fraternity
With colleges across the country back in session now, millions of freshman are figuring out how to navigate a new world. If you’re one of them, you’re likely wondering what you should major in, how long it’ll be until your roommate’s every word and move drives you nuts, how to navigate a confusing campus, and how not to be pummeled by classes that are more challenging than you ever thought possible. If you’re a guy, you might be wondering if you should join a fraternity.
The answer is no. And I say that as a recently graduated fraternity alum.
Fraternities are organizations plagued by racism, misogyny, homophobia, and hypermasculinity that put on a good enough front and maintain a wall of secrecy to continue without addressing these issues. And that’s to say nothing of hazing, which is constantly talked about and frowned upon, but nowhere near being eliminated. While fraternities draw young male students in (officially) with promises of brotherhood, service, leadership development and (unofficially) with a four-year party experience that can’t be topped by any other social group, the benefits of joining these chapters are outweighed by these problems.
For much of my time as an undergrad, I didn’t have a problem with my fraternity. I thought we were different and resented the stereotyping of all fraternities, down to the use of the word “frat.” Then I moved into the house and surrounded myself with more than 80 of my brothers for the duration of my senior year. Seeing and hearing what happens on a daily basis opened my eyes and made me realize that this was no different than most other fraternities.
It was easy to focus on the positive things when I was only around for the parties, brotherhood retreats, and community service events, but those were superficial. Day-to-day, away from the public, you realize the unchecked privilege enjoyed by a marginally diverse group of males (there are nine non-white faces out of 120 on our most recent composite) fortunate enough to go to university and join a fraternity. Behind closed doors, which can only be opened with a code given to brothers, is a safe space to shamelessly engage in intolerant behavior. No one faces repercussions for dropping the n-word or calling women sluts. Sure, someone might speak up about it, like I’ve tried to, but they’ll be written off as a "liberal pussy." Living in this oppressive environment made me regret ever becoming a part of it and sent me into the worst bout of depression of my life. I only came out of it with the help of a school therapist who happened to be a fraternity alum who also cares deeply about social issues, Zoloft, and the release date of graduation just weeks away.
I know plenty of people in my fraternity who didn’t exhibit these troubling characteristics, and we were successful in raising thousands of dollars for many charitable endeavors. But the prevalence of less savory behavior overshadows the good, and fraternities shouldn’t be cast in a positive light until they take more proactive steps toward eliminating the ugliness than saying, “Yeah, but look at this nice thing we did over here.”
If you're truly concerned about the disadvantages everyone who isn't a white male faces, you shouldn’t join a fraternity. Once a brother asked me at lunch if I was ever going to write about how horrible fraternities are. I guess the answer is yes. Here are 10 Reasons You Shouldn’t Join a Fraternity, From a Fraternity Alum.
You'll probably be hazed.
One of the few redeemable (the standard for that is pretty low) things I can say about my fraternity is that we mostly didn’t haze. I say mostly because, though everyone on the exec board expressed a zero tolerance policy for hazing, there was still the rogue brother who disregarded this rule.
Last year one of the most notorious assholes of the chapter had the audacity to run for the position of pledge educator. During the election process it was revealed, with him out of the room, that he had appeared in front of the judicial board three times that semester for hazing violations. So even if the fraternity isn’t lying when they tell you they don’t haze (not likely), there’s still the possibility that some drunk guy will break the rules and will be held partly accountable. Homeboy was prevented from being in a position where he could haze more easily, but it’s not like he was going to be kicked out of the fraternity. What’s billed as “no tolerance” is really some tolerance.
Of course, things could be worse and you could end up in a fraternity that has no problems hazing your balls off, despite what they advertise and tell Nationals (consider Nationals the federal government and individual chapters, the states). A friend of mine from high school went on to join a fraternity at one of the biggest party schools in the country, and he wasn’t shy about telling me his hazing stories.
He lit a couch on fire with a pledge sitting on it. He made a pledge cut his grass with plastic scissors. He threw 99 BBs into the grass, told a pledge there were 100 and that he expected him to find them all, and then chewed him out when he came back with 100 because the pledge obviously had no choice but to “cheat.” Once that abusive pledgeship window came to a close, there was still the matter of initiation. In order to become a full-fledged brother the pledges literally had to be paddled in. My friend showed me photos of asses so black, blue and bloody they belong on r/morbidreality. Recalling his own paddling, my frat star friend said he couldn’t sit down in class for days.
Sadly it gets worse. Stories of hazing incidents involving serious injury or death pop up in the news with alarming regularity. Last week, the president of Cal State Northridge announced hazing was involved in the death of a Pi Kappa Phi pledge forced to hike 18 miles. In May, 14 brothers of Gamma Phi Gamma at Wilmington College were charged by police for a hazing incident in which a pledge was snapped so hard with a towel he had to have his testicle surgically removed, changing “hazing your balls off” from a euphemism to a literal description. In March, the father of a Penn State freshman who jumped off a roof blamed his son’s suicide on his experience pledging Phi Sigma Kappa. The 18-year-old’s texts revealed he had to chose between snorting coke or having a sex toy shoved up his ass.
I don’t need to go further, although doing so would be remarkably easy. Hazing is a horrifying, dangerous, barbaric reality of pledging a fraternity, no matter how many tell you “we don’t do that.” It’s so awful that Sigma Alpha Epsilon, labeled by Bloomberg as the nation’s deadliest fraternity, announced earlier this year it was banning pledgeship from every chapter and colony across the country. In other words, SAE admitted its previous no-hazing policies weren’t enough.
It highly encourages alcoholism.
Until I started discussing the topic with friends outside of my fraternity, I didn’t realize how uncommon blacking out is. I partied in high school, but it kicked into high gear once I joined a fraternity. I blacked out more times in college than I can count—not that I’d really like to know the exact number. When I tell this to friends they’re rightfully shocked. Most have only done it a handful of times, if at all, but within my fraternity it was just another night.
Having the night obscured by an alcohol-induced fog wasn’t some accident that would cause my brothers and I to reflect and wonder how it happened. It was premeditated. A common refrain before going out to the bars or hosting a party was, “I’m going to black out so hard tonight.”
The result isn’t pretty. Last year, one of the pledges got so drunk he passed out and fell face-first into our aluminum-sided bar. He was alone when it happened, so his pledge brothers came into the room and found him unconscious, lying in a pool of blood. He couldn't remember the accident but he had a couple of reminders: a broken jaw and several shattered teeth.
Another common refrain is, “You can’t be an alcoholic if you’re still in college.” Yes, you can be. And if you’re in a fraternity there’s a good chance you’ll end up being one. Even if no one forces you to drink ungodly amounts, which isn’t unheard of, they will condone, encourage, and praise you for it. Before we initiated pledges we’d put them all into a room and block the doorway with dozens of cases of Natty Light. They couldn’t leave until all the beer was gone, but we were right there helping them and getting just as wasted.
It's a hotbed of racism...
If you asked anyone in my fraternity who the biggest racist was, they’d have no problem answering. But somehow this wasn’t a problem, and the racism didn’t stop with him. I’ve heard several brothers refer to Barack Obama as the N-word and hip-hop referred in the same manner. This seems minor, however, compared to the worst example of racism I witnessed.
Right before Thanksgiving break last year, a girl from the sorority across the street was in our house during the middle of the night and stole several wallets from brothers’ rooms while we were all sleeping. She also happened to be black, and that was the characteristic the most vocally angry brothers chose to focus on the next day. She was never referred to as the girl who stole our wallets. It was always the black girl who stole our wallets. While sitting in my room, I heard a few brothers talking in the hallway, a reliable amphitheater for offensive material, about how it’s a problem when groups of black girls come to our parties. One brother even said, “Let’s put up a sign that says no n****** allowed.”
More discussions about the theft ensued on our private social network (which existed to minimize the possibility of all the offensive or incriminating posts being seen by the public), and I finally had to say something. I left a comment saying that it was problematic how people were discussing the theft and that the girl who did it did so because she’s a shitty person, not because she’s black. I also named the person who I heard recommend the “no n****** allowed” sign, and he responded by saying if I had a problem with “what I think he said,” I should talk to him “like a man” instead of commenting about it.
Because I was already home for break at this point, I texted him and said, “I very much have a problem with what I know you said. And the medium in which I chose to address it is far less problematic than the content of what you said.” He responded by saying it was a joke, so I told him it wasn’t funny. Then he offered the ultimate non-apology: “I’m sorry if I offended you"—completely different from “I’m sorry for what I said.”
My comments were deleted from the social network, and I never heard the issue addressed again.
... and misogyny...
During all of the parties we hosted, girls were allowed to come and drink for free, and we’d pay for all the alcohol by passing the hat. Officially, this was known as the social tax, but in most settings it was called “the pussy tax.” This was the phrase used for urgent texts telling us to pay it, and even on signs posted by the main doors to the second floor, again telling us to pay it urgently.
The same girls who came to our parties were also commonly referred to as “sluts, “sloots,” or “slooters”—as in “When are the sluts coming?” or “Everyone invite sluts tonight.”
Factor in the prevalence of sexual assault at fraternity houses—two different studies found that fraternity men are more likely to commit sexual assault than other men in college—and you’ll see that fraternities are not places for women to visit. They’re places for potential (sometimes unwilling) sex partners. Too many men see "women" and "willing sex partner" as synonymous.
... and homophobia.
I don’t know how people who use “f****t” and “gay" as negative terms can insist they’re not homophobic. You simply can’t have it both ways. Using those words, even if you claim to be joking, implies there’s something wrong with being gay. And with how often I’ve heard those words shouted across the hallways, and in plenty of other settings, there was a lot of implying going on in my fraternity.
Statistically, there’s a good chance at least one of our brothers is gay, and I can’t imagine what it would be like to hear homophobic slurs tossed around as casually as a football at our Saturday tailgates. If there was, in fact, a brother who hadn’t came out to us, no wonder he didn’t feel comfortable doing so.
I understand that this is a continuation of the locker room culture from which many brothers came from in high school, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. It doesn’t matter if the audience to your homophobic slurs is bonded by sport or fraternity or whatever. It doesn’t matter if you say it’s all a joke and that you’re not serious. Saying this type of shit, even in a jocular manner, alienates entire groups of people, and that’s why Richie Incognito has yet to find another NFL team since his behavior became known outside the locker room. It may have been normal in there, but every reasonable person on the outside recognizes how unacceptable it is.
You'll be forced to conform.
Here is a copy of our pledge rules, meant to control the way potential brothers dress, groom, and attend class, including the commute. These rules aren’t as oppressive as some of the other things I’ve detailed, but they’re sure as hell obnoxious. How much room do you have there to dress like yourself? There’s a reason why every fraternity member you see has on some combination of khaki or pastel shorts, Polo, Sperrys, sandals, (curved) baseball caps, visors, and Croakies.
One night, I got in an argument with a brother specifically about the no-bikes-or-longboards rule, and he insisted it was in place to encourage brothers to walk to class and get to know each other better. Please. The only reason this rule was in place was to maintain the fraternity’s narrow definition of what it looks like to be a man. If you want to dress like you belong in a country club that's your prerogative, but insisting it's the standard every man should be held to is extremely closed-minded.
Living in the house is a nightmare (if you're not an alcoholic man-child).
Moving into the house is like going to a year-long summer camp for alcoholic man-children. It’s a disgusting place that at best reeks of stale beer and at worst vomit and stale beer. I’ve walked to the bathroom at 7 p.m. and been greeted by fresh vomit in the doorway, courtesy of one of the newly initiated freshman and probably the worst alcoholic I’ve seen not in their 40s. When I was rushing fraternities I saw a hallway that brothers had pissed all over in anticipation of the first pledge cleanup.
Quiet hours are a myth, as people come home drunk every night of the week and shout in the hallways until they go to bed—if you’re lucky. They’ll also dump the contents of 32-gallon trash cans into the hallways for the pledges to clean up the next morning and continue the party, complete with music loud enough to entertain the entire house, well into the night.
All of this wouldn’t be that bad if it were limited to the standard college party nights: Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. But this happens every night. I’ve had to go crash on a friend’s couch on a Tuesday night because it was too rowdy to realistically make it to class early the next day. I lived in New York City for a summer, and it was like going to sleep in a library in the vacuum of space compared to my fraternity house.
You can find brotherhood elsewhere.
Few outside of a fraternity would use something as contrived as “brotherhood” to describe their friendship, but there’s no reason you can’t build rewarding, life-long bonds outside the fraternity. Fraternities claim to have a superior form of “brotherhood,” but that’s delusional and cocky. You’re going to make close friends in college regardless. The only difference in joining a fraternity is that you’ll have a lot more acquaintances. Unless, of course, you really think you’ll be able to become close friends with each of the 100-something guys in-house, which just isn’t feasible (and is exhausting to even think about).
The recruitment chair will tell you that all of your brothers will have your back, but isn’t that how all friends should be? Many of my fraternity brothers didn’t have the decency to quiet down on a non-Thursday weeknight or stop saying clearly offensive shit when I asked, but four of my best friends had no problem letting me use their home as a getaway when I needed an escape from it all.
So there’s your one-of-a-kind brotherhood.
You'll also have a tougher time bonding if you don't constantly feel the need to display your masculinity; if you don't use "pussy" or "f*g" as often as "man" and "dude;" if you don't think punching a wall is an appropriate way to handle your anger (one of my brothers has hurt his wrist twice doing this—blacked out, of course); or if violence isn't your default solution for a dispute with another man.
When another one of my brothers, who wasn't more than an acquaintance, found out I slept with the woman he'd broken up with three months prior, he reacted by coming into my room wasted at 4 a.m. to stand over my bed and yell at me until he'd repeated himself enough to shift gears and smother me. When he finally got over it months later, or at least claimed to, he said, "Let's not fight over some slut." I didn't bother to tell him the fight was one-sided and she didn't need to be a slut for the dispute to be over because, you know, deaf ears.
If anything goes down, Nationals will throw you under the bus.
If you haven’t read this piece by The Atlantic, you should. (And while you’re at it, read this one on sexism and fraternities.) In addition to detailing the troubling drinking habits and a few other problems I’ve mentioned, it also reveals how the insurance Nationals make members pay is designed to protect the fraternity at large and not the individual. In fact, if shit goes down, the fraternity won’t hesitate to throw you under the bus to save itself.
The risk management procedures—most of which we didn’t follow; LOL at the idea of making a guest list and requiring people to BYOB, and then using a check-in system—aren’t meant to protect you. The rules are designed for the fraternity to avoid liability. I had no idea about the true nature of risk management policies until the sobering Atlantic feature came out. We, like every other fraternity I've been to or known people in, broke most of the rules. Fortunately, no tragic accidents occurred, but if something had happened we would have been doomed. Here's The Atlantic's take:
“Once [the plaintiff] violated their frat’s alcohol policy, they parted company with the frat. It’s a neat piece of logic: the very fact that a young man finds himself in need of insurance coverage is often grounds for denying it to him… When the inevitable catastrophes do happen, that policy can come to seem like a cynical hoax than a real-world solution to a serious problem. When something terrible takes place—a young man plummets from a roof, a young woman is assaulted, a fraternity brother is subjected to the kind of sexual sadism that appears all too often in fraternity lawsuits—any small violation of policy can leave fraternity members twisting in the wind.”
If an incident occurs, risk management policies tell you to spill your incriminating guts about what happened instead of telling you to shut your mouth, like any good lawyer would. “Those questionnaires and honest accounts—submitted gratefully to the grown-ups who have arrived, the brothers believe, to help them—may return to haunt many of the brothers, providing possible cause for separating them from the fraternity, dropping them from the fraternity’s insurance, laying the blame on them as individuals and not on the fraternity as the sponsoring organization.”
A lot of these problems are seen as points of pride.
Perhaps worse than the existence of the problems I’ve outlined is the fact that many of them are considered points of pride. Drinking so much your brain stops remembering things makes you a man. Ditto to viewing women as targets of sexual conquest. And if you’re willing to be the silent victim of abuse for several months, that makes you worthy of becoming a brother. Hiding the unsavory aspects and putting the fraternity first isn’t only good PR—it’s being a good brother.
There are probably people who'll be pissed at me for discussing the darker side of the fraternity I swore an oath to, but I can’t imagine the anger coming from anyone who isn't guilty of the injustices I've described. I just hope the people in my fraternity who didn't engage in these things understand where I'm coming from. Revealing and combating these things are far more important than protecting some club I joined as a naive 19-year-old who just wanted to party and didn't consider the broader social implications.