There was a discussion on fraternities over on the WDT that I think is worth it's own spinoff. Let's hope it goes better than Joey! *frowns, fires Bruce Villanch* *adjusts glasses* Focus: Were you in a fraternity or sorority? What were your experiences? Subfocus: What do you think about hazing?
Was in Kappa Sig, second largest out of 12 frats on campus with about 100 members. It was a pretty fun experience and made some of my best friends through it. We had parties at an off-campus house on Fridays and Saturdays and mostly hung out with other sororities or the dance team. Drunken, sexual shenanigans were had quite often by most along with associated drama. Spring breaks were a fucking blast. A few things some of you retards brought up: -The dues is not tantamount to "paying for friends." The money goes to funding the parties, events, etc. Same way you would pay for things you do with your friends, except formalized. -Hazing occurs, but not the way you think. There's no homoerotic bullshit or beating on pledges or anything that would physically harm anyone.. It's more psychological than anything. -Sororities are way worse to their recruits than the fraternities. One example that comes to mind is having each one sit on a washing machine in their underwear to see where the fat jiggles. Not all are like that, but many are. -Each org has its own reputation in Greek life. -It's a very insulated social circle. You mostly hang out and interact with other Greeks and eventually it's all you really associate with. EDIT: Got this as a rep: "really the thing I learned from my twin brother is that frats are for people under 21, once you turn 21 hardly anyone goes to frat parties." This is pretty true. Once you become a senior, it becomes somewhat uncool to go to the parties. You go to the bars and hang out with the other older Greeks. You go to the big parties, but other ones you might show up for an hour.
I didn't join a frat because I wasn't willing to humiliate myself or make the time commitment (fuck you, I won't get out of bed at 3 AM to clean your toilets). I had friends that were more than happy to go through the pledge process. Coincidentally, after that, some of them were no longer my friends, because I wasn't a brother (their decision to stop being friends with me, for the record). Whatever. If being your friend requires me to accept you and your buddies treating me like shit, then clearly you're not someone I want to be friends with. I was friends with other guys that joined frats and DIDN'T stop being my friend after that, because their frat wasn't full of assholes with an 'us against the world' mentality. There were bad houses and good houses on campus. One house was kind of known on campus. Apparently, they collectively got off on the idea of inviting couples to the house for parties, separating them, throwing the boyfriend out (often beating the shit out of him in the process), and then doing their damnedest to nail the girlfriends. They apparently even had an inside name for these kinds of parties, but they were secretive about it. Rumors swirled about the use of roofies in that house, too. We avoided that house. Another frat was known for going to the bars, which is fine, but they were also known for picking fights and following guys home across campus just to harass and gang up on them. It came out later that part of their 'pledging process' was for the pledge to start a fight on campus, and this was how they did it. Another frat house was much better and more laid back, though, and the guys there were normal enough and fun to hang out with. Lots of booze and good conversations throughout the house any time we partied there. Of course, you don't hear the stories about the good houses. Fraternities: your mileage will vary.
I think hazing is something that naturally happens when you put high school/ young college kids in a group together. It happened to me with my high school hockey team, and its going to happen in the Greek environment. When you give people the title of pledge and the expectation that they're going to have to kind of prove themselves it's going to happen. The pervasiveness of the hazing and the degree to which it happens varies. I had a friend in college who was part of the lax team, he had to swallow a gold fish, and other things. Hazing sucks, and it needs to be monitored so it doesn't get taken to an extreme. The things about frats is they all have their own personality. People on this board wouldn't likely join a frat like Acacia (at Indiana) where the hazing is bad and the guys tend to be meatheads and other things that most people on here aren't. But there are plenty of other frats where I'm sure guys here back in their college days would get along with the guys and enjoy themselves. It also depends on the school. If you go to an SEC school you pretty much have to join a frat to have a social life. Kids want to go to college to have fun and be crazy, if you go to a school with a large greek system and you aren't greek you're kind on the outside looking in.
I've really heard more bad stories than good about frats, but then again bad stories are what people remember. I've been to frat parties and they were great if you're single and horny, and I've never seen more in-the-open drug dealing in my life. After college, setimes my friends and I would do security for their parties, at Beta here in town. What a shithole. I remember once steping into a bathroom and my leg punches through the rotted floor, my entire leg now dangling through the ceilimg of the second floor. I could here arty goers below yelling GRAB HIS LEG! PULL HIM THROUGH!!!" Sure, it was funny. But I've taken some of my worst licks in that house, especially where some 6'10" OC threw me clean through a wall when I asked him to stop trying to drag a girl upstairs. That place was the ultimate bad representation of Greek life. Question for USA'ers: are your frats/sororities in a row, or scattered all over the city like here?
Depends on the school. The ones at my school are all on University property (although very nice mansions). Usually each frat rents a shit hole house off campus that they just pass down. Other schools have individual houses that they bought/rent that can be spread out.
Like everything else in life, frats are all over the spectrum, from laid back to militant. I have friends and relatives who were in low-key frats, and I hung out with them on occasion. On the other hand, I have friends who pledged and tell horror stories. There were, in fact, dangerous and homoerotic hazing rituals that ocurred. There was the cookie race - where pledges raced by crawling with an oreo betwen their ass cheeks. If it fell out during the race you had to eat it. Last one across the finish line ate everyone elses' cookies. Pledges were also instructed to get girls to sign their asses. If a frat brother asked to see the signatures, they had to drop trou wherever they happened to be to show the brother their ass with the signatures. If either of these aren't homoerotic, I'm not sure what is. As for dangerous, this incident is what led my friend to drop out of pledging - in addition to the activites mentioned previously, the centerpeice of pledging was being denied sleep. After 2 or 3 days with no sleep, one pledges' girlfriend complained to a frat brother that she was worried about him, as he was fucking up in class, at his job, and was starting to hallucinate. The brothers then told the pledge, in front of other pledges, that if his girlfreind bitched to them again, they would gang rape her. Now, maybe she was being bitchy and melodramatic about the condition her boyfriend was in. And maybe it was purely a bluff on the brothers' part. But to threaten to rape her was so outrageous that the pledge in question quit, as did my friend, who really didn't know either the other pledge or his girlfriend very well. But he didn't want to be part of a fraternity that would even threaten to do something like that. I could go on - there was the black fraternity that branded its members, or the time pledges were "ordered" to attack me in a parking lot (wound up being nothing but posturing and threats). There have been crack downs on hazing, and a lot of this has changed in the past 20 years, but I'm still not a big fan of frats for obvious reasons.
That's..... Horrible. They belong in prison for that kind of threat and find out what the Real Deal feels like. Who does that? Even as a joke it isn't funny.
I was not involved in Greek Life in any way in school, but I think this might be because I started my undergrad at 26. So I ha no real reason to go pledge and live in a house of 18 year olds. It would have been annoying. Although my neighbors/good friends had the honor of being in the only Frat ever to have it charter revoked on our campus when they were going, Ahh ZBT.
I hadn't read the last few pages of the drunk thread before I posted, but the outraged responses of some of the pro-fraternity folks is mind boggling. You would swear people are questioning their religion, or their mother's sexual proclivities. This is part of a disturbing recennt trend on this board - everyone is fine with black humor and mocking others, until it involves something that one of us has a vested interest in. Then we rise up in righteous indignation at the audacity of those who would speak ill of what is dear to us, or our beliefs. The word "hypocrite" comes to mind. Settle the fuck down, for Christ's sake. The particular frat involved with the incident I posted was easily the worst on campus. When I mentioned this to a buddy at Penn State, he was shocked, as that frat had a reputattion for being one of the more upstanding, elite frats on his campus. As I state early in my post, the behavior of frats is all over the map. Certainly most, and the people in them, are pretty harmless, and many perform acts of charity and community service. But to deny that crap like I posted doesn't occur is assinine. It's like denying the female orgasm. Sure, most of us don't have first hand knowldeg of it (except for Parker) but it does exist.
Hey, somebody has to defend against Crown's insane hyperbole. This is the internet...... Got to post it here since it's relevant.
I had no complaints with people trashing hazing and associated humiliations. Cause that shit is fucked up and stupid. I was merely commenting on the blanket statements about buying friends and other frat stereotype nonsense. FOCUS: Briefly touched on this in the WDT, but I went to undergrad at a school that would probably average 40-50% Greek, depending, but was unaffiliated. I might have rushed but I got pretty close to a 2.0 my freshman year in college and a good number of frats I would have looked to pledge at had GPA requirements and I wouldnt have stood a chance. I had plenty of friends in fraternities, and my current roommate was a frat bro himself. The main influence the Greek scene had was driving the social scene. Lot of parties and events, some open, some closed. I was resentful cause there were scores of gorgeous sorority girls who were only interested in frat guys and I knew dumbass frat dudes who had strings of stupidly attractive girlfriends as a result of being in the "right" fraternities. So that was fucking infuriating to me at times when I was getting laid as regularly as I might have wanted, but other than that, I had no problems with them. I enjoyed their parties when I was younger, and met cool groups of dudes through my friends and their brothers. Fraternities all had houses which ranged from older to new. My roommates house actually burned down two weeks ago. It was a classic house at the edge of campus and uptown, the most perfect location you could ask for, but that's where the positives ended. It was a shithole and trashed inside. Sure frat houses usually reflected the 18-22 year old dudes that lived there, but the layer of beer cans and trash in this place was shocking. No source is known for the fire yet, but all those things couldnt have hurt. But normally when houses were rebuilt or remodeled, they had stricter rules about cleanliness and conduct, so maybe its a benefit for them. Sororities weren't allowed houses based on some antiquated brothel law in Ohio, so they all had "suites" of rooms in sorority dorms on campus. As a result, rushing and hazing were a bit tamer. Some sororities got intense with drinking but they ALWAYS got caught and busted. If I did it all again, and I wasn't an academic fuckup that first semester, I probably would have rushed. I was in a business organization my last 2.5 years on campus and a majority of my friends from college I still hang out with were people I met through that, so the net outcome would have been similar, but I likely would have fornicated with girls during that time. And as we all know, that makes ALL the difference to how you turn out as a person. EDIT: If I had done the whole college search again, if I didn't go to the same school (which I loved), I likely would have looked in the South, for example UGA or USC. In that case I would DEFINITELY have rushed.
A) it's never just me B) I wasn't attacking frats. I mentioned the cherry thing, thats how it started. I was attacking hazing. Hazing deserves to be attacked. It's bullying. It wouldn't be hard to take to horrors out of hazing and make it fun. They're college kids, they're not in the Airbourne.
I went to two universities, and neither of them had really big frat culture. The University of Western Ontario definitely had more going on than the University of Toronto, but that's also because the University of Toronto is where the hollowed-out corpse of fun goes for its final resting place. I knew one guy (peripherally) who was a frat pledge in my first year, I saw more frat presence, and I saw one of my TAs bang a porn star in one of those "real college frat party" type porn videos that was shot just off of campus. Hi-larious. I also can't say I know many people who are/were in frats or sororities. Definitely an extreme minority. One guy I know - he's older - said it does carry benefits later in life for networking and the like. At most, I might have seen some obvious initiation type stuff (guys doing a Chinese fire alarm in their underwear on campus) during the fall just after the school year had started but never knew of any serious incidents involving frats while I was going to school. And I didn't live far from the frat row, either. As for hazing, I have a sincere and deep contempt of it. I understand that some organizations need to put their recruits through severe tests to a) make sure they're up to snuff, and b) train them. Frats/sororities are absolutely not those organizations. Nor are any kind of sports team. If you think you're so important that you need to commit sexual assault on new inductees to ensure the continued quality of your organization, you're delusional and also probably a psychopath.
Maybe not tantamount, but can you see how us retards could relate those two? Pay dues for organization + Only hang out with people in organization = ???
But you also ignored my explanation for it. It's easier to collect the money upfront than go around collecting from 100 people everytime you want to do something. And I still don't see the correlation between paying dues and having an a insular community. It's not like its forced on anyone, it just happens that way. We had plenty non-affiliates hang out at our house and parties, but by and large, Greeks hang out in that sphere.
Alt-Focus: Hazing is obviously horrible and almost always unnecessary, we all agree. The more I think about this, the more I think the suckage is situational; everything being equal, I think sports team hazing is worse than frat hazing. If I pledge a frat and I finished last in some dumb crawling race, I AM NOT eating those ass Oreos, no matter what. I'm taking my ball and going home, you guys are sick fucks, I'm out. But if I really want to play a sport in HS/college, and have a chance to possibly play at the next level, it's not as easy as just telling them to eat shit and walking away. Say you're on scholarship to play D1 ball, but the rookie hazing is extreme and homoerotic and violating and all that. Are you going to throw away this great opportunity for your dignity? Maybe, but that decision is much harder to make when your 'opt out' option has serious ramifications. Worst hazing that I've personally heard (though cannot eyewitness confirm): one of the sororities on my campus made their pledges stand in a line in their underwear whilst their paired fraternity brothers went down the line one by one and Sharpied each girl's physical flaws on their own bodies. And to add salt to the wounds, each girl had to present the commentary to the sorority afterwards. Truly sickening stuff.