I was always appreciative of the fact that a sizeable portion of like-minded male and female students could associate on their own on Friday and Saturday nights effectively segregating themselves from the rest of us.
The late-night sequelae were sort of heart-wrenching, however.
xx
@PizzaGirl, I’m baffled that you seem to be saying that the lacrosse team has as much to do with the tennis team as sororities have to do with fraternities.
Does the lacrosse team have mixers with the tennis team? Do the two teams work together on projects? Does the lacrosse team have parties every Friday and Saturday night so that the tennis team will come the parties and get drunk and the lacrosse team members can have sex with them? Do schools have Offices of Tennis Team and Lacrosse Team Life, establishing rules that apply to the tennis team and the lacrosse team and no other organizations? Do the two teams socialize more with each other than with other people on campus? I don’t think fraternities and sororities are intrinsically intertwined, but they’re in fact socially intertwined on many campuses.
Yes, they are socially intertwined but what does that have to do with the actions of the administration?
Your premise was that the college needs sorority “backup” or “support” if they decide to take action against or shut down fraternities who are violating the alcohol rules. Hence your point about playing hardball and offering to have them “rethink their stance.”
If a college decides this is the year or the moment to crack down on underage-serving fraternities who create an unsafe environment, what the sororities think and whether they are in favor of this or not in favor of this is of zero consequence. None. The college doesn’t NEED sorority “permission” to enforce whatever laws are on the books or whatever rules they wish to enforce re carding or serving or registering parties ahead of time or whatever.
Colleges put frats on social probation all the time and the sororities don’t have any “say” or “pull” in it, and they don’t need to “back up” the admin - it is what it is.
"Does the lacrosse team have parties every Friday and Saturday night so that the tennis team will come the parties and get drunk and the lacrosse team members can have sex with them? "
You know, I recognize that there are some over-the-top, eyeroll-worthy Greek systems, often at schools who admit anyone with a pulse in the first place, where Greeks-mingle-only-with-Greeks and heaven forbid anyone date someone who isn’t Greek. But I’m kind of used to dealing with normal people in normal systems. There just isn’t this divide between Greeks and non-Greeks except in your imagination. My son is in a house - and his girlfriend isn’t in the Greek system. No one cares. His brothers don’t care, his female friends who are Greek don’t care. Really. You have got to stop acting as though these are exclusive, mingle-only-with-each-other systems.
My premise was that the college would be saying to the sororities: which would you prefer, having parties with alcohol yourselves, or having fraternities stopped from having parties with alcohol? I thought (perhaps wrongly) that the sororities would prefer the alcohol parties to no alcohol parties.
This article is terrible:
First of all. NeonTommy is not a credible website. Just read the comments.
Of course the people who throw the parties, supply the alcohol, and provide the fun are going to get more girls. That’s just how life is.
Nobody is forcing girls to have sex with guys in this situation. Girls are choosing to sleep with them. If they don’t want to have sex, they shouldn’t have sex.
Both sorority presidents interviewed counter what the author is saying.
Here is the reason why fraternities try to invite more girls than guys: the fraternity members will invite their friends. Most of these friends are already members of the house. So they don’t really have many male friends to invite. They don’t invite random guys. The main reason is that random guys add far more liability than girls, but also the members don’t know them, so why would they welcome them into their home? Guys would rather meet girls than other guys.
More girls are invited for many reasons. Girls party hop while guys stay at their house. You need to invite more girls in order to keep the house full and fun. Girls party in big groups. So if you want a certain girl to come, she may ask you to add 10 of her sorority sisters to the list as well. It’s impossible to tell how busy you will be in one night because you don’t know how many other events are happening that night. So it’s better to be at capacity and turn people away than not have anybody show up.
We don’t view members of other fraternities or sororities as liabilities because we feel that because they are Greek that they have respect for the house and the system. But we have far less random fraternity guys trying to get in because either they are having a party or one of their friends in a different house is having a party.
The fraternities throw parties because they want to have fun. Not other people.
Hopefully this makes sense to you guys. @ me if you have any questions because I’m not on here very often.
So then you are agreeing with Hernandez’s thesis: that fraternities throw parties in order to get women. So then Hernandez wants to measure what it “costs” to get women, and what it “costs” for women to get men.
Ahem. That’s the problem: some men ARE forcing women to have sex with them. Not all of the sex is nonconsensual. Most of it is freely chosen by both people, and if two people want to have drunk sex, more power to them. But sometimes men rape drunk women.
Moreover, let’s consider this “obligate sex,” exemplified by the USC sorority member who said “The findings in this hit close to home. There have been a number of times when I have had sexual relations in a time when I would by choice elect not to, but in a time where I felt like I had no choice.”
Nobody is saying that the guy in this situation is a rapist. But with “obligate sex,” the interests of fraternity men and the interests of their conquests diverge. For fraternities, “obligate sex” is a success. Fraternities should want to encourage “obligate sex,” because it achieves their goal of having their members have sex. But for sororities, it’s a failure. Sororities ought to be unhappy about it: their members are ending up having sex they didn’t want to have. Sororities ought to be in favor of preventing the situations where their members feel obliged to have sex they don’t want, provided the opportunities for sex they do want remain.
I think TransferGopher makes some good points, though I don’t think that fraternity brothers’ motivations for not inviting that many other guys are quite as pure as he suggests.
But no matter. I think it’s very clear that the article’s author is simply whining when he complains that there are often more girls than guys at a party. He spends a lot of time on this point. Fine. Let’s have many more guys. Then he would be complaining that “these poor girls are outnumbered. It’s like a bunch of deer surrounded by a pack of wolves”.
If anything, having more women at these parties should improve safety, at least marginally. However, it does strengthen the ability of each male to find a willing partner.
It’s important to distinguish between Hernandez’s thesis and the opinions of the editorialist who is writing the article. The editorialist is interested in sexual assault; Hernandez isn’t. The outnumbered point is important to the economic arguments about “producer surplus” and market pricing of sex. Hernandez focuses on alcohol for different reasons than the editorialist implies.
The thesis at least tries to collect some data and analyze it and avoids making too many wild claims. The editorialist is taking a, shall we say, rather different approach.
Maybe, maybe not. We might think that women would protect one another at parties, but the “**** blocking” comment suggests that peer pressure ensures they don’t. Meanwhile, the competition among women for the few males might encourage unsafe behavior among women. I’m guessing that the safest ratio for women would be 1:1, and big deviations in either direction would result in less safety.
I had a long talk with my daughter, who was in a sorority and her fiance, who was in a fraternity.
They both agreed that…
The fraternity and sorority dynamic favors the guys.
They fraternity system is about male power.
Hookup sex can just be about sex.
Some women look at hookup sex as a way to form a relationship with a guy. Some guys will say anything to get a woman in bed. Some guys lie.
When the woman wakes up and finds the guy is gone, she gets angry. Bad things can result from this.
That is a cost of hookup sex.
Guys and gals are often not on the same page.
My daughter said her sorority would never want to host a party. The last thing they want is a bunch of drunken guys destroying their house, trying to have sex in the women’s rooms, etc. 
Having the parties at a fraternity does give the guys an advantage though.
My daughter’s fiance said some guys are pigs. They are willing to have sex anywhere.
Both my daughter and her fiance say Emma can be telling the truth. They don’t know if the story is true, but they would not be surprised.
Thanks for that DStark. Does that change your opinion on any of this?
CF wouldn’t the caveat to your quote be as long as the woman was not “too drunk” or later decides she was too drunk to consent?
@TransferGopher
@CaliCash, The thesis was peer reviewed? Where was it published?
The caveat would be that both parties consented with neither being incapacitated, which is what I meant by “freely chosen.” I have no sympathy for women who say they were incapacitated when they weren’t, so that would not form any part of a caveat.
@"Cardinal Fang" Check the first page. ucbalumnus posted the link. I’m fairly sure it was peer reviewed.
EDIT: Yeah, I can’t find where it said peer reviewed.
Gopher, why are you saying Neon Tommy is not a credible website? Is the University of Southern California not a credible institution? They sponsor NT, which is a student run news organization under USC’s Annenberg School of Communications. The university logo is even on their homepage.
@yoamogatos When I did my USC interview, my interviewer (associate director of admissions) spoke to me in detail about Neon Tommy. This isn’t just some blog.
It’s a master’s thesis, which means that it was reviewed by the supervising professor(s). But they’re reviewing it to masters thesis standards, not publishing standards.
Not peer reviewed in the sense that a published paper would be. Generally peers refer to review by other respected academics or professional in the field outside of the home institution for publication in a journal. This was reviewed by the process used to grant the master’s degree, but not as in an outside publication.
@"Cardinal Fang" @mom2and Thank you for the clarification I figured that because it was published as a master’s thesis, it would be looked at in the same light. Guess not!