaturity long enough for it to become authority

The stakes rise when entitlement is combined with status.

Wealth insulates. Prestige insulates. Athletic talent, family connections, and an elite education insulate.

A promising future can become something everyone around a young man feels obligated to protect—even when protecting his future comes at the expense of someone else's present.

This is where institutional responses matter enormously.

The message young people receive is not contained only in a policy handbook.

It lives in what happens after the policy is violated.

Whose future becomes precious?

Whose credibility gets interrogated?

Whose suffering becomes inconvenient?

Who receives compassion, and who receives scrutiny?

Institutions raise people too—not the way families do, but through what they reward, excuse, punish, ignore, and protect.

Sometimes they teach accountability.

Sometimes they teach that enough status can turn consequences into negotiations.

And too often, at the center of these cases is a young woman forced to spend years fighting to be heard while institutions debate how much accountability might cost the men accused of harming her.

The enablers closest to home

This is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable, because patriarchy has never been maintained by men alone.

That does not make women responsible for male violence. Responsibility for harm belongs to the person who causes it.

But systems survive because people participate in them—sometimes consciously, often not.

And sometimes the earliest person teaching a boy that male discomfort must be protected at all costs is a woman.

Sometimes it is a mother who learned in her own childhood that challenging men was dangerous, or whose survival depended on keeping men calm, pleased, and unchallenged.

Sometimes it is a mother who has organized her identity so completely around her son that any criticism of him feels like criticism of herself.

She may recognize misogyny perfectly well when it is directed at her and become unable to see it in the boy she raised.

This is one of patriarchy's most painful repetitions:

Women who once had to silence themselves can become women who teach other women to be silent.

"Don't ruin his future."
"He made a mistake."
"She was drinking too."
"Why was she out so late?"
"He's a good boy."

Perhaps he is.

But good boys do not become good men because we keep telling them they are good.

They become good men because we expect goodness to require something of them.

Character is not what a parent declares about a child.

It is what that child learns to do when desire conflicts with conscience.

Loving a son cannot mean protecting him from every consequence.

Sometimes loving him means refusing to help him escape himself.

We have confused protection with love

If every teacher is wrong when your son is disciplined, every coach unfair when he is benched, every girlfriend crazy when the relationship ends, and every accusation impossible because you know your son, what exactly are you teaching him?

Not confidence. Omnipotence.

You are teaching him that accountability is persecution, criticism is an attack, women who confront him are enemies, and someone else will always clean up the emotional, relational, and sometimes legal debris he leaves behind.

Then we act surprised when a 20-year-old treats other people's boundaries as negotiable.

But perhaps that lesson began much earlier, when every boundary placed around him became something another adult helped him negotiate away.

Boys do not need harsher masculinity. They need deeper masculinity.

The answer is not raising boys to be tougher.

We have done enough of that.

We need to raise them to be whole.

A psychologically mature man does not need to dominate someone to know he has power or humiliate another man to know he belongs.

He does not experience empathy as weakness.

He can feel shame without collapsing into rage.

He can hear no without hearing humiliation.

He can leave the room.
He can call for help.
He can be the one who ruins the "fun."

He can risk being mocked by the group because there is something inside him stronger than the group's approval:

A self.

That is manhood.

And none of it is handed to you in a basement initiation.

The rite of passage we actually need

Perhaps we have been thinking about rites of passage backward.

The real rite of passage is psychological:

Can you govern yourself when nobody is watching?
Can you protect someone when it costs you social status?
Can you challenge your friends and tolerate being disliked?
Can you sit with the shame of harming another person without turning yourself into the victim?
Can you repair what you damaged?
Can you choose conscience over belonging?

We have to stop calling cruelty tradition.

We have to stop calling silence loyalty.

And we have to stop protecting boys so fiercely from consequences that we deprive them of the very experiences capable of turning them into men.

Because the boys we refuse to hold accountable do not remain boys.

They become physicians, executives, attorneys, professors, coaches, politicians, husbands, and fathers.

They gain authority over other people's careers, bodies, and lives.

And by then, the question is no longer how we raised them.

It is what the rest of us will have to survive because we refused to.

I said what I said, and I stand by it.

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Sources:

Cornell Sun – Cornell, Chi Phi sued by victim of alleged gang rape, drugging

ABC News 4 – DA reopens investigation into 2024 allegations

Cornell Sun – Cornell denies defendants only wrote essays

Cornell Sun – Hochul requests independent review

CNN – Alleged gang rape at Cornell: What we know