Commentary
I have been in intimate situations in my life. I have never once thought it would be a good idea to pick up my phone, text a group of people, and invite them to join us.
Maybe I am old-fashioned, but isn’t that what intimacy means? Something private. Something personal. Something shared between people who have chosen to be vulnerable with one another. The very definition of intimate suggests that everybody is not invited.
Yet here we are in 2026, arguing about the Cornell Seven, a group of young men accused of participating in a sexual encounter with a female student that has resulted in allegations of rape, a civil lawsuit, and a national debate over consent.
I haven’t spent hours digging through every disturbing detail. Frankly, I don’t want to. What I have read is enough to make me wonder what has happened to our society.
I am not weighing in on whether a crime occurred. I don’t know everything that happened in that room, what was legal, what was illegal, or what a court might eventually determine. That is not the conversation I want to have.
What I am questioning is how culturally acceptable we have allowed this kind of sexual behavior to become.
How far have we pushed intimacy away from morality that consent is now practically the only lens through which we examine it?
What if we also need to look through the lens of right and wrong?
I grew up in Ithaca, New York, the same town where Cornell University sits. When I was attending the Alternative Community School (ACS), our class was shown the 1988 film “The Accused,” starring Jodie Foster.
The R-rated movie depicts a young woman being sexually assaulted by multiple men on a pinball machine in a bar while other men stand around watching, cheering, and encouraging the assault.
I remember sitting in that classroom, horrified by what I was watching. I remember thinking we were too young to be seeing something so graphic and that it was inappropriate for adults to put those images into our heads. It was genuinely traumatic for me. More than 30 years later, I still remember how it made me feel.
The adults presenting the film apparently believed exposing teenagers to sexual violence would teach us something important about what not to do.
Now, decades later, I am watching a story unfold in that same town, and the public conversation seems almost unrecognizable.
I believe pornography has played an enormous role in getting us here.
Perhaps there is something about pornography culture I simply don’t understand. I have never really participated in it, and I have certainly never enjoyed drug-fueled sexual encounters.
I suppose I am boring in that way. But I cannot understand how intimacy has become something to perform for an audience or how inviting additional people into a sexual encounter has become an acceptable form of entertainment.
Much of pornography presents sex as a performance, a competition, or an act of domination. It teaches a version of sexuality in which increasingly extreme behavior generates excitement and intimacy is replaced by spectacle.
Young people are not born with these sexual scripts. They are introduced to them, often long before they have developed the maturity to understand the emotional consequences.
We have allowed an industry built around turning human sexuality into entertainment to become an informal educator of our children. Then we act surprised when young adults carry those scripts into their real lives.
Where are the parents in all of this?
I ask that question as a mother raising sons and daughters, knowing full well that I cannot control every decision my children will eventually make.
I pray that I am raising a daughter who knows her value so deeply that she would never feel the need to participate in something like this. A daughter with enough self-confidence to say no, even when everyone around her is saying yes. A daughter who understands that sexual attention is not love, that being desired is not the same as being valued, and that she doesn’t need to surrender her boundaries to feel accepted.
I want her to understand that the decisions she makes about alcohol, drugs, relationships, and intimacy matter. One decision often leads to another, and we are responsible for considering where our choices might take us. None of that gives another person permission to violate her consent. It means I want her to have the judgment to make decisions that reflect her values.
And I want exactly the same moral courage from my sons.
I don’t want sons who measure their masculinity by how many women they can sleep with, who confuse sexual opportunity with achievement, or who participate in something simply because their friends are doing it. I don’t want sons who believe that because a woman says yes, they no longer have to ask themselves whether what they are doing is right.
I want sons who understand that another person’s willingness to participate does not relieve them of responsibility for their own character.
I don’t know whether I will succeed in raising these children. They are human beings with free will, not programming machines. They will make their own decisions, and some of those decisions may disappoint me.
But I am trying to raise children who understand that freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. That self-respect is something we practice, not simply something we demand from others. And that the question we should be asking ourselves is not merely, “Can I do this?” but “Should I do this?”
I cannot imagine being the father of this young woman and reading her account of what happened. I cannot imagine what it would feel like to know my daughter had experienced something she describes in such disturbing terms.
And I cannot imagine being the mother of one of these young men, reading those messages and looking at my son across the dinner table. Even if I believed he had done nothing illegal, would I believe he had done nothing wrong? Would I be proud of the man I had raised?
These are questions for all of us, not just the families involved.
Parents are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to send their children to universities like Cornell. They are borrowing, saving, sacrificing, and sometimes mortgaging their futures because they believe higher education will help their children become thoughtful, capable, responsible adults.
And then we read stories about fraternity parties, ketamine, group messages, and allegations of sexual assault.
What exactly are we cultivating?
I am not suggesting Cornell created pornography culture or that universities can supervise every private decision students make. But academic achievement without moral judgment is not the kind of education I want for my children.
And I am certainly not asking the government to regulate our intimate relationships or universities to become the morality police.
I am asking why we, as parents, families, and a society, have become so reluctant to say that some things are simply wrong.
We have confused freedom with the absence of boundaries, sexual liberation with sexual fulfillment, and the ability to do something with the wisdom to do it.
We are raising children surrounded by sexual imagery while offering remarkably little guidance about love, tenderness, privacy, and the responsibility we have toward one another.
When something like the Cornell Seven happens, we retreat into arguments about criminal liability because those are easier than confronting the culture we have collectively created.
There are no heroes in the public spectacle surrounding this story. There are young people whose lives have been changed, families left to reckon with what happened, and a society that desperately needs to examine its own values.
I don’t need a jury to tell me that intimacy should mean something. I don’t need a university administrator to tell me that treating another human being as entertainment is wrong.
I pray I am raising a daughter who knows when to walk away and sons who know when to stand in the way.
I pray that if my son ever finds himself in a room where someone is vulnerable, impaired, or being taken advantage of, he will have the courage to stand up, even if that means physically putting himself between another person and danger.
I may not succeed in raising those children. But I am going to spend every day I have trying.
Because the world doesn’t need more young people who know how much they can get away with.
It needs young people who know the difference between what they can do and what they should do.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
