Changing a culture

>
Forwarded from Doug Case’s newsletter:

National Sexuality Resource Center
>Posted June 4, 2009
>http://www.alternet.org/story/140416/
>
>Why Is the Frat Boy Culture So Sleazy and Sex-Crazed?
>
>By Nicholas L. Syrett, National Sexuality Resource Center
>
>In the late 1980s the Florida News Herald reported that a Florida State
>University student had been gang raped by some fraternity brothers.
>Allegedly, the attackers painted the Greek letters of their house on her
>thighs, symbolically claiming her as they had also claimed her through
>sexual assault.
>
>In 2001 Dartmouth College’s campus newspaper, The Dartmouth, published
>graphic excerpts from Zeta Psi’s weekly newsletters in which brothers
>described their sexual encounters:
>
>”She’s baaaaackk. And she’s dirtier than ever[;] if young [female name]
>hooks up with one more Zete, I’m going to need a flow chart to keep up.”
>
>”Commenting on [Brother B]’s chances for a highly-coveted spot in the
>Manwhore Hall of Shame, [Brother C] said, ‘Are you kidding me? Rancid
>snatch like that makes you a fucking lock.’”
>
>”Next week: [Brother X]’s patented date rape techniques!”
>
>These two examples — a gang rape fraught with symbolism and the
>misogynist publication describing sexual exploits — are clearly extreme,
>but both of them are the logical outcome of a culture of masculine
>supremacy and sexual exploitation that has made its home in some college
>fraternities since the 1920s. While most do not participate in such acts,
>there is ample evidence to show that many, if not most, fraternity members
>are expected to report on sex they have for the entertainment of their
>entire house. College fraternities — currently numbering three hundred
>fifty thousand undergraduate brothers with more than four million alumni
>– have become a haven for a masculinity that takes sexual conquest as one
>of its defining characteristics. Indeed, the social science literature of
>the past three decades has shown that fraternity men are more likely than
>their nonaffiliated classmates to rape women, and some studies have
>estimated that as many as 70 to 90 percent of repor! ted campus gang rapes
>are committed by members of fraternities. This makes fraternities a
>dangerous place for the women who frequent their houses and attend their
>parties. In their sexist logic — and in their own words — “Brothers Over
>Babes” or “Bros Before Hos.”
>
>But fraternities and the men who join them have not always behaved this
>way. So where did the culture of sexual exploitation and masculine
>bragging come from? Clearly, the men’s behavior is a product of time,
>place, and cultural circumstance, not simply an instance of “boys will be
>boys.” Nor is the behavior a natural outcome of all-male organizations, as
>even fraternities themselves have not always behaved this way.
>
>Dating, ‘Homosexuality,’ and Frat Culture
>
>In the early twentieth century two phenomena that we now take to be
>commonplace were invented. The first was dating and the second was
>homosexuality as a discrete identity category. Both have impacted
>fraternity culture. Dating arrived on college campuses in the 1920s.
>Fraternities, established a century earlier in the 1820s, and sororities,
>which had been founded on some college campuses by the 1870s, were the
>hubs of the collegiate dating scene. With rare exceptions fraternity men
>and sorority women dated each other in an exacting scale that was governed
>by each organization’s popularity. The reputations of the individual
>brothers and sisters and thus of their collective memberships were in part
>determined by whom they dated. Fraternity members were judged by their
>attractiveness, their charm, and by what they called “their line,” the
>verbal method they used to make themselves appealing to young women.
>Popularity — evaluated through dating women — came to define! a properly
>enacted collegiate masculinity. And fraternity men themselves knew this;
>they picked new members based on the perceived expectation of potential
>brothers to attract women. As Dartmouth’s Zeta Psi boasted in 1924,
>”Brother ‘Stan’ Lonsdale has improved the already magnificent reputation
>he had attained in past years as Lothario and Don Juan put together, and
>as representative in the chapter in all women’s colleges within a radius
>of several hundred miles.”
>
>This celebration of men’s attractiveness to women necessitated a
>concurrent demand that brothers themselves recognize what made a man
>attractive. They had to come to terms with themselves as men evaluating
>other men’s good looks.
>
>In a world like that of the nineteenth century United States, where there
>was little recognition of a homosexual subculture and where most men could
>not conceive of a man ! whose sexual desires were centered exclusively on
>other men, this would not have been a problem. But by the 1920s fraternity
>men did not live in such a world. They still don’t. By the early twentieth
>century — thanks to sexologists, Oscar Wilde, Sigmund Freud (and his
>popularizers), as well the very people who identified with the label
>”homosexual” or “invert” — that some men were in fact attracted
>exclusively to other men was widely understood. It was also at this time
>that masculinity itself became yoked exclusively to heterosexuality in a
>decisive refutation of homosexuality.
>
>Thus, at precisely the moment when fraternity men were becoming highly
>conscious of the characteristics that made males attractive to females,
>and were indeed evaluating their brothers based on these characteristics,
>they were simultaneously coming to terms with the possible meanings of
>these evaluations. They were also in the compromising position of being
>members of organizations tha! t enrolled only single men, organizations
>that, through shared living! , bathing, sleeping, and erotic hazing
>practices, fostered an atmosphere of camaraderie, intimacy, and loyalty
>that most found to be the fraternity’s biggest selling point.
>
>They were caught between a rock and a hard place, even more so when some
>fraternities actually did turn out to be havens for homosexually inclined
>students, as my own research indicates, and as Dorothy Dunbar Bromley and
>Florence Haxton Britten found in their fascinating 1938 study, Youth and
>Sex. From the 1920s onwards fraternity men have responded to this dilemma
>with the enactment of particularly active dating and sexual lives designed
>to refute suspicions of homosexuality and to assert heterosexuality, and
>thus masculinity. These practices have only increased throughout the
>twentieth century, in part as a reaction to the intensified denigration of
>homosexuality at mid-century and as a result of the increasing sexual
>permissiveness of college women in the wake of the sexual revolution of!
>the 1960s.
>
>These were not conscious choices made by fraternity men, however. Rather,
>they were gradual changes over generations in response to cultural shifts
>like the advent of dating and the emergence of modern conceptions of
>homosexuality. It is also clear that these two phenomena are by no means
>exclusive to men in fraternities. That said, because fraternities remain
>organizations made up exclusively of single men, organizations that choose
>to haze their initiates in explicitly homoerotic ways and that foster an
>intimacy among men not common in society more generally, they compensate
>for what might be perceived by outsiders as either feminine or gay
>behavior by enacting a masculinity that takes aggressive heterosexuality
>as one of its constitutive elements. This often has adverse effects for
>the women with whom they interact.
>
>Misogyny Rules when Sex Takes Center Stage
>
>By the 1960s, as a result of the sexual revolution, college women were
>more willing to have sex before marriage. Fraternity men thus turned to
>them not just for dates but also for sex, rather than to the prostitutes
>and working-class women of earlier eras who had previously met their
>needs. In 1957 two sociologists found that fraternity members were
>particularly likely to have attempted to take advantage of their female
>dates, some using “menacing threats or coercive infliction of physical
>pain.” Fraternity men in one 1960s study, despite having more sex than
>their nonaffiliated peers, expressed the highest rates of dissatisfaction
>because, in the estimation of the sociologists, the pressure upon them to
>have sex was so much greater. Finally, in 1967 sociologist Eugene Kanin
>concluded: “Erotic achievement is now evaluated by taking into account the
>desirability of the sex object and the nature of its acquisition. A
>successful ‘snow job’ on an attractive but re! luctant female who may be
>rendered into a relatively dependable sex outlet and socially desirable
>companion is considerably more enhancing than an encounter with a
>prostitute or a ‘one night stand’ with a ‘loose’ reputation.” Sex was
>being used explicitly to bolster a man’s reputation amongst his fraternity
>brothers.
>
>By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, fraternity men had
>built upon some of these traditions and elaborated others as well. For
>example, fraternities foster an atmosphere where long-term intimate
>relationships with women are actually discouraged. As Allen DeSantis has
>shown in his recent book, Inside Greek U, many fraternity men perceive
>their brothers’ girlfriends as a threat both to the time that the brothers
>might spend with the fraternity as well as to their loyalty to the
>brotherhood. Casual sex is valued more highly because it can be chronicled
>in a way that many are unwilling to do when it comes to the sex they have
>with girlfriends. Regular reporting on each member’s “conquests” further
>cements the bonds of brotherhood. This emphasis upon casual sex is part of
>a bigger problem, however. Social scientists have demonstrated that it
>places pressure on men who are not otherwise having sex to do so in order
>to save face, and this can lead to sexual assault. In order to ensure that
>brothers always have a steady supply of sexual partners, fraternities
>throw regular parties, often replete with grain alcohol punch. The parties
>are designed to supply intoxicated women who will either consent — or
>succumb — to sex.
>
>Two other practices are also worthy of note. Some fraternity men take
>pleasure either in watching their brothers have sex with women or in being
>watched as they do so. One brother interviewed by anthropologist Michael
>Moffatt for his book Coming of Age in New Jersey put it this way: “When my
>friends pick up chicks and bring them back to the fraternity house
>everyone else runs to the window to look at somebody else domineer a girl
>and I tell you what you almost get the same satisfaction. Some of the guys
>like to put on a show by doing grosser things each time. . . . Watching my
>friends have sex with other girls is almost as satisfying as doing it
>myself. . . . By the same token I enjoy conquering girls and having people
>watch.”
>
>The view of women as objects of domination seems to preclude any
>understanding that women might be acting on their own desires. That they
>are exploiting these women — regardless of the women’s own feelings or
>desires — goes without saying for this brother. Indeed, he uses the verb
>”conquering” to describe what seems to be otherwise consensual sex.
>Finally, some brothers simply compete with each other to see who can have
>the most sexual encounters in a year. Like the infamous Spur Posse of
>1990s Lakewood, California, these men keep a tally to determine who is the
>winner in a competition that has little with to do with the pleasure that
>may be gained from sexual acts themselves, and everything to do with
>bolstering one’s self-esteem and reputation through the perceived
>connections between masculinity and sexual exploitation. It is predicated
>on a double standard that sees women as lesser than men and as possessing
>something that must be coerced from them.
>
>This version of sexually aggressive masculinity is not inevitable. The
>first generation of fraternity men would not have recognized it because
>they did not live in a world that denigrated their intimacy or encouraged
>them to prove their masculinity through sexual conquest, at least not to
>the degree that we see today. Of course not all fraternity men necessarily
>practice it, and just how many of them subscribe to this version of
>masculinity is impossible to calculate. That said, it should not surprise
>us that the structure and the historical context of the fraternity give
>rise to this phenomenon: an all-male organization intent on proving
>masculinity in a world where masculinity is seen as antithetical to
>intimacy amongst men, because that intimacy is too often understood to be
>”gay.” Until fraternity men learn to be more comfortable with the intimacy
>fostered through the bonds of brotherhood without demanding its concurrent
>disavowal through homophobia and the conquest of women, it seems unlikely
that women will be much safer on college campuses with active Greek
populations.

© 2009 National Sexuality Resource Center All rights reserved.