put stuff into my asshole please

Edit* I forgot to add I wrote this earlier in the day before most of this thread happened. I'm too lazy to go back and edit out anything that has been covered.

Focus: I was in a fraternity somewhat regrettably. I’m not even sure where to begin detailing my experiences. It was a strange time. I have a lot to say about this subject, because it was the defining experience of my college years (for the worse I suppose.)

I think the hardest thing for people to understand is not only how greek life varies by organization, but how much it varies by school. It's like football conferences. Some are big time, and others are just an odd imitation. I was most definitely in the latter.

I also joined a fraternity that was plummeting. I didn’t know it at the time as some stuff was intentionally kept secret from me as a pledge, but there were significant problems when I joined that mostly stemmed from the year prior to my joining. Not “oh know the Zetas stood us up at our social” type of problems (though that happened too), but housing debt, a pending lawsuit, and being on probation (not being able to have any parties at our house.) We also had a solid contingent of scumbags within our ranks. The rest of us who were nominally decent people didn’t possess the qualities needed to turn a greek organization around. We were great at drinking beer and shooting the shit, but as whole we didn’t possess the social skills necessary for recruitment i.e. being able to get girls to come to our events.

We eventually ended up shutting ourselves down whenever I was a sophomore. There were only a couple of us willing to do the amount of work required to keep the damn thing running (and it was a god awful amount of work at times.) Everyone else never really gave too much of a shit to begin with, so it was the right thing to do. The entire time I was involved I was really just scrubbing the decks on a sinking ship.

Oh, and hazing.

I was hazed. Not terribly by some standards, but it was still a little ridiculous.

I’m not even sure I want to catalog it. This is going to be disjointed, because I can’t really put all of it into a proper narrative now that it has been so long ago, and at the time I was sleep deprived.

There were a few bullshit things done to us, but of course it had to culminate in a Hell Week. We had to live in the fraternity house for a week in a pledge tent, which just a small section of the room sequestered with tarps. Of course it was too small for the 8 of us, so we had to pile all over each other. It was fucking disgusting. We were woken up early and made to run circles. We had to carry pledge bricks that were about 15lbs if I remember correctly all over campus. These bricks came from a corner of our lawn that served as the prime pissing spot. We couldn’t wear underwear or have caffeine. There were a lot of forced wall sits.

On the last night the fed us a decent dinner. We thought we had it made. Then afterwards they told us that they had put laxatives in it. They lined us up and handed the first guy a roll of toilet paper and told him to take as much as he needed then to pass it back. So of course that was a little game seeing who would take the most. After that they told us it was all a ruse and berated us for believing that they would do something like that, and how we didn’t really trust them at all.

The then took us out into the desert and quizzed us on our pledge book. The most arcane and impossible shit to answer. I vaguely remember some scavenger hunt. They then basically said that we basically failed as a pledge class and that they weren’t going to initiate us. They took us to a hooker motel complete with splooge on the walls and made us stay the night.

They woke us up early, had us get dressed up, and took us to campus. They dropped us off at different points and told us to wait. They then came by and picked us up later and initiated us.

There was no physical violence. It was all just mental bullshit and physical tasks meant to wear you down. In retrospect I am embarrassed that I signed up for that shit.

Before Hell Week there were an assortment of other activities that were pretty lame. Nothing really comes to mind as worth mentioning.

A few random highlights:

-A bank robber was shot and killed in our shed the year before I got there. They threw a cops and robbers party complete with tours of the brain matter. A year later we spray painted RIP Pancho over the bullet holes. The next year the cop who shot the guy came by and was displeased by the graffiti. The next year a buddy of mine was deposed for a lawsuit and they gave him a lot of for the cops and robbers party being in poor taste.

-A pledge class in years past stole a mannequin(?) zebra from a putt putt golf course as their pledge symbol. My sophomore year we were practicing a dance routine (oh, yeah, if you want to join a fraternity you better learn how to sing and dance) for a charity competition. We were in speedos and pink shirts. A cop came in and questioned us about the disappearance of another mannequin. Nothing like walking into a room full of dudes in speedos and pink button downs to confirm all of your suspicions about the homoerotic nature of fraternities.

-My freshman year we went from regular probation to double secret probation when a girl got drunk out our house, was given a sober ride home by one of our designated drivers, got bored at home, and decided to get in her own car and reverse into a tree.

Oh, and as far as paying for friends. I can see the argument. The unfortunate thing is that the money has to go to a whole bunch of shit that people don’t think about like insurance. I wasn’t privy to all of our finances, but that was a fucking mess. We also had our electricity shut off a few times. That’s how poor we were.

And you aren’t paying for friends as much as you are paying for a place to hangout with them and party with them. But houses are fucking expensive. And so is upkeep. And it is worth mentioning that no money collected with dues can go to booze. If you do that and are caught, you are seriously fucked and will have your charter revoked.

If anyone wants to hear it, I can come back and talk about the death of a member (not a pledge, our president drank himself to death on his 21st birthday) and the resulting lawsuit. However, I wasn’t directly involved with much of that. Thank god.

Overall, 3/10 would not join again.

 

I was in a frat in college. Joining was one of the better decisions I made during those four years. I went to one of the top schools in the country, so my positive experience is probably biased by the fact that there were very few morons in my fraternity.

I didn't give much thought one way or another about joining a fraternity until all the friends I'd made during my first semester of college decided to rush the same frat. I figured why not, and joined too. Some of my best friends to this day were my fraternity brothers. Anecdotally, I have much stronger friendships from college than any of my friends who did not join frats. Joining a frat is like joining any other self-selected group. It's no different than belonging to a gym, a sporting club, etc. The point is to come together to share experiences, and pool resources so each member has more opportunities to do the things he wants to do than he would have on his own.

Most of pledging involved getting to know the brothers through interviews, hosting parties, attending the charity events the brothers didn't want to go to, and just generally having fun. We definitely hazed, though compared to some of the horror stories described here my experience was very mellow, and for the most part, a lot of fun. My fraternity played it pretty safe in terms of what we'd do as part of our hazing ritual. For example, we never once forced a pledge to drink during a pledging event, although it was often strongly encouraged.

The only rough part of pledging was our initiation week, and I even had a lot of fun with that, with the exception of one event. Pretty much every fraternity in the country that hazes has its own version of the week before initiation, and they call it hell week for a reason. I found all the best hiding places to sleep on campus that week, because the only place we were allowed to sleep was a 20' x 20' pen in our basement, fenced in by speakers constantly blaring the same song. To this day I still have a nostalgic love/hate relationship with Gwen Stefani's "Wind It Up."

The one hell week event that truly sucked, which I did not ever attend as a brother, we called Grab Bag. Before Grab Bag, the pledge master would go to the grocery store and buy a random collection of "food" that the pledges would have to finish that night. It was basically an excuse to make us all vomit violently in front of a crowd. I went strong until we got to the fish oil. Yikes. I was later told by one brother that he'd never seen someone vomit as hard as I did in his entire life. Greek pride?

 

The whole thing sounds ridiculous. I went to university, talked to people I liked, and partied with them. No initiations apart from the usual social processes. I think Australia's got this part covered.

 

Someone needed to do it...right?

 

My friend went to a Frat party while he was in the States. He said at bars people would put their hand in their drink to grab all of the ice, then leave it with other clumps of ice that we're on the floor.

I had a lot of questions. It was in Chicago during October/November, so it is cold. But why not order your drink without ice? Is this frat specific? I didnt see it at any of the bars I was at during my stay in the States or Canada

 

I dont think that has anything to do with frats and more with wanting a slightly cold drink that you can chug/slam, which is harder if there is ice in it.

 

Living in NZ, I was thinking the same thing.

Is it because of the archaic drinking age in the US? As soon as we're at university we can preload on cheap beers and then go hit whatever the student bar of the moment is.
[For those who know Wellington, I spent an embarrassingly large amount of time at the Big K when I was 18/19/20.]

 

And here I thought this thread was timely after going strap-on shopping last night. Disappointing.

 

Ha ha, that's one of the dumbest things I ever seen you post. Of course not. And, I didn't imply that anywhere in my post. Someone wondered why anyone would join a fraternity. I listed a few of the reasons why did. And, the reason why I added YMMV (your mileage may vary) is because I know people in my own fraternity who didn't particularly enjoy it, and it's not for everyone. I don't care if anybody joins or not or is in one or whatever. I was simply sharing my own personal experience, which included good times, good friends and no ass rape.

Everyone of the reasons that I listed for me joining I have experienced since college, still do today, and it's rare that any of them involve my fraternity. So, how you gathered that I was saying those things were exclusive to fraternity life - I don't know.

Also, acting like a dick towards other guys or getting all gang rapey acting is not exclusive to fraternities, either. Brah.

 

I'm just getting a kick out of the few who post that part of the reason they don't like frats is because they couldn't get sorority girls. Shit I went to a huge state school in the south and didn't pledge; if you're not an asshole no girl worth a damn, sorority or not, is going to shoot you down just because you're not in a frat. I think a good amount of this frat dislike is based on third hand stories and general stereotyping. Frats are no different than any other social group, there's good people and assholes.

 

I went to a school with 1,200 people that was a good hour away from the nearest town of any size. Fraternities were a huge part of the social life there as a result of that. All of the parties were open save for formals and a few other things. I never had any issues with any fraternity guys, but my school was a pretty genteel place, so that may have had something to do with that.

I never joined one, although I thought hard about it, for a couple of reasons. The whole "brotherhood" aspect of it bothered me. It's a large group of people, some of whom you like and some of whom are dicks. That's the nature of a group of people, but because you share a social connection, you are supposed to like them because you have this pseudo mystical connection. I don't buy it. I've always been very careful about the people I call friends and I don't want to have this forced relationship with people I don't like.

Also, I don't take orders very well. The first time someone called me at 2AM to do his laundry would be the instant I said, "bite me", hung up the phone, and quit.

 

If I'm wrong about this, please correct me:

Isn't part of being in a fraternity/sorority at a lot of schools trading on that org's reputation? Like, certain frats are the "cool ones", some are the "smart ones", etc?

It would really bug me if I continually got summed up within three letters.

 

Had I had the time, when I was at Mizzou, had I had the time I would have pledged beta theta pi. As it was I hung out with the guys a lot. But they had a requirement for time spent in their study hall for your first year of like 10-15 hours a week, and they wouldn't count the 15 hours a week I had to do for wrestling plus all the other shit that is a giant time suck as a college athlete just didn't leave me with the time. But they were always really cool to me, invited me to most of their parties and in general were just really cool guys.

There were greek orginizations on campus that sucked, were filled with sketchy people and in general were better avoided. But the whole frat bro vibe was never pervasive.

As a wrestler we had a hazing ritual. We were given thongs to wear then all piled into the back of pickups and drove around downtown. At every red light we had to stand up and dance. Oh while doing this chip and dale caravan we each had to go into a gas station and buy something. (We were given like five bucks. Most of us bought condoms and drink cuz it was fucking hot.) After the parade we all went tl our freshman imitation party. Hours before anyone else showed up we had a freshman chugging contest. Just beer nothing gross in it. First one done witb their cup of beer was out of the contest and we repeated until there was only one person left. We had a momon kid on the team that was given the option of obstaining from the game altogether or chugging water. He chose to chug water. Then we had our freshman initiation party. If you have ever seen a college movie that has the big party at the end, put that party on steroids. It was a toga party. We had well over five hundred people there and most of the women attending wore togas made out of seran wrap. We had a huge mud pit and many women chose to wrestle in it naked. Looking at it the whole parade of half nakedness thing sounds pretty bad, but that day was probably the best day I had in college.

The swim team had a hazing ritual they would never talk about. The only thing I ever learned was that it involved trashbags and that literally ever swimmer I would ask about it would have a look of disgust on their face when saying they couldn't talk about it.

 

Except, depending on the school, most of those explicit reputations are favorable. Out of 20 or so frats, I knew of 1 or 2 as nerdy, 1 as meatheads who were overly aggressive and prone to fighting (despite a great reputation nationwide) and 1 that was skeezy. The rest were just frats who were varying levels of "cool" or whatever based on who you asked. There were douchebags and awesome guys from all of them.

Its no different than people makings assumptions about you because you're an athlete, a musician, or super into something else. You only get summed up or stereotyped if you allow yourself to be. I think there is far greater risk as being labeled a fraternity member as a whole then your individual house.

 

Yeah, I don't want people to make "good" assumptions about me either, though. I realize that other people like the idea, but it just rubs me the wrong way.

 

I don't know if they're real or not in the states, but are there any "God Squad" like-frats or sororities? By that I mean ones that don't take to the stereotype norms of Greek life. Y'know, drinking, parties, drugs, sex, etc. are there one that simply try to fly right and do good, or are they ficticous, and seen only as "villains" in shitty campus comedies?

 

There are Christian frats and sororities yea, and by Christian I mean the good kids who don't drink, believe in the whole sex and marriage thing, etc.