Oh, now I remember why I joined: sports. I wanted to play in the fraternity sports league. Which is a dumb reason to join a secret society when you think about it, but hey, I was like 19 years old at the time and didn’t always think all my decisions through.

Anyway, was my fraternity misogynist? Yeah, probably, although we weren’t as bad as the other fraternities. (There was one on campus that would hang a pair of shoes in a tree every time two of the brothers allegedly had sex with the same woman.) Were we racist? Not at all, but a lot of other fraternities were.

In retrospect, I really regret joining a fraternity, because, sports aside, it just wasn’t my scene. I wanted to be an intellectual and a non-conformist, and I was in many respects, which made me a really terrible fraternity member. As I realized the connotation of being in a fraternity, over time I ended up disguising my membership from any people that I thought might lose respect for me, so in other words, any people who were intelligent and independent.

Oh well. I guess I would support the banning of fraternities because then at least people who should know better won’t make the mistake of joining them!

Frankly, I don’t think fraternities in general are all that great. Historically white fraternities tend to be bastions of suck. (I don’t really include HBF or academic frats in this.) The volunteerism tends to be a more of an eyewash so they have a reason to exist other than beer pong. The frats tended to do things like yell sexist slogans at Take Back the Night Marchers, bully gay people on campus and deceptively spike the punch. (You thought that was water? Oops.) My school had those stupid whistles they gave every freshwoman, but never really cared about making places safer. Frat socials attracted guys who thought nothing of making running commentaries on how great it would be to get Mexicans for knife-fights while eating Mexican restaurants. They didn’t even throw the best parties (that was the small living units), which is maybe the one thing they’re supposed to be good at.

Since I’m female, joining fraternities was never an option. I opted not to join or rush a sorority, because 1)I would have had to pay fees and still live in campus housing and 2)the supposed alumna connections seemed to be so much hot air and 3)I simply wasn’t interested in being part of the “Fraternities-Ladies Auxiliary” or 4)the rampant body policing. The coolest people I met mostly ex-sorority members or not ever members of sororities.

I have two friends who went to a very heavy Greek dominated university in an even tinier town and I can’t say that either of them felt like they benefited job-wise from joining. Of course, the fact they were both full scholarship students who were non-white may have had something to do with it. My friend feels awkward socializing without beer (and he’s in his late 20s and his family has a history of alcoholism), and his sister dieted herself down to a size 0 — and she’s 5’7″.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/univ-of-virginias-proposed-rules-would-lower-standard-for-sexual-misconduct/2011/05/05/AFwQVt1F_story.html

I don’t know what these policy changes will mean on the ground, but it’s something. At the end of the article, a sexual assault victims’ rights advocate makes a sharp point that it took the (public-relations disaster) of a young woman’s death to provoke these new policies.

Yes. Because the de-recognition or abolition of fraternities would impinge on male privilege, we can’t even consider it. Nevermind that women are now the majority of students nationally pursuing both undergraduate and graduate degrees–the interests of the minority are a trifling matter against the interests of patriarchal equilibrium.