On October 3, Madhusudan “Mad” Sandhu, a queer Punjabi makeup artist and social media influencer, was shot dead while waiting at a car wash in Amritsar. Two men on a motorcycle reportedly followed Sandhu before opening fire. Police have not established a motive, and any connection between the murder and earlier threats remains unproven. But to treat Sandhu’s killing as an isolated crime would be to ignore the social world in which it occurred.For years, Sandhu had endured homophobic ridicule for dressing, moving and speaking in ways deemed too feminine. In July, an Akali Sikh leader publicly objected to Sandhu’s clothing and online performances. He reportedly told Sandhu not to use the surname “Sandhu,” a name closely associated with dominant-caste Jat Sikh identity. The warning was revealing. Sandhu was not simply being condemned for being gay or queer. Sandhu was being accused of contaminating a caste identity, of wearing an inheritance of masculine respectability that cultural vigilantes believed a gender-nonconforming person had no right to claim.The violence was preceded by an attempt at social erasure: Do not dress this way. Do not influence young people. Do not attach our name to your body.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.Days earlier, across the globe, allegations surrounding a 2024 sexual assault at Cornell University in Ithica, New York returned to public view. A former student, identified as Jane Doe, alleges that seven Chi Phi fraternity members drugged and raped her. Some of the accused deny the allegations, and no criminal charges have been filed. Cornell’s internal investigative process led to expulsions and suspensions, and the incident was quietly laid to rest. After the local district attorney initially declined to prosecute, New York’s governor appointed the attorney general as a special prosecutor.These cases might not – on the surface – appear to share much in common, yet there’s a throughline of patriarchy that runs through both. A religious organisation is not a college fraternity. Murder is not rape. Yet both incidents reveal something that the “toxic masculinity” often obscures: male violence is not produced only by deviant men. It is enabled by institutions that decide which forms of manhood deserve protection, and which bodies can be sacrificed to preserve them.In my forthcoming book, Coming of Age in Macholand, I describe (Indian) Punjab as a “Macholand,” a terrain where masculinity is manufactured, distributed and policed. The term draws on sociologist Michael Kimmel’s “Guyland,” the largely white, middle-class and heterosexual world in which American young men learn masculine belonging. Macholand and Guyland look different. One is organised around the Jat surname, ancestral land and caste-endogamous marriage; the other around fraternity houses, elite credentials and institutional prestige. But the bargain is similar. Men gain entry by proving loyalty, repudiating femininity and remaining silent when other men cross a line.Sandhu unsettled more than a gender binaryPatriarchy is often mistaken for sexism or reduced to individual prejudice. It is more formidable: a structure that ranks men over women, straight over queer, masculinity over femininity. It offers what sociologist R.W. Connell calls a “patriarchal dividend”: unearned authority and the expectation that institutions will take your side. Violence is not a glitch in this system. It enforces the hierarchy. It keeps the entire machinery churning.Sandhu unsettled more than a gender binary. As a Jat Sikh who publicly embraced the Sandhu name, he exposed the fragility of dominant-caste masculinity from within. Punjabi popular culture routinely celebrates the swaggering Jat man: armed, landed, heterosexual and answerable to no one. Films and music videos repeat these fantasies until it appears natural. But caste status, like masculinity, must be guarded. When a queer person inhabits that name flamboyantly, neither caste nor gender looks as stable as its guardians claim.There is nothing inherently anti-queer about Punjabi or Sikh culture. Punjabi poetry and cinema have routinely allowed same-sex longing and gender ambiguity to surface and even celebrated. Sikh scripture is more capacious than the men who appoint themselves its border guards. Guru Nanak’s poetry imagines male and female as present within one another, while Sikhism’s foundational teachings reject caste hierarchies. The contradiction is not between queerness and Sikhism. It is between Sikhism’s egalitarian promise and a dominant-caste patriarchy claiming religious authority.At Cornell University, the protected ideals are shaped by different hierarchies. American fraternity culture emerged historically as an exclusive domain of white, heterosexual male privilege, even as its membership has diversified. It converts wealth, alumni networks and secrecy into brotherhood. In such spaces, loyalty can become an alibi and silence a membership requirement. Women enter as guests – as sexual prospects or reputational threats – but rarely as equals.Race, caste and class do not simply add up; they rearrange power. A dominant-caste Jat man may command deference in Punjab yet become racially subordinate abroad, after migration. Younger male students may lack power inside a fraternity structured around the control of older male students. Privilege in one hierarchy does not erase vulnerability in another. Patriarchy survives by exploiting both.Sexual violence is not limited to fraternities or elite universities. It occurs across campuses, classes and communities – in the United States and in India. Yet fraternities can concentrate the conditions that enable it: sex-segregated power, ritualised drinking, collective secrecy and male peer approval. Cornell’s own 2025 survey found that 35% of undergraduate women who responded reported experiencing nonconsensual sexual contact since arriving at the university. When a problem is this pervasive, it cannot be explained by blaming a few predatory men. The institutions must be held responsible.Patriarchy also decides whose credibility is expendable. The woman who reports rape is scrutinised for what she drank, what she took, why she went upstairs and why her memory is incomplete. The queer individual facing threats is told to dress differently, speak less loudly, make themselves less visible or abandon the family name. Responsibility moves away from those who police, violate or kill and settles instead on the body that supposedly provoked them.Patriarchy travels so wellThis is repudiation before it becomes violence. Patriarchal masculinity defines itself through what it must not be: feminine, queer, penetrable, vulnerable. Women and queer people become repositories for everything men are trained to disown in themselves. Their dehumanisation allows male solidarity to masquerade as tradition, brotherhood or community defense.The comparison between Amritsar and Ithaca matters because patriarchy travels so well. In Punjab, I call its terrain Macholand. In the United States, Kimmel called it Guyland. Both promise men power while narrowing their emotional lives and demanding obedience. Both teach that belonging must be acquired through domination. And both can turn men into enforcers, accomplices and spectators. Calling these patterns “toxic masculinity” gives us the comfort of separating good men from bad ones. But the problem is not a contaminated batch of masculinity. It is patriarchy itself: the families, fraternities, caste networks, religious bodies, universities and criminal justice systems that train men to protect the hierarchy before they protect the vulnerable.Mad Sandhu’s killers must be found and prosecuted. The allegations of gang rape at Cornell deserve a rigorous investigation. But accountability cannot end with individual perpetrators. Nor can our conversations with young men about sex stop at coercion and consent. Consent is indispensable, but it is the floor, not the horizon. Sex must also be taught as an ethic of care: attending to another person’s pleasure, vulnerability, dignity and well-being. Queer people, who often have to negotiate intimacy outside conventional gender roles, can offer important models of this more egalitarian sexuality, grounded in reciprocity rather than conquest. We must also dismantle the arrangements that made violence intelligible to other men: the warnings, the group chats, the laughter, the silence, the expectation of impunity. Until then, Macholand and Guyland will go on reproducing themselves, and women and queer people will keep paying the price of admission.Harjant S. Gill is an anthropologist, filmmaker and author of the forthcoming book Coming of Age in Macholand: Masculinity, Patriarchy, and the Search for Freedom in Indian Punjab (University of Chicago Press, November 2026).This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.