Sorority: No fat chicks, minorities

Wow, you mean I just lucked out and missed the hazing somehow?

 

That can be arranged.

Feet or balls, maggot, which is it going to be?

Oh, wait, that was the Marine Corps.

 

I can certainly help initiate you from a pollywog to a shellback. We'll take care of it the Old Navy way.

 

I am so with Pringle on this...just because your brother or your cousin or your friend's friend lived with an asshole rapist doesn't mean everyone else is an asshole rapist. This thread is the equivalent of someone saying they knew women sportswriters who slept with players, and therefore all women sportswriters sleep with players.

And I'd love to see the stats proving that more rapes and sexual assaults occur in frat houses than in dorms and other private campus housing.

 

So that being the case, we'll fall back onto the much more reliable "anecdotal evidence by way of SportsChick's brother's sister's cousin's fiancee"?

 

So we'll just take your word for it?

 

Wow. This thread has degenerated into stupidity.

This debate isn't about rape stats.

Frats are about the class system, something most North Americans don't want to talk about.

Frats are the emobdiment of that class system: entitled kids ganging together with other entitled kids and freezing out those who they deem "different": the poor, the ugly, the fat and the badly dressed.

It's the American version of the British "U" versus the "Non-U".

They may pretend to look like us but we can spot the phonies by the way they speak.

Frats are about as egalitarian and democratic as radical religious groups.

And yes, I was, for a short time, a frat boy.

 

You forgot to drop the word "philanthropy" in there.

Again, my alltime favorite Greek buzzword.

 

Interesting topic, from what I read. It sort of triggered a thought which I hope I'm not repeating...

I chose the college I did partially because it had no fraternities. I've never been big on group identification, and I've always had a tendency to assume frat guys are troglodytes (very judgmental of me, I know.)

But over my four years on a frat-less campus, I noticed something: We still had incidents of rape, we still had incidents of boorishness, we still had mindsets of mass identification. But in lieu of Greek life, we had dormitories. One dorm was the "party dorm." There was another where all the girls were supposed to be easy. We had the "smart people" dorm, the "druggie" dorm, and so on. It wasn't uncommon for people to adopt the personalities of their dorm, hang only with people from that dorm and act accordingly.

It kind of shifted my perspective on the whole Greek thing, because I now believe it's just a formal way of delineating something that occurs on most campuses anyway. Like attracts like, so if your thing is wearing a dirty white baseball cap, listening to Dave Matthews and achieving sexual conquest by any means necessary, you're probably going to fall in with like minded people whether there's a fraternity or not. If you tend to be stuck up, snotty and aggressively underfed, you're not going to be hanging with the big girls.

I think you could nuke the entire Greek system, and you'd still have most of the incidents and attitudes being discussed here. Whenever people are insecure - and I don't know about you, but I was insecure as shit walking onto a college campus for the first time - they tend to clump together under various appearances and behaviors.

 

Here's some stats, 21.
I post without comment because I don't know the methodology involved.
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:0cVZgGwa6dQJ:www.oneinfourusa.org/attachments/statistics.pdf+Fraternities+rape+statistics&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=10&gl=us

 

Is it too weird that the only reference to fraternities involved gang rape, in relation to gang rapes by sports teams?

All I know is, I went to one of the biggest Greek schools in the country, and all the frat guys I hung out with went on to become boring but successful doctors, lawyers, and accountants. Same for most of the women in my sororities. Maybe they don't include the Jewish houses in those polls.

This whole argument is no better than 'How can you live in the suburbs' versus 'How can you stand the city?' Or 'Why do you not have kids' versus 'Ugh, I'll never have kids.' Why is it anyone's problem whether someone liked Greek life, or hated it?

 

Good heavens, if we had to use logical process to initiate every debate, this board would be four threads and a few empty tables in the corner.