I entered college as Barack Obama began his second term. Within a year, two close friends at separate colleges, in separate fraternities, had been accused of sexual assault. They were promptly suspended and expelled. I wasn’t there those nights, and I don’t know the facts of the cases. More importantly, I question whether the colleges did either – I suspect they never cared to find out in the first place.

My experience has become all too common for American men under 35, especially those who have joined fraternities. The solution to the purported rape epidemic on college campuses is for men to act more like women: introspective, vulnerable, compassionate. The irony is that fraternities offer a distinctly male-coded way to foster those traits through rituals, shared hardship and peer accountability. Yet to join a fraternity today – or to “rush” it in the Greek life parlance – means accepting a permanent target on one’s back. America’s dominant cultural sensibility treats any all-male institution as presumptively toxic. This is why incidents such as those involving the so-called Cornell 7 function as a universal standard worthy of national hysteria, even though the morality of the Cornell situation seems far more nuanced.

It is an institution that mixes outsiders and insiders, rich and poor, nerds and jocks and offers them belonging

It is an institution that mixes outsiders and insiders, rich and poor, nerds and jocks and offers them belonging

In fact, if you talk to actual fraternity brothers who rushed in the post-#MeToo era, the conversation rarely turns to parties or the perks of privilege. Instead, they talk about brotherly bonding, the shared sense of obligation to one another and the practical ways membership helps men from wildly different backgrounds navigate college life and beyond. Some bad behavior exists, as it does in any large group of young people, but the reality rarely matches the caricature of predation and exclusion. What emerges is a quintessentially American form of elite egalitarianism: an institution that mixes outsiders and insiders, rich and poor, nerds and jocks, and offers them a sense of belonging.

“I was bullied in high school,” said Sam, a University of Maryland alumnus. “I never thought I would join a fraternity.” He was an obvious outsider: Jewish, gay – although he didn’t know it then – and noticeably effeminate as a teenager. He never had male friends growing up, and didn’t know how to relate to men. Hoping to rectify that, his dad bribed him with a Cartier watch to rush, and he did so reluctantly. The brothers accepted him, regardless of what he acknowledged was probably a “shitty attitude” at the beginning. Eventually, he learned to enjoy........

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