Maybe more than anything else, sexual violence is repetitive. Men commit it in patterns: mostly against women who are close by and vulnerable, just below them on some social hierarchy: their assistant, their date, their friend, their daughter, their student, their kid’s babysitter.

Men rape for opportunity – because they can – and for status – because it makes them feel good. They rape to impress other men, documenting it on phones for one another’s benefit. Men rape and do not always seem to register much of a difference between the sex they’ve had that was rape and the sex that they’ve had that wasn’t. They rape, often, without seeming to think about it, registering their victims’ unwillingness with vague contempt, if at all.

Institutions don’t seem very interested, either. When a woman comes forward, she is often told in hushed, awed, and thoroughly patronizing tones that she is so brave – by the very same people, be they cops or prosecutors or Title IX coordinators, who will then set about explaining to her why she had no right to say no; why the man or men who violated her were within their rights to do so; why inaction and indifference on the part of the people she turned to for help are the only rational response, and the best that she can hope for. Some version of this happens over and over and over again. It happens every day.

Once in a while, an instance will rise to public consciousness. There is outrage, new articulations of feminist consciousness. Brilliant and livid women describe the pattern with insight, intelligence, and often a kind of bitter wit. People with real power call for action, investigations, even a new law. Then, the moment fades. Attention ebbs. Change doesn’t come. Soon after, a woman wakes up bruised. She steels herself to report. A person on the other side of a table will smile at her with a patronizing treachery, tell her something nonspecific, and set the cycle of impunity in motion again.

This pattern is repeating itself, now, at Cornell. A civil suit filed by a former undergraduate against the university and seven male students has attracted public attention and instigated feminist agitation around rape to a degree not seen in years.

The unnamed plaintiff alleges that in........

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