Let’s Talk About Male Complacency
A few weeks ago, I went to a wedding and watched a man interact with his young daughters in a way that made me deeply uncomfortable.
He was dismissive of them. He treated them as “wrong” for wanting to play with a soft Frisbee. He told them, in a tone that made my skin crawl, to be “good girls.” They were very young but already brimming with curiosity, intelligence, and imagination. They weren’t sitting demurely on a stone wall, picking at flowers. They wanted to play and run around and enjoy the day. They seemed to long for their father’s attention, and I watched him repeatedly demean them and make them smaller.
I wasn’t the only person who witnessed it. He was surrounded by other men—fathers, husbands, boyfriends—presumably men who would describe themselves as good men, men who protect women, men who live by strong moral values.
Not one of them said anything.
To be fair, neither did I in the moment. I was too stunned by what I was witnessing. But I messaged him afterward and told him what I thought. His response was exactly what I expected: I didn’t know him. I didn’t understand his family. I was mouthing off and should be put in my place.
That interaction was no skin off my back. I have never liked bullies, and I have never been capable of silently condoning behavior I know is wrong.
What has stayed with me is every man in that circle's silence.
Because what good is the “good guy” who only tells you what he would do?
If he had hit one of his daughters, I would have intervened.
If it were actually abuse, I would obviously say something.
There’s nothing I could do. What he was doing wasn’t a crime.
There is always an if—some hypothetical threshold just beyond whatever is happening in front of him.
But these men have it backwards. The low-stakes moments are the training grounds for the life-changing ones. Friends discouraged me from messaging him because I wasn’t going to change his parenting, but changing him wasn’t the point; I wanted him to know that not everyone was willing to silently endorse his behavior. If a self-described “good guy” can’t risk awkwardness or another man’s anger when the stakes are low, why should we expect him to when a woman’s entire life and future is on the line?
Then I started thinking about Cornell.
A former Cornell University student identified publicly as Jane Doe has filed a civil lawsuit alleging that seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity drugged and sexually assaulted her at the fraternity house in October 2024. The criminal investigation, which initially resulted in no charges, has since been reopened, and the Tompkins County district attorney has said the case will be presented to a grand jury.
One detail has been particularly difficult for me to stop thinking about.
According to the lawsuit, at approximately 1:42 in the morning, a message was sent to a Snapchat group called “Chi Phi Actives,” advertising a woman upstairs for sex in dehumanizing terms. The lawsuit alleges that additional men subsequently entered the room and that the assaults continued for hours.
Cornell records listed 57 active Chi Phi members that fall. We don’t know how many were in the group chat, awake, or saw the message. But while public attention has understandably centered on the Cornell Seven, the seven men named in the lawsuit, I keep thinking about everyone else who may have witnessed something troubling that night and said nothing.
What does a self-described “good man” do when a message like that appears on his phone? The uncomfortable answer is that what he does may depend, in part, on the men around him.
In a laboratory study of heterosexual men, researchers Ruschelle Leone and Dominic Parrott manipulated the social environment participants encountered, exposing them either to male peers who established a misogynistic norm or to peers who established a more ambiguous one. The presence of the misogynistic peer norm made men less likely to intervene and slower to do so [link].
Friendship and status complicate things further. A study of undergraduate men found something particularly uncomfortable: men who genuinely wanted to prevent sexual assault did intervene, but their interventions tended to target men who were socially distant or more vulnerable. Their practices could protect popular men and men within their own social circles [link].
It is one thing to confront some creepy stranger. It is another to confront your roommate. Your fraternity brother. One of your “boys.” The guy whose approval matters to you. Suddenly, doing the right thing might cost you something.
Maybe that’s why I’m increasingly frustrated by the way we talk about men as “protectors.” Because men are not necessarily reluctant to help. In fact, Alice H. Eagly and Maureen Crowley’s landmark meta-analysis of 172 studies of helping behavior found that men helped more than women in many of the situations social psychologists had traditionally studied. But those studies disproportionately examined the kinds of situations that fit what the researchers described as a traditionally masculine model of “heroic and chivalrous” helping [link].
And that raises a question I can’t shake:
Have we taught men to recognize courage more readily when it looks like heroism than when it looks like dissent?
The hero gets to save the woman.
The dissenter has to turn toward another man and say:
“That’s not okay.”
Heroism can earn you admiration.
Dissent might cost you the approval of the men standing beside you.
But why does their approval matter so much?
Why is keeping your place among the boys more important than holding true to your own supposed values? Why should the possibility that another man might think you’re disloyal, "whipped", or no fun carry more weight than the knowledge that someone is being demeaned or harmed in front of you?
At some point, you have to decide whose opinion of you matters more: theirs, or your own. If staying a “good guy” in the eyes of your friends requires betraying what you know is right, you’ve already made the wrong choice.
A moral compass doesn’t break all at once. It rusts from disuse.
Men keep promising us the courage they will display in an emergency while refusing to practice courage when nothing is on the line. Instead, they practice looking away and preserving their own comfort and safety—a luxury women have never had. Courage is not an emergency response system. It is a habit.
I am exhausted by how much responsibility we put on women to protect themselves from situations that should never have been dangerous in the first place.
We learn to carry mace. We learn not to walk alone with headphones at night. We text our friends our locations before first dates. We watch our drinks. We pretend to linger in a store because the man who has been following us paused outside. We are told to recognize danger earlier, leave sooner, drink less, watch each other more closely. And every woman reading the Cornell Seven story can relate to Jane Doe's experience. We are all Jane Doe.
Where is the corresponding responsibility for the men who insist they are our protectors?
I don’t want to hear what you would have done.
I want to know what you did when your friend made the demeaning joke about your female coworker.
I want to know what you did when your cousin called his girlfriend crazy.
I want to know what you did when the father at the table humiliated his daughter.
I want to know what you did, Chi Phi fraternity member, when the messages started appearing in the group chat.
If the answer is nothing, stop calling yourself our protector. Women have been protecting ourselves and one another all along: watching the drinks, sharing the locations, making the phone calls, believing each other, speaking up, surviving the consequences, and rebuilding ourselves in order to keep going and doing good work. We do not need men to imagine themselves as heroes in some future emergency. We need them to find the courage women exercise every day and use it on the men standing beside them.
The question isn’t whether you would stop a monster. Most men are certain they would.
The question is whether you will challenge a friend before you’ve decided he’s the bad guy.
Because by the time everyone agrees that the line has been crossed, the person who needed you to speak may already have paid the price for your silence.
So when a man tells me he’s a good guy, I’m no longer interested in the terrible things he would never do, or the heroic things he swears he would do if the circumstances were bad enough.
I want to know what he does when the man crossing the line is one of his “boys”—when speaking up might cost him that friendship and staying silent would cost him nothing.
The standard isn’t:
Would you ever do something like that?
It’s:
What did you do when the man beside you crossed the line?
Because being a good man isn’t something you get to claim.
It’s something you have to prove when it costs you.
If you are outraged by the news of the Cornell Seven and Cornell University's handling of it, here are some things you can do:
Contact the president of the university:
president@cornell.edu or (607) 255-5201
You do not need to be a great author or orator to do so. Have ChatGPT or Gemini generate something for you to say. Screenshot a well-worded post you agree with and send it. Simply say, "I am ashamed with your handling of Jane Doe's case against the Cornell Seven. You are supposed to be setting an example. The world is watching. Do better going forward."
Join the march/protest on campus if you can on October 13th at 3:00 p.m. EST.
Share posts of outrage on social media. Seriously, it matters. It shows the people in your life where you stand.
Listen to women. Believe women. Call out those around you when they are letting the world down.