Professor Kathryn S. March Ph.D. ’79, anthropology, is a Graduate Professor of Anthropology and Professor Emerita of Feminist/Gender/Sexuality Studies and Public Affairs at Cornell University. She can be reached at ksm8@cornell.edu.
“Shame!” was a prominent chant on Monday at the largest demonstration Cornell University has seen since I first arrived here as a graduate student in 1973. I have been affiliated with Cornell ever since, as a postdoctoral fellow, faculty and now graduate professor and professor emerita. Through all these years, I have taught, researched, written and been active in gender and social justice. And I have wanted to see the institution I gave my professional life to live up to the promise that brought me to it in the first place: To be the original co-educational and non-denominational school in the Ivy League that was founded to offer a place where “any person can find instruction in any study,” and home to one of the very first programs in what was then called “women’s studies.”
“Shame” was the message we wanted to convey to the then-president of Cornell in the midst of mid-1970s campus frustration at what came to be called “sexual harassment.” We presented him with a copy of this ancient admonition from Homer’s Odyssey in the original Greek: “Men of Ithaca, it is all your own fault that things have turned out as they have; you would not listen to me, nor yet to Mentor, when we bade you check the folly of your sons who were doing much wrong in the wantonness of their hearts.”
“Shame” is what keeps assault victims from reporting, and often, even from easily processing what has happened to them. The dark corners of shame shelter recriminations about what could or should have been said, done, worn, imbibed, wandered. It emboldens assailants to deny — to themselves as much as to others — their own responsibility and complicity for wrongdoing.
“Shame needs to change sides,” said Gisèle Pelicot. Her husband, Dominique, you may remember, drugged, raped and videotaped her, then recruited some 51 other men to do the same from 2011-2020. Not one of those men was sufficiently ashamed to report the abuse. The shameful thing Dominique did, that got him caught, was surreptitiously upskirting women and girls in a supermarket.
Shame will only change sides when our rape culture refuses to see rape as a natural (if not nice) expression of male desire and power. Until then, daughters will be told to be very careful, and, if they cannot go down quietly, to yell “Fire!” not “Rape!” Sons will learn that you have to “use it or lose it.” Police, judges and, apparently, college administrators will continue to fret that “boys being boys” shouldn’t have their futures tarnished.
Cornell’s own studies have found that 35% of undergraduate women and 8% of undergraduate men in 2025 said they experienced “non-consensual sexual contact”. Shame, secrecy and pride, of course, all make it difficult to know how exact these figures are. But I doubt there are few other Cornell experiences that are as widespread; even hockey tickets are harder to get. What’s even more disturbing is that these percentages appear to have been pretty stable: a 1997 Ann Landers column claimed a similar 35% reported sexual; other studies from 2015 found that 32% of men said they would force a woman to have sex if they knew they wouldn’t get caught.
For shame to change sides, sexual offenders like rapists have to be viewed with the same public disgust as flashers. It was peeping up skirts that got Dominique Pelicot in trouble, not drugging or raping. How, then, to get around the tenacity of the shame attached to being raped, and the lack thereof to rapists? What if women who were raped declined to prosecute for “rape” but instead charged their assailants with “indecent exposure”? Prosecution for a lesser offense is a well-tried legal strategy, especially when the prosecution worries that a conviction for the more serious crime might be unsuccessful or be too traumatic for the victim. In a case of indecent exposure, nothing about the assailed person’s history, state of mind, clothing and countless other variables would be pertinent; we all understand that nobody asks to be flashed. Everything about the assailant would become suspect; nobody sympathizes with a flasher.
Until shame changes sides, until rape is so shameful that no one sides with a rapist, until the legal process and the courts give as much credence to the damage done to those raped as they do to the mitigating excuses of those doing the raping, it is precisely and only by public shaming in the courts of public opinion that we can seek justice. And recall the other chant from Monday’s protest at Cornell: “No justice! No peace!”
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