During a fraternity party at a West Coast college in 2016, a drunk boy and an equally drunk girl went into a bedroom. Two freshmen noticed them go upstairs. They rounded up several other students and found the couple. One student, flanked by the rest as backup, said to the boy: “Hey, dude? You can’t do this.” Another student offered to walk the girl home.

The students who thwarted a potential crisis were neither women nor members of a sexual assault awareness group; they were freshman members of the fraternity that hosted the party. They had been counseled by their chapter president, who told me this story, that it was their mission to prevent sexual assaults and to treat women right.

Americans demonize fraternities as bastions of toxic masculinity where young men go to indulge their worst impulses. Universities have cracked down: Since November 2017 , more than a dozen have suspended all fraternity events . But I spent more than two years interviewing fraternity members nationwide for a book about what college students think it means to “be a man,” and what I learned was often heartening. Contrary to negative headlines and popular opinion, many fraternities are encouraging brothers to defy stereotypical hypermasculine standards and to simply be good people.

Consider some recent examples: In 2017, brothers in Beta Theta Pi at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln invited officers from several sorority houses to a dinner where they talked about the experiences of being a woman on campus and the ways men could help to prevent sexual assault. Last October, Alpha Tau Omegas at the University of Maryland assembled 400 sexual-assault aftercare kits that included handwritten notes of support. When Ball State University fraternity houses hung banners supporting consent awareness for Homecoming last year, Sigma Phi Epsilon declared it would continue to display its “‘No’ does not mean ‘Convince Me’” banner as long as sexual assault remained a campus problem. Last July, Christian Kahf, a former Georgia Tech student, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for rape; the case against him began when his fraternity brothers called the police in 2017 to say he had confessed to them.