<p>Hunt wrote: And you haven’t identified where you or your kids attended college,</p>
<h1>129</h1>
<p>*Adding my D was a student at Yale when it happened, and although she thought it was an extremely stupid act, she was not threatened by it in the least. *</p>
<p>This is the reason why Bay’s position on the Dekes rape slogan chanting is so interesting to me. </p>
<p>Actually addressing the parents of the daughters in question about where they send their kids seemed more than hypothetical to me, unlike wishing for speed bumps on the freeways around a college. But that was just my read on the conversation. OF COURSE you should warn your son to watch his step, and I don’t think anyone will find that controversial.</p>
<p>Wait–Bay had a kid at Yale when the DKE incident happened, and she never heard of anybody being warned about sexually dangerous fraternities? This strains even my very broad credulity. Maybe the daughter doesn’t talk much. My son was there, and he had a lot to say about it–all highly negative about DKE.</p>
<p>I won’t be identifying where my kids or I went to college, for privacy reasons and not any other reason. You already know where one went, and you might know where another went from previous discussions.</p>
<p>If “rapey” is overly vulgar and desensitizes some to the actual meaning and impact of rape… </p>
<p>Maybe a more appropriate term is this:</p>
<p>Misogynistically and Chauvinistically Inclined</p>
<p>Or</p>
<p>MACI (“macy”)</p>
<p>Bay - I absolutely respect the privacy of your kids. You put that in this thread. I did not pull it up from an old thread. It was just a few days ago. If you hadn’t posted it here, I would never have mentioned it.</p>
<p>Hunt,
Maybe because my D knew some of the young men in question and did not assess them to be “sexually dangerous.” She thought they were stupid and immature, but not threatening. </p>
<p>But, c’mon, Bay–everybody knows that DKE at Yale has a horrible reputation for sexually aggressive men. If your daughter wasn’t warned about this as a freshman, then her freshman counselor must have been incompetent. The chanting incident was just a last straw that finally got them punished.</p>
<p>Maybe she was warned, Hunt, but if so, she never shared that with me. I try hard not to make things up on these threads. Sometimes I might fill in a little gap with something logical, admittedly. But in this case, no, I never heard her express any fear or concern or anything like that about DKE. Some of them were her friends, I understand, including a fellow high school classmate who went there (a very nice boy, I might add).</p>
<p>My daughter also knows a very nice boy from high school who is on the football team and joined DKE (at least, I think he did). What I don’t know is whether he is still nice. I wouldn’t want my son to join that particular organization, at least until it seriously cleans up its act. They have shown too much evidence of being a pernicious influence.</p>
<p>Let me add that there are fraternities at Yale that don’t have this kind of bad reputation, and which seem much more like casual drinking clubs. I wouldn’t be nuts about my kid joining one of them, either, but my objections would be much less.</p>
<p>Certain fraternities earn their reputation by, obviously, repeatedly hosting parties where women are raped. I don’t see where on this thread it was generalized to all fraternities or to all fraternity men. It is also not used by the students toward fraternities where rapes are rare or non-existent. Students have plenty of other descriptive adjectives for fraternities to avoid that do not have anything to do with rape (lame, creepy, nerdy, smelly).</p>
<p>If I am doing the math correctly, a typical large college has four male on female sexual assaults each day. I do not know of a single female on male rape. We have talked to our boys about how to get into a relationship, out of one, how to avoid bad situations with manipulative females, but we felt no need to warn them about how not to be raped by a woman. Talks with our daughter were very different.</p>
<p>Now we have sort of looped back around to Hunt’s rapey exercise. There was the suggestion we should call no groups rapey unless we could prove there had been actual rape. That is why I wondered if Bay wanted to suggest other language to use to warn young women about potentially dangerous fraternity houses. I can see parallels between not wanting groups called rapey and not wanting young women to talk about being raped, or name their rapists. And wonder if it is a kind of silencing? I thought the Deke case was a slam dunk since I can’t really see how there is any problem with calling chanting rape slogans rapey behavior, and it seemed to me most agreed rapey is usually applied to behavior of groups not individuals. </p>
<p>One of my sons was in a fraternity. All my brothers, father, uncles, grandfathers…
Some fraternities are rapey.</p>
<p>I have no particular investment in the word “rapey.” It’s just a convenient shorthand for, “At that fraternity, the guys are creepily sexually aggressive, and some of them will try to get you hammered and then get you to go with them to one of the small rooms upstairs. They particularly like to hit on freshmen girls during the first couple of weeks of school. If there is dancing, strange guys will come up behind you and grind on you without asking. If you decide to go to a party there, go with a group, stay with your group, and watch what you drink. Don’t drink the punch, or anything you haven’t opened yourself. Look out for the other girls with you, too.” Is that nicer, somehow, than, “Watch out for that frat. It’s kind of rapey.”–?</p>
<p>I will note, in passing, that I have also heard this complaint, about different groups: “The guys there don’t want to talk, or to dance. They just want to play beer pong with each other, and they don’t want to let the girls play, either.”</p>
<p>right - rapey says in one short word a a whole lot of commonly understood warnings parents give their daughters and sorority actives should be giving their pledges.</p>
<p>If I understand correctly, Bay doesn’t seem to acknowledge any warnings are ever necessary for young women, at least as regards fraternities.</p>
<p>Well, perhaps some people are squeamish about the idea of giving warnings about a particular fraternity, at least if nobody there has actually been convicted of rape. I can imagine that there might be fraternities that have an unfairly bad reputation, or which have changed for the better and no longer deserve the old reputation. I just have to say, that’s not what I’ve observed. Sadly, what I observe is people flocking to the fraternities that have the well-deserved bad reputation.</p>
<p>I agree about the flocking. And I think it is about a particular kind of power. It’s interesting to think about some fraternities keeping the same sort of reputations for generations. Is this deliberate on their part?</p>
<p>Since reading on this board about campus rapes being committed by only a few serial rapists and thinking about my first hand knowledge of fraternity life, I have been thinking a lot more about fraternity life than ever before.</p>
<p>alh,</p>
<p>I feel like you are baiting me now. OF COURSE women should be warned about potentially dangerous situations. I have said this on this thread. I have two daughters, remember. Hunt is right that my objection has always been to labeling men who have not committed rape “rapey.”</p>
<p>sorry Bay - not my intent to bait you</p>
<p>I am not an expert on rape statistics, and I think poetgrl might be. Earlier she said college women are most likely to be raped in the dorms. </p>
<p>“I agree about the flocking. And I think it is about a particular kind of power. It’s interesting to think about some fraternities keeping the same sort of reputations for generations. Is this deliberate on their part?”</p>
<p>I think it is. And there are women who like it that way, or seem to. A gender studies professor would probably call this internalized patriarchy. At any rate, there are women who seek out groups of men who are perceived as sexually dominant and aggressive. It may be that they feel that they share some of that power when they align with those men, or that connecting with them confers a sort of protection.</p>