<p>@Katliamom wrote: “Please explain to me why it’s an insult to call the Greek system antediluvian? It is QUITE LITERALLY true. What’s so offensive about calling an institution outdated? This is a ridiculous and defensive reaction.”</p>
<p>It is not “quite literally true”. That is your opinion. I hate the idea of fraternities, but it is also your opinion that they are outdated. I guess you consider the Kiwanis etc type of groups outdated too? A group is a group is a group. </p>
<p>I don’t see how frats can be shut down if they are off campus. We may not like the idea of the KKK but it doesn’t mean we can prevent them from meeting. This is America, and if people want to get together and call themselves Tappa Kegga Day, or whatever, they can do so. </p>
<p>What I would like to see is some sort of oversight if a frat wants to be an official part of a school’s student organizations. I especially think the police need to start policing some of these houses. If a bar was serving underage students it would get busted, the same thing needs to happen to frats. </p>
<p>Bay, you shouldn’t necessarily give up so easily. Given everything we know about freshmen girls and fraternity parties, it shouldn’t surprise anyone if fraternities attract a disproportionate number of rapists, since they seem to have a target-rich environment. But that doesn’t mean that banning fraternities would reduce the number of rapes significantly; it might just mean that if fraternities were banned, the rapists would find another way to rape. </p>
<p>Before I sign on to the ban-the-fraternities movement, I would like to understand how fraternities make things worse. That’s what’s so powerful about the UVa stories of “Jackie” and “Kelly” – they describe how men are coerced into participation against their better judgment. THAT’s what you need to show to ban fraternities – that they create rapists and enable them, not just attract them.</p>
<p>(I would be awfully surprised if men’s Division I football and basketball teams didn’t also have more rapists than average, but I don’t hear as many calls for banning football and basketball.)</p>
<p>As many here have said, the culture needs to change, and it’s not just the fraternity culture. If anything, fraternities could be a useful tool for culture change, since they actually have some power to effect a change in culture among their membership.</p>
<p>(By the way, just to make clear, I dislike fraternities and went to a college that had none of them while I was there. I do have friends who were in fraternities and sororities, though, and who had overwhelmingly positive experiences that did not involve raping anyone or being raped.)</p>
<p>I know it’s a new adjective, and I just started hearing it in the last couple of years, but I just read 20+ definitions in the Urban Dictionary and not one mentions fraternities. I have heard it IRL applied to a song (Blurred Lines) and to a group of people, as in “I don’t hang out with a rapey crowd.” Wiktionary: agrees with popular definitions in Urban Dictionary, no mention of fraternities. Collins suggested words: same story.</p>
<p>I would like to see your evidence for it having been invented specifically for fraternities. </p>
<p>No, TV4caster, actually it IS literally true. The Greek system predates Noah’s flood. And that’s what the word means. Literally. </p>
<p>And I said in other posts, I have no problems with fraternities and sororities per se. I have a problem with them being on public school campuses and affecting campus culture. If they existed off campus, they’d be just another social organization those who find them distasteful could steer clear of. As it is, they have way too much influence – negative, terrible influence, imho – on campuses. </p>
<p>And do you really believe “This is America, and if people want to get together and call themselves Tappa Kegga Day, or whatever, they can do so”? Yea, try having a professional sports team called the Red Skins… or a social organization called the Ku Klux Klan and see how much public approbation you will get!</p>
<p>Outdated is obviously a derogatory term for anything. I’m not even convinced that ‘antediluvian’ is “quite literally” true since, according to Google, it implies that fraternities have been around before the dawn of antiquity. But the reason why outdated is insulting is because it implies that the Greek system is obsolete (in fact, that’s what “outdated” literally means) and no longer has any value today. I personally don’t care for them but it’s rather obvious that many people currently in college find some kind of value in Greek organizations. They might be ancient, they might even be irredeemably corrupt, but ‘outdated’ is certainly disputable.</p>
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<p>There actually is a football team called the Redskins in eastern United States though. They receive some criticism but it’s hardly overwhelming, and they have at least as many supporters as detractors (and certainly far less support than the KKK, an organization so hateful that it has zero political power or influence any more.)</p>
<h1>361^ I think (some) fraternity houses are dangerous places and (some) create a culture described in the Rolling Stone article. I have no studies and can’t prove that. Most women I know with fraternity experiences warn their daughters, nieces, young friends to be careful. They don’t see fraternities as safe places. I can think of very few places where I felt less safe as a young woman.</h1>
<p>Whether fraternities help create rapists, and don’t just provide an easy hunting ground for the serial rapists, is the real question for me. What happens in military situations? Are all men who rape as part of an invading army serial rapists who happen to have opportunity?</p>
<p>I’ve been waiting for the athlete discussion. Poetgrl alluded to it a bit. </p>
<p>adding: on one of these threads, I reported men I know IRL saying it is time to ban fraternities AND sports if that eliminates rape.</p>
<p>@Katliamom There is a difference between outdated and old. Breathing has been around since long before Noah’s flood and it isn’t outdated. Next time you try to throw out a word to impress someone, try using it correctly. </p>
<p>FYI- Noah’s flood was around 2400 BC. Fraternities were started in 1776 at William and Mary. Good try though!</p>
<p>What? Are you saying that the US fraternity and sorority system, which generally started in the first half of the 19th century, PREDATED the mythical event known as Noah’s Flood??? Really? At first I thought that perhaps you were confusing the word with “antebellum.” But no, you have stated several times that you are talking about the biblical flood.</p>
<p>Between this head-shaker and MYO claiming that using a perjorative term to describe something is not putting it down, I feel as if I’ve slipped into an alternate universe. </p>
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<p>Well, in all my years here I’ve heard the Ivies called many things, but “outdated” is not one of them. And if a person said that, I’d just think they had as shaky a grasp on reality as the people who think that there are no other schools worth aspiring to.</p>
<p>As far as athletes though, I did read a study (I believe from Duke) that suggested that pro athletes actually have a lower rate of domestic violence than non-athletes. I won’t generalize to all athletes though, and obviously there may be some problems with the methodology if it is tied to something like prosecutions where being an athlete gives you an edge in avoiding punishment in some areas. But I would be hesitant to argue that ‘banning sports’ would actually eliminate sexual violence. I don’t think any one thing can, unfortunately. </p>
<p>Alh, I’m a man you don’t know IRL but desperate that, I think that some fraternities create an environment that increases the probability of rape. Those serial rapists find such fraternities an opportunity-rich, supportive environment for rape. Others who might not rape are encouraged to do so to obtain social acceptance and the behavioral becomes more normal. Banning fraternities will not eliminate rape but by taking away one set off supportive environments, should reduce the probability of rape and reduce the number of males participating. As I have argued before, the fraternity environment activates a whole array of social psychological mechanisms that make risky and bad behavior more likely. Fraternities also create a legal and social structure that discourages reporting rapes or standing up to help prevent the rape in the first place. </p>
<p>I don’t know whether there are well-conducted studies that compare the incidence of rape on campuses with and without fraternities add major parts of campus life.( I haven’t read the literature on rape - I’ve got several disciplines that I follow). Let’s hope there are or will be. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the traits we associate with personality are more situation-specific and malleable than one might think. But different people have different predictable reactions in different situations. For example, I have one gifted employee whom people call a control freak. When he fears that he will be blamed if something isn’t perfect (this seems to be an extreme fear on his part stemming from I don’t know what), he will spend lots of energy setting up and controlling the situation so that either nothing goes wrong or if it does he won’t be blamed. The latter behavior is usually counterproductive, dysfunctional and time-consuming. I have found that if I set up situations in which he does not fear blame, he drops much of the controlling, counterproductive behavior. By changing the situation/context, we get different and better behavior. Eliminating the dangerous behavior-inducing or behavior-encouraging setting at some fraternities can similarly engender better behavior. </p>
<p>As an individual solution, I told my daughter not to go to frat parties. Add a systemic solution, I’d drain the swamps. </p>
<p>Incidentally, I’m not impressed by arguments that “I went to frat parties thirty years ago and didn’t get raped or even don’t know others who admitted to bring raped.” I know women who were raped. I ran across a guy at an all male institution I rarely frequented who used to get women from neighboring colleges really drunk and then would have sex with them on the pool table or bar with others watching. His brothers reported that this was a regular occurrence. At the time, people thought his behavior was intended to degrade but didn’t at the time think of it as rape – perhaps because it didn’t appear non-consensual. Our experiences are small sample anecdotal. We should be looking for data and causal mechanisms (my focus has been the latter). Given the under-reporting of rape, good data may be hard to come by. </p>
<p>I’m not impressed by anecdotes either. Let’s leave them out of the discussion, and then what do we have to discuss about fraternity rape? Nothing supported by actual real-life rape data. We have a lot of sociological studies that summate for us how fraternity men <em>think</em> about “models” indicative of rape, and we have some freshmen at a couple of colleges telling us whether they think they were sexually coercive. But we don’t have any information (other than anecdotes) about what fraternity men actually <em>do</em> in terms of raping women. That is not much to go on or to indict the entire system with, imo. And it is not enough for me to label fraternity men as “rapists” or the cutesy “rapey” iteration. Those are defamatory words.</p>
<p>“What? Are you saying that the US fraternity and sorority system, which generally started in the first half of the 19th century, PREDATED the mythical event known as Noah’s Flood??? Really?”</p>
<p>The American system invokes ancient fraternal organizations, many of which lasted hundreds of years, seen in ancient Greece and Egypt.</p>
<p>Uh, you are really, really reaching there. (Been reading too much Dan Brown?) </p>
<p>Besides which, how are you dating Noah’s flood? </p>
<p>Shawbridge, I offer my example of a <em>specific</em> fraternity I knew very, very well, even living there for a couple of summers, only as a counterweight to those who are claiming that fraternities are the root of all evil. You’re “not impressed”? I’m not impressed by those carrying torches and pitchforks in this discussion, some of whom make up new definitions for words, make wild claims of all kinds, and are willing to like any BS that supports their personal prejudices. And I say this as a person who would happily see all fraternities and sororities done away with.</p>
<p>Well, that’s not really well-supported either but at least it’s not as incorrect as saying that frats are ‘quite literally’ predating the Biblical flood. </p>
<p>I’m not even sure how this line really got started though. College fraternities are really an American college ‘thing’. If there are any superficial similarities to something that happened during the reign of King Tut then they are probably the same similarities that any large group of people and therefore meaningless.</p>
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<p>I think that we might have cause and effect a little screwed up here. I don’t think that fraternities - or even just rapists - actually create the legal and social structures that we’re talking about here. The actual rapists might benefit from these preexisting systems, but these systems are created and enforced by and large by people who actually aren’t sexual predators themselves. I don’t think that college deans who sweep rapes under the rug are actually perverts. I don’t think they even necessarily want to hurt anyone. They just have an easier time empathizing with some people than others, and feel professionally obligated to put their institution first. </p>
<p>It’s kind of like the Penn State situation; Jerry Sandusky did not create the system that allowed him to prey on children for so many years unnoticed. Rather, administrators and coaches – none of whom were actually child molesters themselves – got together and made bad decisions that hurt and endangered a lot of innocent people. It’s not just a frat thing, it happens with pretty much any large organization. Police departments covering up police corruption, churches covering up child abuse by clergy, businesses hiding fraud. The vast majority of the people involved aren’t the ones who originally committed the crimes, but they get pulled into this denial, this self-preservation vacuum and don’t have the spine to get themselves out of it.</p>
<p>I don’t know when Noah’s flood happened and whether Noah built an arc, like the Bible says. (Consolation says it’s mythic.) I do know that fraternal societies predate Christianity. </p>
<p>I haven’t been reading Dan Brown, but I have been reading Sigma Chi’s online history of Phi Beta Kappa. I suppose it may be pretty much the same thing ;)</p>