@CaliCash@Cardinal Fang – It’s amazing to me that you people believe the things that you believe.
I’m the one with first hand experience, but argue with me if you must.
No fraternity throws parties with the sole goal of having sex. Sure, it’s a byproduct if the right guy finds the right girl. But it is not the goal. (But you won’t believe me because it doesn’t fit your narrative).
I did read the article and I still believe obligation sex is ridiculous. It’s just not how things work. You don’t escalate from the dance floor to the bedroom because you feel obligated. Honestly, having been in that situation, and knowing tons of sorority girls I can tell you that obligation sex is ridiculous. (Again you won’t believe me because it doesn’t fit your narrative.)
Lastly, I’m not sure if you are familiar with the real campus rape statistics. 6.1 students out of 1000 will experience sexual assault or rape. And non students of the same age are more likely to experience rape or sexual assault than students. So please stop with the false narrative that 1 in 5 college students will experience sexual assault or rape. It’s simply not true.
It read to me like he realized the issue, but couldn’t find a good instrumental variable.
I also wondered whether the fraternity rankings were affected by the willingness of the women to hook up. Let’s say that two sororities had otherwise identical women, but in one of the sororities the women were more willing to hook up. Then the fraternities might rank the more willing sorority higher. In that case, it would be circular to say that higher-status women were more likely to hook up. Rather, the women got the higher status precisely by being more willing to hook up.
@TransferGopher, since you haven’t been following this long long thread and its predecessors, you’ve missed the long discussion about the bogosity of the BJS study you reference. In particular, you probably missed the part where I explained that I wrote to the author of the study, and she admitted that it undercounted rape, and further that the study was unable to distinguish whether being at college was more dangerous for sexual assault than not being at college, if socio-economic status was held constant.
I’m not inclined to trust a study when the author says it’s wrong.
Is there no such thing anymore as the really attractive girl (sorority or non-sorority) who ONLY “hooks up” with a guy that she is at least dating? Do these girls no longer have status on college campuses? I would argue they used to have a lot of status. Guys would compete for these girls.
@cardinal fang I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m going to trust a government study over an anonymous internet poster. I feel like if the author of the study admitted it was wrong it would not be readily available on the internet. Thanks though.
@TransferGopher, here, yet again, is the entire 278-page book that was solicited and paid for by the US Government, that explains that the rape and sexual assault numbers in the NCVS data that your study used are undercounts:
(1) The interviews are not conducted in private. Interviewees may not want to talk about their sexual assaults in front of their families.
(2) The interviews are conducted in the context of crime. People who don’t realize that their rape was a crime even though they didn’t report it to police would be less likely to bring it up.
(3) The interviewers don’t define the terms they are using to the interviewees.
One can look at the raw data. I have; I loaded it up on my computer. For 2012, the panel interviewed 160,000 people and found 18 rapes. Eighteen total rapes, all year, for 160,000 people. Some people might think that number is a tad low. Others, like me, think it’s complete poppycock.
@cardinal fang So we really have no idea how many women are sexually assaulted? That’s ridiculous. I will trust the 8 year government study.
I can’t even find the post where you talk about writing the author. So if you could direct me to that, that would be great.
@dstark What you are talking about is not common among any group of people. But it is not something exclusive to fraternities. In my personal experience I’ve seen way more sketchy things at house parties than at greek parties.
Again, I’m the only one on this board with first hand experience with current fraternity life at a major school.
"I think when women post on this thread they should list their bmi and original hair color. "
Ha ha! When I was in college, I was 5’4" and in the neighborhood of 120 pounds. Normal, average build. Medium brown shoulder length hair. Green eyes. Freckles. Reasonably conventionally attractive. The closest “celebrity” I look like would be Bridget Fonda, very girl next door. “Maintenance” simply included haircuts, normal grooming and the requisite curling iron of the mid 1980’s – no manicures or pedicures. Dressed mostly in a classic, preppy style - think Fair Isle sweaters, topsiders and penny loafers. Somehow managed to “snag a man” without parading around in stilettos and short skirts dressed like a whore, imagine that! Amazing!
“It’s also worth noting that the average BMI for sororities at USC is below the average BMI for all women there. Sorority women are thinner than non-sorority women. Judging from their pictures, they’re blonder, too.”
Ha - my two friends / coworkers who are recent USC alums (Theta and A Chi O in particular) are both very dark-haired and dark-complected – one is of Israeli heritage and the other is Italian / Eastern European.
TransferGopher, I am asking you because you are in a frat. I am not quite getting similar answers from others. Maybe it is the definition of common that is the difference in what I hear and what you write.
I think Bridget Fonda was very attractive.
I like freckles too.
My wife is a blonde jew. I found that attractive. Has a great BMI. I hated her clothes. She dressed very conservatively.
@TransferGopher maybe you can answer my question. Let’s say you have a very attractive girl, everyone agrees about that. If she is constantly “hooking up” with a different guy all the time, does that add or subtract to her status? Likewise for a guy - really attractive guy. If he is well known for just one night stands and nothing else, how does that affect his status?
Well, I don’t know if I agree with a lot of what TransferGopher says, but based on my experience I do think there’s some perspective that’s worth thinking about.
I went to a small/mid-sized school. The girls from school who were at our parties were our friends. Don’t get me wrong - they were friends with pleasing curves who we’d love to date, but they were friends. And we threw parties hoping to get them to date us as well as for fun. But if someone raped one of them and we knew about it, the risk wouldn’t be that we’d ignore it; the risk would be that we’d go to jail because we’d beat the guy up. But these are gentler times when kids aren’t allowed to walk to the playground by themselves.
So some of the worst behavior that I read about just doesn’t compute to me. I’m not denying the statistics. I’m just saying that I’m always conflicted because I have a hard time reconciling my personal experience with a lot of what I read.
And I completely acknowledge that we were far from saints. Lots of sexist jokes, but we kept it relatively clean around the ladies. And I agree with HarvestMoon1 - for the most part we dated the girls from school that we liked; we didn’t really “hook-up” with them as much as seems to be the case now (I don’t think the term existed). It always seemed much easier and more fun to me to have a girlfriend who you could see every night rather than try to go through all this effort to find a one night stand.
Maybe girls today put up with more cr*p. I don’t think the girls back then would have wanted or tolerated what seems to be going on now.
dstark - let’s not. The women will ask the men to list the size of their … incomes.
Was that too early for AIDS to have an impact on casual sex? I think the 70s may have been different. I graduated in 78 from college. It does seem to me on these threads there may be different experiences reported for those who attended college in the 70s compared to the 80s.
adding: first friend died in 82. By 85 or 86 single friends were getting tested together with potential partner before having sex. No one I knew was having stranger sex/ casual sex in the mid 80s. I am trying to think when there was a shift to casual sex again. Is it the children of 70s parents? omg
Notice that the young women who are more likely to get raped are freshmen in their first weeks of school. When I read articles about party rape, I repeatedly see that fraternity men will protect women who are or have been their girlfriends, and friends of those women, but see unknown freshman girls as free prey. In other words, there are two classes of women: your women, whom you have to treat with respect, and free women, whom you can rape if you are someone not concerned about consent, an in crowd of women who were safe, and an out crowd who were not safe.
@al2simon, you and your friends would beat up someone who raped one of your female friends. But what was the attitude to the other women, the ones who were not your friends? How would you have felt if one of your male friends bragged that he had plied a woman you didn’t know with alcohol until she could barely walk, then led/dragged her to their room and had intercourse with her? Would that guy get beaten up, or would you just turn away and do nothing?
Come on. I know you want to protect your brothers, but you couldn’t possibly be that naive.
EDIT: I’ll remove this section because that will make a WHOLE new convo.
It sucks you know. Because I was admitted to Minnesota and was actually considering going and maybe even rushing as a sophomore. But if your laissez faire approach to sexual assault is common among males there, there is no way in hell that I am going there.
