Fraternities, eh. They’re going to hell in a handbasket, and you know whose fault that is? Drunk women! That’s who! All these drunk women keep forcing their way into the place and they’re ruining everything. Erin Gloria Ryan at Jezebel has the story.
If you blinked at all, even for a second yesterday, you may have missed a doozy of a story that Forbes ran and very quickly deleted. Which is a shame, since the headline was “Drunk Female Guests Are the Gravest Threat to Fraternities,” and the only thing more hilariously evil than much of the piece that followed was the Satan-y byline photo that accompanied the piece.
Unfortunately, Bill Frezza isn’t a character made up by stoned Onion writers searching for the next Herbert Kornfeld. He is a very real man who many years ago graduated from MIT with a degree in theology and engineering and spends his time now being creepily involved with his old fraternity.
Theology and engineering…that’s a rather frightening combination.
Before feminist web vigilantes call for my defenestration, I single out female guests for one simple reason. Fraternity alumni boards, working with chapter officers, employ a variety of policies designed to guide and police member behavior. Our own risk management manual exceeds 22 pages. The number of rules and procedures that have to be followed to run a party nowadays would astound anyone over 40. We take the rules very seriously, so much so that brothers who flout these policies can, and will, be asked to move out. But we have very little control over women who walk in the door carrying enough pre-gaming booze in their bellies to render them unconscious before the night is through.
That’s so true! Men never can have any control over those bitchez who smuggle booze into the fraternities in their bellies. It’s all part of the plot.
Here are the things that worry me most. Any of them could result in organizational extinction, even if the fraternity never served the “victim” a single drop of alcohol:
Alcohol poisoning due to overconsumption before, during, or after an event. Death or grievous injury as a result of falling down the stairs or off a balcony. Death or grievous injury as a result of a pedestrian or traffic accident as the young lady weaves her way home. False accusation of rape months after the fact triggered by regrets over a drunken hook-up, or anger over a failed relationship. And false 911 calls accusing our members of gang rape during a party in progress. (Yes, this happened, resulting in seven police cars and thirty officers storming the chapter house.)
False accusations of rape more concerning than actual rape perpetuated by frat members on incapacitated women? Hey, I think I’ve heard this one before!
Yeah so have I. I wonder why Frezza forgot to say anything about outrage bloggers who do it for the clicks.
Never, ever take a drunk female guest to your bedroom – even if you have a signed contract indicating sexual consent. Based on new standards being promulgated on campus, all consent is null and void the minute a woman becomes intoxicated– even if she is your fiancée. And while a rape charge under these circumstances is unlikely to hold up in a court of law, it doesn’t take much for a campus kangaroo court to get you expelled, ruining your life while saddling your fraternity with a reputation for harboring rapists.
Uh huh. That’s what happens all the time. It’s never that the woman gets raped and then nobody does anything about it. Never never never never.
Except all the times that it does.
They’re going to hell in a handbasket, and you know whose fault that is? Drunk women!
I wonder where on EARTH they are getting the drinks FROM!??! (flutters hands)
I bet I can shorten it to two words…
As people pointed out on the We Hunted the Mammoth article on this (and the followup), that 22 page risk management manual really has nothing to do with helping the fraternities. It’s there so that when problems DO happen, the higher level organizations can point to the manual, claim it wasn’t followed, and sacrifice a couple of students to avoid getting the fraternity as a whole shut down. Nobody is expected to actually read or follow the manual.
Well, he may not have said it at the time, but considering how widely this has spread across the net since then, and that he doesn’t seem to have learned any lesson other than ‘don’t get caught’ (something which seems to have served him well back in his own fraternity days), he’s almost certainly complaining about that sort of thing now. And there are a number of MRAs that seem to be saying that as well.
How the hell did this not get hilighted? I’m just staring at everything he said and thinking “Maybe we should shut down the frats. They seem pretty goddamn rapey when they’re actively worrying about being accused of rape and having the police actually raid them suspecting gang rape…
Guys, the solution is obvious: stop inviting women to your frat parties! I mean frats exist to encourage academic excellence, promote community service, etc., right? In fact, just cancel the parties altogether and spend the time, oh I don’t know, maybe studying….
.. uhh, HUH??
It amused me that in the article he mentions turning drunken guys away all the time! They could obviously just as easily turn away the women that show up…but then that would make their stupid parties pointless and their boners may have a sad. Plus, those devious women in college have invented some way of hoarding enough booze in their belly as to appear totally fine at the door and then render themselves a sloppy mess for the next 6 hours. Sneaky feeeeeemales.
AAGGHHHHH… this is just ridiculous. So, Frezza’s argument is that fratboys can’t act like predatory assholes because the wimminz get drunk BEFORE they come to the party, and that results in unintended consequences for the predatory assholes?? (I guess that’s his objection, anyway….).
Looking at the larger picture, tho, there seems to be a common theme in a lot of the FTB threads, this story, the Shermer story, etc., that theme being that men are hard-wired to think foremost about getting our end wet (who can forget Randi’s famous “I guess that’s what men do” comment). I would not be shocked to learn that the fraternity brothers were inviting the women to party in hopes of playing bed games rather than board games… and if I remember correctly, one of Shermer’s responses to criticism included “… she was young and new”, or words to that effect.
I’m not making an argument against casual sex. I could, but my argument would be based on personal values, not empirical evidence. What I will argue, however is, I don’t believe that this behavior is hard-wired. I also don’t believe behavior that sexually objectifies people is hard-wired. Hmmm… these arguments are not based on empirical evidence, so I can’t support these arguments either….
What I CAN argue, based on empirical evidence is, we are not cockroaches. We are not at the mercy of our propensities whether they are hard-wired or the result of memes passed to us over hundreds of generations. We have choices. If I so chose, I can interact with women and not act like I’m the graphics coordinator for Hustler Magazine.
It should not be difficult for educated intellectuals to control their behavior and to think before they speak. It may be harder for fraternity men to do so, but, hey, college is supposed to be challenging.
I think you mean Frezza. I think. Or did I miss a joke?
OMG! You mean, a woman who is too drunk to drive, and who cannot give informed consent on written contracts due to alcohol impairment, is not considered capable of giving informed consent to sex? NOT EVEN IF SHE IS ENGAGED TO ME?!?!?!!? Wow, I am SO glad you informed me of this tricky legal trap! Boy, lawyers and judges are just out to ruin a dudebois life, amirite???!!!!!!11!!!
moarscienceplz @10:
I know, right? It’s like, I already made the down payment, I basically own her already. Geez….
On a related note, Wesleyan University in Connecticut recently issued a new policy that requires on-campus residential fraternities to admit women. This will affect the two all-male residential fraternities there, but won’t affect the non-residential “Greek” organizations. (They don’t have any residential sororities.)
Wesleyan already has two co-ed residential fraternities/societies, Alpha Delta Phi and Eclectic. Some other liberals arts colleges in New England already have co-ed requirements, and Trinity College in Hartford started transitioning fraternities two years ago.
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/09/23/wesleyan-university-orders-on-campus-fraternities-to-admit-women/
http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-p-wesleyan-fraternities-coed-0923-20140922-story.html#page=1
I don’t think Bill Frezza would like this idea.
What’s this “we” crap? I can’t find his age quickly, but the dude must be pushing 60 based on his career notes. Why is he hanging around frat parties in the first place? Creepy as hell.
At least Forbes sacked him.
sonofroj @ 9 – No you’re right, I meant Frezza. Fixed.
Back in the day, when I went to college the first time (end of the 1970s), we’d periodically hear about how there was a “nymphomaniac” at a frat party the Saturday night before. I was too naive and sheltered to realize this was a euphemism for “blaming a gang rape victim”.
Funny how “nymphomaniacs” seem to have gone extinct…
One certain way for there to never be any accusations of rape at fraternity parties would be for all the fraternity members to agree to all remain in the common area with their guests, in a large group, and to only retire for the night ALONE to their own rooms. The “nymphomaniac” scenario described above aside, if the fraternity bros are all staying together, those boozy hos won’t have an opportunity to corner them with rapey/defamatory intent. If the fraternity members all agree that nothing remotely sexual will be allowed for the duration of the party, so long as there is even ONE guest there – that the evening and night of the party are voluntarily celibate for every fraternity member – that would seem like a policy that would go a long way toward protecting those poor innocent frat boiz from those irresponsible, blousy, predatory FEMALES.
@ Blanche Quizno 15
Blanche, I appreciate your advice to the fraternity brothers, however, I’ve seen WAY too many incidents, particularly incidents involving sexual assault where the perpetrators all stood in solidarity and insisted that the Emperor “DID SO have on clothes, we were all there and we saw it”… and there are enough of us and we have enough “pull” to get away with it, despite the fact that other witnesses saw the Emperor naked.
Here’s an interesting bit from BBC News: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-29433262
‘While sexual assault is not a problem specific to fraternities, studies have shown that on college campuses, men who join a fraternity are three times more likely to rape than other men.’
I absolutely hate “studies have shown” and using it like that article does is journalistic malpractice.
Couldn’t find an open source for the claim, but this meta-analysis looks like a decent place to start looking.
“Athletic Participation, Fraternity Membership, and Sexual Aggression Among College Men: A Meta-analytic Review”
Messed up the link, here’s the url: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11199-007-9225-1
A friend linked to this Guardian article: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/24/rape-sexual-assault-ban-frats
Which eventually linked to this: http://www.academia.edu/163846/Foubert_J._D._Newberry_J._T._and_Tatum_J._L._2007_._Behavior_differences_seven_months_later_Effects_of_a_rape_prevention_program_on_first-year_men_who_join_fraternities._NASPA_Journal_44_728-749
And what did the frat boyz DO back in the ‘good old days’ before the schools provided them with a pool of victims?
Key line from the Foubert and Tatum paper:
Based on self-reported data from 111 men who joined a fraternity and 365 who did not. Sexually coercive act is from the 1985 sexual experiences survey and could mean any of the following to make a person have sex when they didn’t want to:
1) use of continual arguments and pressure
2) use of position of authority
3) use of alcohol or drugs
4) Use of force or threat of force