"57"

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In October 2024, at the Chi Phi fraternity house at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York a young woman alleges she was sexually assaulted by seven male students for hours after being pressured to consume alcohol, marijuana and ketamine.
What makes the case particularly disturbing, however, is not simply the allegations against the seven.
It is the 57.
Messages about what was happening were circulated amongst fifty-seven other fraternity members. The messages invited others to participate, referring to “free pussy” and asking whether the “shop” was still open. The criminal investigation was closed without charges. The University's internal disciplinary investigation resulted in 2 students being expelled from Cornell while the remaining 5 were compelled to write essays reflecting on the event.
The question we want to put on the table is not simply: How do seven men come to do something like this?
It is: what happens when dozens of other men know enough to know that something is profoundly wrong—and nobody stops it?
This takes us directly into the increasingly bitter territory of the contemporary gender wars.
Women have spent years asking men to become accountable for male violence. The familiar response is: But it isn't all men.
Of course it isn't.
But that is not the question women are asking.
The more difficult question is: what does the “good man” do when another man violently and sexually crosses the line?
Does he intervene?
Does he report it?
Does he challenge his friends?
Does he refuse to participate in the culture that makes such behaviour possible?
Or does he remain silent because it isn't his crime?
And what does that silence mean to the women on the other side of it?
This is where the “woman or bear” question becomes relevant. Many men genuinely seem puzzled by the question: Why would a woman choose the bear? The question was never simply about whether men are dangerous. All women are fully aware of the answer to that. Rather, it is about whether a woman can reliably know which men are safe—and, more importantly, whether other men will act when one of their own is not.
Because if a woman cannot rely on the men around her to challenge male violence, then the distinction between “the violent men” and “the good men” loses any practical meaning. Not because all men are violent, because safety depends not only upon the absence of violence. It depends upon the presence of people who will intervene when violence occurs.
Our current systems are failing women in ways that are difficult to dismiss. We are living through a period in which women are increasingly challenging whether the social, cultural and legal systems will protect them when male power is exercised against them. Case in point: the Epstein files.
This is not a claim that all men are violent or sexually predatory. It is a question about whether male culture has evolved (and if not, why not?) —and is willing to enforce—the norms necessary to make predatory behaviour socially intolerable rather than merely individually reprehensible. Women are asking men not merely to not be perpetrators, but to become active participants in creating a culture in which male violence is deemed to be systematically unacceptable.
What are women supposed to do when even the “good men” remain silent?
And this begs a much larger and more uncomfortable question.
Why, after tens of thousands of years of human evolution have human societies failed to teach human males the most basic principle of sexual self-control**:** that another person's autonomy places an absolute boundary on their choices?
Because if the “good man” is defined only by what he himself does not do, while remaining silent when other men cross the boundary, then women are left with a profoundly difficult problem.
They cannot know which man is safe simply because he has not yet demonstrated that he is unsafe. If women can’t trust that men will protect their right to bodily autonomy, what happens to the possibility of trust between men and women at all? How is trust between men and women built or recovered in this environment? And what happens when trust becomes so damaged that withdrawal looks safer than relationship?
The South Korean 4B movement offers one striking example of that possibility. Its four principles reject heterosexual sex, dating, marriage and childbirth. Members of the movement have decided that pregnancy itself must be precluded because a male child carries all the potential to grow up and become yet another state-condoned sexual predator.
And that brings us back to 57.
What has to happen to turn this situation around?
What do men have to do—collectively, culturally and personally—to become deserving of women’s trust?
And if women conclude that the answer is nothing they can reasonably rely upon, what happens next?
Let’s talk about it.