In the wake of the “Cornell 7” case, in which seven members of a Cornell fraternity are accused of drugging and sexually assaulting a fellow student, many people, including some at Cornell, have suggested banning fraternities. Despite the general debauchery fraternities are famous for engaging in, it’s important that we do not ban them. If we were to ban fraternities, we would be losing one of the last bastions of something that we abandoned a long time ago – all-male spaces.
Decades ago, all-male spaces were ubiquitous. Every boy was a member of a Boy Scout troop, or was an altar boy, and as they went into school, they would join societies. Churches had the Holy Name Society and the Knights of Columbus, and other men’s groups were much more fraternal and much more ubiquitous. Colleges had not only fraternities but other societies, extracurricular clubs that were focused on something and were closed to women.
