Why aren’t men talking about Cornell?

Records

JOEL ROSE, HOST:

Are guys getting involved enough in the Cornell discussion? Ladies throughout the country and the world have actually been speaking up, sharing their experiences, revealing their discomfort and outrage about the allegations of gang rape at Cornell. The case has actually stimulated deep discussions about misogyny and authorization, which, culture author Louis Staples states, males have actually been missing from. His newest piece for Harper’s Bazaar is entitled “Women Everywhere Are Talking About Cornell. Why Aren’t Men?” Invite to the program.

LOUIS STAPLES: Thanks for having me.

ROSE: You understand, I simply wish to state at the top that we are 2 guys speaking about this hard topic, and you state that’s precisely what is not taking place enough. You compose in your piece that, quote, “men can and should be contributing to the conversation, but so far, we’re failing to meet the moment.” Describe what you indicate.

STAPLES: One thing that actually stood out to me when I was viewing the response to these troubling accusations, especially in my own yard as a reporter in fact, was the absence of protection that it was getting in guys’s platforms, guys’s publications, locations that have an especially male readership.

That was my very first sort of point of call here, was seeing a genuine space in locations that typically have rather a lot to state about the state of contemporary masculinity and its instructions. I’m under no impression that guys’s publications are where most of males get their news from nowadays. I began believing about, you understand, the web of male material developers that we see online even better to home, simply males in my own sort of online orbit.

And once again and once again, there was this silence around this, which was just juxtaposed by the reality that females’s platforms, ladies’s developers and females in my own life were publishing a lot about it on social networks. It was an actually glaring distinction that I believed was absolutely a sign of a gender distinction in how this story is being approached.

ROSE: You understand, something that captured my eye about your piece – you state a great deal of guys change into what you call listening mode. Speak about what that is and why you believe, in this case, that it fails.

STAPLES: I believe that that’s something that a great deal of individuals can associate with, when a huge story takes place that’s possibly not worrying a group that you relate to. We see that frequently in the news cycle. Listening mode I would define here is – that possibly a factor why there may be a male silence, particularly on social media, relating to these claims in this story is that guys may not desire to state the incorrect thing. They may likewise believe, like, oh, it’s making it about me at this time that great deals of females are sharing, you understand, in some cases extremely agonizing experiences from their own lives about sexual violence and misbehavior and things like that.

I believe that there’s a semi-understandable impulse there. What’s bothersome about that is that it does not actually acknowledge the fact at the core of the problem, which is this truly is a story about guys. It’s a story about how guys act, about how they allow their peers to act and about the kinds of habits that are stabilized amongst guys, how they talk to each other and how they allow others to act. That’s why I do not believe listening mode actually cuts it in this circumstance since it kind of deals with males as though they’re eliminated from the story when in fact they’re a really essential part of it.

ROSE: And a great deal of what we’re discussing here involves media, with guys’s publications and with social networks. You likewise state that the genuine work has to take place not simply online, however in genuine life. What do you indicate by that?

STAPLES: Look, I believe each people has a personality that we curate online. All of us reside in a digital world. Really, the simple part is responding to it after the reality on social networks. The silence around it provides us a recommendation of just how much those discussions most likely aren’t occurring in reality.

For males, the actually impactful thing here would be to state something in minutes where there’s a genuine social expense or a possible social expense, such as challenging that male in your relationship group who makes misogynistic jokes or who everybody understands imitate a bit of a creep when he’s intoxicated, and it’s swept under the carpet and sort of glossed over.

I believe that what we actually require to see is guys having more of those discussions due to the fact that the type of silence around those types of concerns is what leads us to circumstances like this Snapchat group, where it’s declared that members of the fraternity were publishing disparaging messages, pictures of Jane Doe on the Snapchat group, and no one stepped in or stated anything at the time.

The culture of silence is most hazardous when it takes place in social circumstances in between guys. I believe it truly drips down. The reality that males aren’t talking about it openly on social media, I believe, has a connection to a silence in social settings, and that’s how we end up with stories like this.

ROSE: I’ve been speaking with cultural author Louis Staples. His piece in Harper’s Bazaar is entitled “Women Everywhere Are Talking About Cornell. Why Aren’t Men?” Thanks for being here.

STAPLES: Thank you a lot.

Copyright © 2026 NPR. All rights booked. Visit our site regards to usage and authorizations pages at www.npr.org for more info.

Precision and accessibility of NPR records might differ. Records text might be modified to right mistakes or match updates to audio. Audio on npr.org might be modified after its initial broadcast or publication. The reliable record of NPR’s shows is the audio record.