As the Cornell rape allegations continue to roil beyond college campuses and into the homes of families across the country, a familiar question has played out: How do we educate our sons? Specifically, how do we raise boys who grow up to be men who will not rape women and who will stand up to perpetrators?

In discussing the case in my social circles, the mere suggestion that our kids could come to mirror the behavior of the so-called Cornell 7 is enough to induce genuine nausea right there smack in the middle of a 5-year-old’s birthday party. The allegations seem perversely unrecognizable to us and the inner lives of our families, leaving parents understandably grasping for strategies for a scenario they can hardly imagine. And so, it’s against this air of anxiety that favor has once again settled on sexual consent, and the need to drill its importance into the minds of our youth.

If consent as a talking point feels like grim deja vu, that’s because it returns with each cycle of outrage over alleged campus sexual assault. Consider how the topic has been the inspiration for two different Saturday Night Live skits across 25 years: a 1993 segment that ridiculed the “Ask First” policy at Antioch College, and another in 2018—albeit depicting consent education in a more favorable light—during the #MeToo movement that emphasized an unambiguous “yes means yes” approach to establishing consent. Which is to say that consent, in different registers and varying deliveries, has informed decades’ worth of discourse around sexual assault.

“Sexual assault has nothing to do with consent.”

But too often, these conversations treat consent as the finish line—not the starting point to addressing more challenging aspects around rampant sexual assault on our college campuses. In doing so, we sidestep more uncomfortable questions of what makes something like rape appealing to perpetrators in the first place: the thrill of violating consent. That rapists don’t just disregard your consent but don’t want it.

“Sexual assault has nothing to do with consent,” Andrea O’Reilly, a professor at York University in Canada, said. “It’s about power, misogyny, and abuse. This is what we’re missing in the conversation with all these memes going around.” (Indeed, the Snapchat thread at the center of the Cornell allegations is littered with comments relishing this rot: “Free pussy” upstairs. “Shop still open?” “Like you can walk in and whip it out rn.”)

“Of course, we need to educate boys about........

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