What can Gloria Steinem teach us about the Cornell Seven?

The allegations emerging from Cornell University are horrifying. A former student has filed a civil lawsuit alleging that she was drugged and sexually assaulted by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity, but one detail in the case has stayed with me in particular. According to the lawsuit, at 1:42 in the morning, while the alleged assault was taking place, a message was sent to the fraternity’s Snapchat group announcing that there was “free pussy” upstairs, reducing a young woman to a body available for the use of the men who received it.

The seven men accused in the lawsuit will have to answer for their own actions, but the existence of that group chat raises a broader question about the men around them. We do not know how many members saw the messages that night, and their responsibility is not the same as that of the men accused of the assault. But when I read those messages, I find myself thinking about what it takes for a young man, confronted with something disturbing among his friends, to say: something is wrong here, and I am going to do something about it.

When Gloria Steinem died a month ago at the age of 92, I went back to some of her writing about violence, masculinity, and power, and was struck by how directly the questions she raised decades ago speak to this moment. Steinem was interested not only in individual acts of violence, but in the ideas about power, gender and masculinity that make certain forms of violence possible, acceptable or easy for others to ignore.

I am the director of the Tel Aviv Sexual Assault Crisis Center, founded in 1978 as part of the feminist movement that transformed the way sexual violence was understood and discussed. That movement changed our language, our laws and our expectations of institutions. It brought experiences that had been hidden under the excuse of being “private” inside homes, relationships and workplaces into public and political discussion.

And yet, sexual violence remains extraordinarily prevalent. In 2025, the Tel Aviv Sexual Assault Crisis Center received 10,858 calls. Other crisis centers across the country received tens of thousands of additional calls. I found myself asking: have we won the battle but lost the war?

In 1999, following the Columbine massacre, Steinem published an essay in Ms. magazine called “Supremacy Crimes.” She argued that some forms of violence are difficult to understand if we look only for obvious motives such as money or revenge. Instead, she asked us to look at hierarchy, dominance and the need to establish control.

At the center of her argument was masculinity. She was not suggesting that men are inherently violent. Quite the opposite. She was asking what societies teach boys about what it means to be a man, particularly the expectation that masculinity requires strength, control, and distance from vulnerability. It frequently requires disregarding others’ feelings in order to prove that you are “a man.”

Years later, discussing rape in war, Steinem returned to the same idea and applied it explicitly to sexual violence. She rejected the idea that sexual violence is simply a natural or inevitable part of human behavior. She argued that in war, rape can function as an expression of domination, humiliation, and supremacy. We saw this in a horrifying way on October 7, when sexual violence was used in the attack led by Hamas against Israelis, demonstrating how rape can become a means of asserting power over an individual and a community.

If we want to change social perceptions of masculinity, we need to look at what we teach boys about being men. That does not mean assuming that men are inherently violent, or overlooking the fact that men can be survivors of sexual violence too. Our center operates Israel’s national hotline for male survivors, and thousands of men have reached out for help.

Prevention efforts are not new to rape crisis centers. In Israel, education and prevention have been part of our work for decades. At our center, we work extensively with teenagers in schools and informal educational settings. We talk about consent, boundaries, intimate communication, healthy relationships and sexual violence.

The Cornell allegations have made me think again about whether we need to understand prevention more broadly.

We can teach a fourteen year old boy the definition of consent, and we should. We can use the familiar analogy of offering someone a cup of tea to explain that consent should be freely and enthusiastically given, that it can be withdrawn, that silence is not consent and that intimacy requires communication. Consent education usually focuses on the question: what am I allowed to do with another person? Cornell raises another question: what am I responsible for doing when someone around me may be causing harm?

By the time we have that conversation, he has already spent fourteen years learning what it means to be a boy. This is why I increasingly believe that the prevention of sexual violence has to be understood as part of a much larger project of gender equality. Teaching consent is essential, but it is not enough without also examining the gender roles young people bring into an intimate encounter. If we want to change sexual violence, we need to expand the possibilities of what a man and a woman can be.

Seen this way, gender equality is not only a question of equal salaries, political representation, or professional opportunities. It is also a question of what kinds of human beings boys and girls are allowed to become.

I think about this constantly as the mother of two daughters and a son. With my daughters, I find myself consciously pushing against the way girls are taught to be polite. I want them to recognize their own boundaries and trust the feeling that tells them when something is wrong. I tell them that if a situation feels uncomfortable, they do not owe anyone politeness. They are allowed to leave, to object and to make someone else uncomfortable when they need to protect their own boundaries.

This is much harder than it sounds, because being nice is still deeply embedded in what we teach girls about being good.

With my son, my responsibility looks different. He is only five, but I am already talking to him about what kind of person he should be.

When he cries because something hurts, I tell him it’s okay to cry and that his mother and father cry sometimes too. When children are playing, I encourage him to notice the child who is being left out. There is a boy he knows who has difficulty speaking clearly and is sometimes excluded from games. I want my son to understand that noticing him, inviting him in and refusing to participate in cruelty are also his responsibility.

None of these conversations are about sexual violence, and yet they are all relevant to the subject at hand. Long before we talk to a teenager about sexual consent, children have already learned something about gender roles, strength and weakness, belonging and exclusion, empathy and humiliation. They have learned how we treat someone who has less control, less power.

And perhaps this is where the other men in a group chat become part of the story. I want my son to grow up knowing not only that he must never sexually harm someone, but that when another person is vulnerable, looking away is also a choice. I want him to be willing to challenge a friend, go against the group and risk being unpopular when someone else may be in danger.

Of course, allowing boys to cry will not on its own end sexual violence. Parenting alone cannot solve a problem rooted in society. But these everyday moments are part of prevention. They teach boys that empathy, vulnerability and care do not make them less masculine. They also teach them that belonging to a group should not require silence when someone else is being harmed. We also need to teach girls that being assertive, expressing anger or desire and saying no do not make them less feminine.

This matters even more because parents and educators are no longer the only people teaching our children about gender. When I open TikTok, I find an endless stream of videos about what makes a man powerful, what makes a woman desirable, what rejection means and who is supposed to have control. Some of that content challenges old gender roles, but much of it reproduces them in a new language.

For decades, feminism fought, rightly, against the idea that women and girls are responsible for preventing men from harming them. We should never retreat from that principle. The responsibility for sexual violence belongs to the person who commits it. But that principle should lead us somewhere further: we should expect boys and men not only to avoid causing harm, but also to notice power, challenge cruelty and understand that respect and empathy do not make them less masculine.

Almost fifty years after the Tel Aviv Sexual Assault Crisis Center was founded, I want us to remain excellent at answering the call when someone has been sexually assaulted. I want every survivor to be believed, supported and accompanied for as long as they need us.

I do not want the success of the next fifty years to be measured only by how well we respond after someone has been hurt. I want it measured by whether we have changed the beliefs that help make that harm possible: that boys must prove their strength through control, that care and vulnerability make them less of a man, and whether we have raised the young man who, when the message appears in his group chat, is prepared to go against the group and refuses to look the other way.