Cornell’s Frat-Party Ban Kicks the Keg Down the Road

T he 19th-century Shakers, who strictly separated men and women in both daily life and social interaction, might seem like an odd example for American campuses to follow in 2026. But as the consequences of morally unbounded but somehow agency-less sexual trysts continue to cause friction unsolvable by liberal platitudes for college campuses, that’s where they seem to be taking inspiration.

Instead of — heaven forbid — expecting some responsibility and agency from the young women smart enough to get into elite universities, or issuing guidance from older and wiser heads that perhaps it’s not the greatest idea to enter into drug-fueled orgies, Cornell has a better solution two years after the Jane Doe fallout.

It’s banning fraternities from having parties.

The particular fraternity at issue had already been disbanded, but that hasn’t been enough for college administrators looking to simultaneously appease the screechers on and off campus, and to cover their own rears. New rules forbid fraternities from hosting large gatherings, including in their “annexes” off campus, for the duration of the 2026–27 school year. Sororities face no comparable ban currently, but strict suspension consequences await any organization that co-hosts and provides cover to a fraternity to circumvent the sanctions. Some involved in the university report that even this draconian policy is a walk-back from what was initially proposed, and that Cornell is itching for a violation that would justify a total disbanding of Greek life on campus, permanently.

Nothing could be a worse or more futile response to the Cornell 7 incident than to further encourage young adults to turn away from in-person socializing and dating and return to their glowing screens.

In 2010, when I was still a college youth attending frat parties (how painful to type these words), young adults spent about 13 hours a week socializing with friends, in person. Post-lockdowns, the coup de grâce on a long free fall, the average is considerably less than half that, at about five hours. Conservative talking points about the hookup culture, likewise, are slightly out of date; while everyone is trading “pillow talk” for scrolling more often, the steepest declines in sexual activity are among young adults.

This retreat doesn’t mean, however, that the left has come around to more conservative views on the importance or seriousness of the sex act, or that there’s been any backtracking of the libertine principles that drove the hookup culture of the 2010s. Cornell 7 incident aside, what we actually have on campuses seems to be a whole lot of nasty talk without much nasty, where degraded and casual sex is preached as political liberation, but the vast majority are far too awkward and lonely to try it out anywhere beyond the pornography screen. That’s exactly the ideological stew that, judging by the participants’ accounts and messages, was providing the background premises for what took place in that Cornell room in 2024.

And that’s the real problem. Perhaps there shouldn’t be many tears on the right shed for the demise of ABC parties, but as long as the premises of the sexual revolution remain unexamined, young people will continue to be unprepared for the realities of sex, sex differences, and relationships.

Because the natural and biological consequences of sex still exist, young women will continue to be disappointed with how men treat them when they use sex as a tool to get attention or a relationship, and with how they feel after such trysts. And because liberal cultural institutions like Cornell will continue, instead of giving them real advice, to assure them that the only type of “bad sex” is the kind that lacks consent, and that men and women are interchangeable in their sexual interests, the drumbeat to expand the life-ruining legal sanctions for men who engage in unfortunate hookups will only get louder.

In an alternate universe, the accuser’s friends or even some university employee with her best interests at heart would have advised her not to view herself as a victim, but instead to take what happened that night, including the social fallout, as a lesson dearly purchased about foolish, immoral sexual behavior.

Men and women, some older sorority peer might have gently said, aren’t the same. Women are the biological gatekeepers of sex, because the natural consequence — pregnancy — is so much more monumental for us. In Western cultures, the vast majority of men are easily dissuaded by a simple, clear, and firm “no,” which should at minimum be deployed in situations where there is no romantic commitment from the man involved. Engaging in casual sex, let alone group sex with random men, is playing Russian roulette with a woman’s body, including her heart.

Gossip dissipates, people graduate, and life goes on. Had the Cornell accuser gotten this kind of commonsense advice and never filed the Title IX investigation or the lawsuit, by now that night would likely be nothing more than a regrettable experience unknown by most of her peers, and certainly by the rest of the country. And even more importantly, seven men would not have had their lives irrevocably tarred by unsupportable and contradictory accusations of assault.

The right often and correctly points out the contradiction between the feminist assertion that women have every right to engage in sex like men, and the increasing and legally dangerous notion that when that sex doesn’t work out to her liking, it’s because she lacked the agency to consent.

But in spite of the logical contradiction, sexual libertinism as pushed by the left leads inexorably to the puritan rules they now seek to reimpose to force better outcomes for women. Due process violations, Title IX inquisitions, and now, frat party bans and the reinvention of strict rules about male-female interaction, are all downstream of a sexual ethos that insists on multiplying the legions of women scorned.