‘Boys will be boys’: A professor on bro culture, Cornell and the sign that wasn’t ‘just a sign’
Warning: sexual violence
Boys will be boys. It’s the line that has long let bad behaviour get filed under harmless.
The allegations at Cornell University have people asking how far that logic stretches.
A former student, identified as Jane Doe, filed a civil lawsuit in September alleging she was drugged and gang-raped by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity in 2024.
No criminal charges were laid, but prosecutors have since reopened the investigation. For St. Thomas University professor John Muise, who teaches human rights and English, the reaction was distressing.
“It makes me physically ill to even think about it,” he said.
STU has no fraternities. But Muise said the culture behind these doesn’t need a fraternity house to exist.
“It goes beyond mere sexism to misogyny,” he said. “There’s such a sense of impunity.”
He described the response when someone is accused as one of outrage that the question is being asked at all.
“It’s, ‘How dare you accuse me? How dare you suggest that this is criminal?’” he said. “That attitude creates, or certainly enables or reinforces, a culture in which that is a genuine sentiment.”
ABC News reported it obtained a Snapchat group chat shared among more than 50 fraternity brothers during the alleged assault. For Muise, that points to how these groups work.
“It’s kind of weird hazing, in a way,” he said. “To me, it’s deep insecurity, an obsession with domination and control.”
It’s the same shrug that shows up when the group is a fraternity, a team or a group chat: they’re just boys.
Muise said the pattern is familiar. He compared the response to the Cornell case to the 2025 Hockey Canada trial, where attention shifted to the alleged victim’s behaviour.
“People try to say, ‘well, if this happened, then why didn’t she do this, or why did she behave that way?’” he said. "As soon as I hear that, it sounds an awful lot like the hockey case.”
Sometimes the shrug fits on a banner. Last weekend, a sign hung outside an off-campus house in Antigonish, N.S., during St. Francis Xavier University's homecoming weekend. It read “Drop-off zone: Acadia girlfriends,” CBC News reported. Acadia University said the sign encouraged sexual violence against its students. St. FX said it referred the matter to its discipline process.
A St. FX professor told CBC she didn’t see it as just a joke. She said it treated women as possessions.
Muise said calling it “just a sign” is part of the problem, because it turns a serious issue into a culture-war argument.
“You don’t have to be labelled as a feminist to think that that's wrong,” he said. “That's just wrong.”
He said the attitude gets reinforced from the top.
“Certain political figures kind of enable this kind of a culture,” Muise said. “If you get a leader of a country who's saying it’s just locker room talk, I mean, that’s back in 2016. But it’s certainly something that is pervasive everywhere.”
Muise said it's the silence that lets it continue.
“There has to be a real cultural shift. There has to be a real emphasis on the value of human dignity. It sounds so simplistic and idealistic, but these things actually matter.”
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