JOEL ROSE, HOST:
Are men participating enough in the Cornell conversation? Women across the nation and the world have been speaking out, sharing their experiences, expressing their pain and outrage about the accusations of gang rape at Cornell. The case has sparked deep conversations about misogyny and consent, which, culture writer Louis Staples says, men have been absent from. His latest piece for Harper's Bazaar is titled "Women Everywhere Are Talking About Cornell. Why Aren't Men?" Welcome to the program.
LOUIS STAPLES: Thanks for having me.
ROSE: You know, I just want to say at the top that we are two men talking about this difficult subject, and you say that's exactly what is not happening enough. You write in your piece that, quote, "men can and should be contributing to the conversation, but so far, we're failing to meet the moment." Explain what you mean.
STAPLES: One thing that really stuck out to me when I was watching the reaction to these disturbing allegations, particularly in my own backyard as a journalist actually, was the lack of coverage that it was receiving in men's platforms, men's magazines, places that have a notably male readership.
So that was my first sort of point of call here, was noticing a real gap in places that normally have quite a lot to say about the state of modern masculinity and its direction. I'm under no illusion that men's magazines are where the majority of men get their news from these days. So I started thinking about, you know, the web of male content creators that we see online even closer to home, just men in my own sort of online orbit.
And again and again, there was this silence around this, which was only juxtaposed by the fact that women's platforms, women's creators and women in my own life were posting a lot about it on social media. So it was a really glaring difference that I thought was definitely indicative of a gender difference in how this story is being approached.
ROSE: You know, one thing that caught my eye about your piece - you say a lot of men switch into what you call listening mode. Talk about what that is and why you think, in this case, that it falls short.
STAPLES: I think that that's something that a lot of people can relate to, when a big story happens that's perhaps not concerning a group that you identify with. We see that often in the news cycle. So listening mode I would characterize here is - that perhaps a reason why there might be a male silence, especially on social media, regarding these allegations in this story is that men might not want to say the wrong thing. They might also think, like, oh, it's making it about me at this time that lots of women are sharing, you know, sometimes very painful experiences from their own lives about sexual violence and misconduct and things like that.
So I think that there's a semi-understandable impulse there. But what's problematic about that is that it doesn't really acknowledge the truth at the core of the issue, which is this really is a story about men. It's a story about how men behave, about how they permit their peers to behave and about the types of behaviors that are normalized among men, how they speak to each other and how they permit others to behave. So that's why I don't think listening mode really cuts it in this situation because it kind of treats men as though they're removed from the story when actually they're a very integral part of it.
ROSE: And a lot of what we're talking about here has to do with media, with men's magazines and with social media. But you also say that the real work has to happen not just online, but in real life. What do you mean by that?
STAPLES: Look, I think each of us has a persona that we curate online. We all live in a digital world. Actually, the easy part is reacting to it after the fact on social media. The silence around it gives us a suggestion of how much those conversations probably aren't happening in real life.
For men, the really impactful thing here would be to say something in moments where there's a real social cost or a potential social cost, such as challenging that man in your friendship group who makes misogynistic jokes or who everyone knows acts like a little bit of a creep when he's drunk, and it's swept under the rug and sort of glossed over.
So I think that what we really need to see is men having more of those conversations because the type of silence around those types of issues is what leads us to situations like this Snapchat group, where it's alleged that members of the fraternity were posting disparaging messages, photographs of Jane Doe on the Snapchat group, and nobody intervened or said anything at the time.
The culture of silence is most harmful when it happens in social situations between men. I think it really trickles down. So the fact that men aren't talking about it publicly on social media, I think, has a correlation to a silence in social settings, and that's how we end up with stories like this.
ROSE: I've been speaking to cultural writer Louis Staples. His piece in Harper's Bazaar is titled "Women Everywhere Are Talking About Cornell. Why Aren't Men?" Thanks for being here.
STAPLES: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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