put stuff into my asshole please

Our frats were known more along the lines of "stoner", "nerdy", "jocks", stuff like that. Our sororities, on the other hand, were "oh that's the ugly one". The one that really sticks out to me was Chi Theta Pi was known as "Chi Spreada Thigh". Doesn't seem balanced.

Touching on what Noland said a little about being forced to be friends with people you don't like, a friend of mine was talking about her initiation night. While she didn't tell me specifics, she did say it involved a lot of yelling. She said one girl was so vicious she couldn't stand it when it was all over and the girl came up to hug her and was "Now we're sisters! Yay!" Ignored her as much as she could the rest of her sorority life.

My junior and senior year we lived across the street from a fraternity. Basically what everyone has touched on. Some were great guys and some were not. We became friends with some of them and my roommate dated (hooked up?) with one of them occasionally. Our bedroom had a door off the back that led to a deck with steps (it was awesome!) and he would stop by sometimes after his pledging duties were done and sleep over. One time his pledges came over to wake him up for something, except they were really quiet. Have you ever rolled over in bed and seen two guys just standing over the bed dead quiet in the dark? Scared the ever-loving crap out of me. Also brought home the fact that we needed a stronger lock on our door. It seemed their hazing involved a lot of sleep deprivation stuff. And because we were girls and oh so soft-hearted, whenever they were sent over to our house to do something, we would lock the door, pull the shade and let them sleep. Yeah, we were pretty badass.

Never heard anything too extreme regarding hazing. We had some frats that were kicked off campus, mostly for drinking violations although one was kicked off for sexually violating a girl with a beer bottle. One of the things that I thought would stink about joining was you were obligated at some point to live in the house. So you were then forced to live with people you may not even like. I understood the rules behind it, but I lived with one girl I didn't care for, I can't imagine it being more than that.

My one roommate was in color guard and they did hazing also. The only thing she told us was she had to drink a jar of pickle juice and she hates pickles to this day.

 

I went to an SEC school and rushed, got a couple of bids but turned them down because fuck that, I'm not letting anyone paddle me. In retrospect, I wish I would have taken it.

The main issue was girls. You get a constant supply of freshman girls delivered, literally, to your doorstep and they are dependent on you to provide them alcohol. Whatever moralistic objections I may have to this structure at age 25, at age 18 I would have thought it was dope.

I did have access to designer drugs, however, because I was from the area I went to school in. This led to me being accepted to "hang out" at even the most exclusive and uptight fraternities, although I was never viewed as having the same status as a full brother.

Selling drugs to college frat bros is just about the most profitable enterprise I've personally been involved in. 100% markup was common. SAE paid my bar tabs from 2008-2010 and this likely accounts for my rose-colored glasses regarding fraternities.

I do think that Greek culture gives rise to some despicable acts of violence and misogyny. And I agree that people defend it with terrifying fervor.

I remember a picture being passed around of some sorority officer, sitting in a trashcan, with an enormous amount of frat semen on her face. When's the last time a bunch of stoners bukkake'd a chick then distributed humiliating photographic evidence of it? Weed always throws my timing off.

 

I was in a state school with 50,000 people. I joined a sorority kind of on a whim. Really, it wasn't one of those things that I had ever wanted to do, I just did it. My mother and father thought Greek life was ridiculous but nonetheless, supported my decision to pledge. My university was not supportive at all of the Greek system and it showed - when I saw my sorority at other schools (Auburn, UGA, Alabama, Florida, FSU) I nearly fell over. Fifty girls to a pledge class? A sorority of 200? My pledge class had five girls, my sorority at most had 100 active members.

My experiences started out okay but ended poorly. Our philanthropy was domestic violence, yet, the sisterhood looked the other way when one of my pledge sisters went to the chapter advisor and said "Pink's boyfriend is really abusive to her. Like, slapping her around in public abusive." My chapter advisor told her to look the other way but to avoid me because that kind of thing would make them all look bad.

Out of a sorority of 100 girls, I maybe speak to 20 at most. One of my closest friends pledged with me and I still speak frequently to my big sister and grandbig sister. I wasn't too terribly disappointed when I found out National yanked our chapter from the campus.

We were on probation for hazing when I pledged. By the time I was a senior, we had relaxed a little and participated in a few hazing rituals. I think it was kind of harmless. Making the pledges separate a bucket of sprinkles into separate colors by candlelight with one hand dipped in marshmallow Fluff while reciting the Greek alphabet and other factoids about our sorority? I don't think anyone was traumatized by that.

 

I think hazing is a lot worse than people in Greek life admit, even people who would seemingly have nothing to lose from outing what happens behind closed doors seem too ashamed of it to admit it happened in their frat. Everyone in my generation who is a guy joined a fraternity, we're talking about 12 dudes, and I found out that all of them were hazed from one of them who was a little too drunk last summer. I know only 3 of those 12 guys shared a common school, and from what I remember from the conversation the majority of them were in different frats. Oh, and the hazing, I'm not talking yard work or taking out the trash, or mild public embarrassment, like locked in a dark closet after being forced to drink energy drinks with people only coming by occasionally to scream at them and they would only be allowed to come out after finishing a puzzle in that darkness. When I asked my cousin if that kind of thing was common he said "it happens all the time" and "that's not even bad" and then his brother (who I knew at the time went to a different school and found out later was in a different frat) came over and literally forced him away from the conversation. I tried bringing up the subject later but he wouldn't talk about it and was visibly uncomfortable when I asked again, I tried with one other person just to find out how bad it really was and got the same reaction and I just gave up.

Maybe all of my cousins and my brother who went to different schools and joined mostly different frats all had bad luck, but I really doubt that. I'm not even inherently against hazing, as long as it's constructive, which it can be, but from the sounds of it the hazing that happens in Greek life is something that people are rightfully ashamed of. It's weird because I hung out with some of them and their fraternity brothers and they really don't seem like the type of people who'd do some weird shit like that, and their fraternities ranged from complete bros to nerds.

Not to just shit on other people and sound like I'm on my high horse, I'm in the military we don't have a stellar rep with hazing and rightfully so. Technically I've been hazed (taped to a chair, hosed down with water and covered in ketchup and mustard), but the difference for me was that when it happened it was a going away type of deal because I was leaving that base and going to another one so I knew all those people and was told if I wanted it to stop I just had to say so and it would before it started. The only other hazing I can think that's pervasive really is hitting people in the arms when they make rank, but again I've known people who didn't play those kind of games and others respected their wishes not to be punched in the arm. Then you hear about the Army guy who had one of his senior NCOs hit him in the chest with a wooden mallet (there's a video out there somewhere, it doesn't look like a hard hit but what the fuck did they think was going to happen?) and the guy ended up dying, and I gotta say seeing and hearing about shit like that makes me be ashamed to be associated with those people, even loosely.

 

BC doesn't have frats (most Catholic schools don't--Villanova is an exception, there may be others but BC, Georgetown, and Notre Dame don't), although there are certainly plenty of frat guy/sorority girl types who go there. As a result I obviously wasn't in a frat, if I had gone to a different school I may or may not have depending on how important Greek life was at that school. I remember visiting Tulane and while they have a Greek system, the tour guide said only something like 10-20% of students take part--probably wouldn't have bothered in that case. If I'd gone to a southern state school, different story. I did go to a couple frat parties at BU freshman year (had friends who were members) and they were alright from a freshman guy's perspective but I learned later that BU fraternities are notorious for being roofie havens. Maybe if their hockey team spent more time at the rink and less time raping girls they wouldn't have been irrelevant for most of the last decade and a half.

A high school buddy of mine was in a frat at an Ivy League school and told me that part of his initiation involved fucking a dead fish (in the mouth, I guess) in front of the brothers. This guy used to have a major tendency to exaggerate shit and straight up lie on occasion, so who knows. Shit like that and the "circle girls' fat spots in Sharpie" story are humiliating but not dangerous in any way, so to each his/her own I guess.

If you can't take getting punched in the arm/chest when you get promoted you don't fucking belong in the military, IMO.

 

How come the stories of horrible hazing are taken at face value, but the stories of mild hazing are discounted because frats are super secretive?

 

The most remarkable thing about this thread is how it follows pretty much every thread about fraternity life that I have read for what is now pushing 20 years. I will sum it all up as that I was glad that I chose to be involved in a fraternity. I view it as a positive experience in my life and I still have some really good friends that I met due to the house. I also think it was important that I kept a large group of "non-house" friends in my life during and after college. I was probably lucky that for the most part Georgia Tech was a not terribly insular Greek community in terms of having GDI's as friends.

On the hazing front, I guess I was technically "hazed" by the letter of the law. I was put under mental (lack of sleep during Hell Week) duress, but I did not have anything physically done to me that wasn't just typical rough housing stuff. On the latter what I mean is that we had something called a pledge raid that could go one of two ways:

1)We had a rule that pledges had to be out of the house by 9 PM (this was legitimately a concern around grades being that it was a tough school). Occasionally we would sucker a kid into staying and drinking after hours and "kidnap" him. The kidnapping mostly revolved around hanging out and drinking while somebody called their pledge brothers to come get him. This initiated a pledge raid, which was mostly just a huge wrestling match (brothers always won on numerical superiority) and ended with pledges hog tied in a room for about 10-15 minutes and then we all got drunk. I wrestled all through high school so I thought they were blast on both sides. I can see some people hating them, but frankly if you did then it was probably better not to hang with us because you wouldn't have fun and that kind of defeats the purpose.

2)Pledges kidnapped a brother and then brothers typically snagged a pledge and the above ensued during "the exchange."

We also had an annual brothers vs. pledges tackle football game, but it was clean other than the fact that brothers got the advantages of bullshit penalties like "too many yards by a pledge on a single play." People definitely got injured during these types of things, but always accidental and we never physically attacked somebody with the intent of hurting them.

My view on true honest to goodness physical and deep mental hazing is that I don't think I would want somebody in my fraternity that would put up with that kind of shit. Even the sleep deprivation during hell week wasn't too terrible, though side story I was the reason the house slowly backed off on that. Come about Thursday when I had only gotten about 6 hours of interrupted sleep in the last 4 days (several naps in class and what not), I completely flipped my shit in the middle of my Psych 101 class due to a particularly vivid nightmare. I was one of the folks that later advocated allowing at least 4 hours of sleep a night so that we didn't have some poor kid get hit by one of the campus buses in a haze.

Kind of a rambling mess of thoughts, but it's interesting to see the same arguments going on 17 years later with basically the same circular reasoning on both sides.

 

I'm not sure if I expect for non-fraternity members to 'like' fraternities. It doesn't really matter whether non-greeks like greeks to the greeks. Non-greek guys don't have much to offer greeks unless they are planning on joining at some point. It's good to have friends that are non-greek, but that's on a more 1:1 personal level. From a group standpoint, unless some guys are going to bring a large group of girls up there's no incentive to have them around. It's just one more guy to cause drama, fuck up, steal stuff, or tell campus/police about things. Most of the fraternities on my campus had heavy drug use (mostly weed) going on nearly 24/7 for instance. Most of the ones that got busted were caught because some random guy fucked up or told or was actually undercover. We didn't fuck with dudes if we didn't need to - because again that just increases risk. If everyone hates you you're more likely to get reported, accused, house egged, harder to recruit etc.

We were dicks because we thought we were more 'hardcore' than everyone else on campus. The cleaning culture (every room every day, kitchen 3x a day), we drank more, etc. There was a point of pride of not taking shit and doing everything our own way. The internal running and attitude had a military feel to it - a generation or two of older members were ROTC and the like and caused a lot of culture change. But the days of military guys being in the house had been over, so what you had was out of shape nerds with the same wanton attitude of military folks without much to back it up. But, we were still one of the biggest on campus.
We had a few tight connections with other big fraternities and kind of stuck to those. Definitely insular.

Some more detail on the date rape stuff - I probably heard "I think I got drugged" twenty or more times at different points in college. It was always the girls that couldn't control their drinking. They would wake up somewhere random, found they had shit their pants or otherwise been a complete mess, and say "one of my drinks tasted funny, I think those guys drugged me", etc. The girl that got us in trouble was definitely one of those types. I don't want to downplay actual date rape, but particularly sorority girls have reputations to protect and it's much easier for them to blame someone spiking their drinks than to admit they're a clusterfuck when they drink.

We had some sketchy dudes - there was a sub-culture in the house that revolved around smoking weed nearly 24/7. A portion of the house simply did nothing but smoke. In rooms, in a hidden outdoor shelter, etc. Typical tie-die, long hair, beards, out of shape dudes. It didn't help that a large portion of these guys were awkward with women.

Regarding hazing - like I said I think some is productive and other stuff if malicious. We did stuff like have the pledge class remove a 4 foot tree stump from the ground with nothing but axes. Challenging and hard work, but not do-pushups-on-bottlecap maliciousness. We would have them clean a mess up as fast as possible, but a lot of it is instilling work ethic and working with your class rather than just being assholes. You'll never really know what happens, and even if you found out, my guess is it would all be pretty pedantic. This changes per school though. Like I said at a top 15 engineering school with a lot of nerds, you don't get the same retarded decision making (let's have them chug 15 gallons of water! let's pee on them!) that you may get at bigger party schools.

 

Maybe the people who opt out just don't want to be punched. It's kind of a dumb tradition and I don't do it to people, and some people can be malicious about it by hitting people as hard as they can when they're holding something over their head. That and people break fingers and wrists doing it. Yeah, if you can't even take a punch you probably shouldn't be doing something like infantry, but a lot of people are just shoe clerks.

 

I mean honestly getting your stripes pinned on doesn't even count as hazing in my book. I guess what constitutes hazing is kind of an individual thing.

 

I was in a very frat-like atmosphere for the better part of 3 years. It was a very insular environment, and I regret staying in it as long as I did.

I cosign these to the fullest. It was the main problem I had with it - I am very good at choosing my own friends, and I didn't need them chosen for me. In a frat environment, you can't just call a guy a fuckwad if you don't like him. That bugged me.

 

I was a member of Phi Sigma Pi so my fraternity experience was different than most. They like to call themselves a 'national honor society' so it's more about scholarship and charity work than partying. It was co-ed and you were openly encouraged to join another fraternity or any other groups on campus. While we had several events throughout the semester, most of the members of my chapter weren't big partying types so only about 20-30% of my social life was spent with my fraternity. We never did any hazing and we only rejected two pledges the entire time I was a member (2 years). Both got rejected for what I thought were stupid reasons, one was a girl who talked about drugs she had experimented with during one of the pledge events, and another was a guy who got smashed at a party. He fell over with his pants around his ankles trying to take a piss, flailed around trying to get up and ended up getting urine all over the bathroom. A crowd had gathered around the doorway (he left it open) and watched the entire struggle. I suppose he's just lucky it didn't end up on youtube.

Our biggest events were regional meetings with the other chapters and our formal. At the formal you were in theory supposed to bring a girl from a sorority, or go with one of the girls from our frat, but nobody gave a shit. We'd get limos and rent out a bar with a dance floor. It was one of the few events we had where everyone would get smashed so it was a pretty good time. While we were split evenly most of the other chapters had trouble recruiting guys. My thinking initially was that since it was a fraternity full of hot women, it should have just been a self solving problem if they put more effort into recruiting, but it turns out greek life was taken way more seriously at those schools, so it was cooler to join a guy only frat. I heard several times, "At our school if you aren't in a fraternity or sorority you're a nobody." A little vapid, huh? Since the guys were outnumbered 4:1 the girls made up a rule system for hooking up(it only had to be kissing to get the points, maybe you got more for fucking, I don't remember). You got one point for a pledge, 2 points for a member, 3 points for a member who held a position, and 4 for a chapter president. So for example I was a regional delegate so I was worth 3 points(line on up ladies). It was absurd, but anything to get people's tongues in each other's mouths, right? The other chapters hazed their pledges, and had to reject way more recruits than we did. We only had 35 members and were one of the smallest chapters there.

The main reason I joined was because I wanted to do some charity work, and it's a pain in the ass to organize certain events for large groups of people (that isn't just 'show up here and start drinking'). I don't really have any complaints, although at times I wonder what it would be like to be in one of the frats that required a serious commitment, but then again I'm not sure it would have been different than the other parties I went to at college.

 

Similarly, I was in a, wait for it, business frat, Pi Sigma Epsilon. Also co-ed, there was no rushing/pledging process, but rather a recruitment. Being it was business focused, there was a meet and greet followed by a two stage interview process. My chapter was around 100 active members with 20-30 non-actives (usually older who came to parties) and really functioned as a small business. Through sales, marketing Research, and promotional work, we averaged around $70K in annual revenue my 3 years being involved. But we had a national convention each year as well as regionals in the fall, plus our token formal. I'd say about half the chapter was also involved in a traditional fraternity or sorority. It was great cause it gave me a lot of the social benefits that a frat would but also provided the co-ed aspect. We partied a lot, and there was no hazing but we had a new member initiation party where the new members would basically get trashed with encouragement. We had to scale back as the fall initiation party had about 6-7 new members puking and it could have gotten bad. I mention it to people that didn't go to school with me and it seems nerdy, but it really was anything but. It was a pretty great preparation for what business was like (interacting with your coworkers both professionally and socially) but obviously way more college and with more hooking up than is normally condoned in an office setting.

 

I was in a Jewish frat and I think if I were to go back and do the whole thing again, I would either not rush at all or go to a more well-rounded group. We had a phrase during chapter meetings that went something like "40 Jews and 75 different opinions".

I had some good friends at the time when I was there and I'm still mostly friendly with all of them on Facebook, but I don't have many active friendships remaining from college. I went into the whole thing with the idea that we all had something like this is common. And being raised by a Jewish mother, I feel, is fundamentally different than a non-Jewish one.

That said, there are personality traits among us that while giving common ground, also become annoying when hanging out all the time in large groups. A lot of us aren't traditionally good-looking in that classic way that sorority girls tend to be attracted to at schools with large greek systems. So that was pretty devastating for the social calendar. I can't tell you how many times we would have something planned to only get cancelled at the last minute. Or if we would try to plan an event with alcohol and the sorority we would try to work with would turn us down because they are only allowed so many alcohol-allowed events and didn't want to "waste a good one on us". That was a phrase shown to me from an internal email from that group's social planner from a friend I had in that group.

There was a mini-golf event we planned with a major sorority on campus. This group had 200 active girls. We had 40 active guys. But we worked really hard at planning it and got our alumni to come out as well. We probably got 60 guys to come out. The sorority barely had 30 girls willing to go. This was out of 200. The running joke was that they had to draw straws to find people to attend. It was really discouraging and ruined a lot of the group morale. Our pledges looked at us like we sucked and about 5 dropped out.

Of course there was always the ever-present being treated as a group instead an individual problem. I always found it "funny" when I would see a girl I knew in class from one of the other groups and she was cool with me when I wasn't wearing my letters, presumably because she didn't know which frat I was in. When I saw her at Greek Week, wearing letters or hanging with my group, it was like she never met me before.

Now, with all that negativity, I did appreciate our secret rituals for initiation and meetings. I liked our history and I liked that because we were a smaller group, we all knew each other better than people in other organizations. A lot of people in fraternities and sororities don't know all of the people that they supposedly had such a strong bond with. I think that is kind of silly.

Never really got hazed. Nothing bad ever happened to me. We had the kidnappings which were a blast and scavenger hunts. Camping trips were amazingly fun. Excellent parties and tons of weed. Overall, with the exception of the disappointing Greek community experiences, the smaller group experience was good.

 

Every time I got promoted, I couldn't move my arm for a couple days. If you half-ass it, you're saying you don't care about them getting/keeping that rank.

And if you break your wrist or fingers, it means you don't know how to punch, and you probably should turn in your man card.

 

Or miss, for fuck's sake. When I got my Airman stripes one of the guys in the shop - who was one of the stronger built guys who always made a point of trying to make me fear him pinning my stipes on because of how hard he was gonna hit me - actually somehow missed and gave me this glancing blow that I barely even felt. I course he managed to hit my other arm extra hard, but that didn't stop me from calling him a pussy who hit like a girl after he missed his first swing. It was all in good fun.

 

My first team leader was a stocky Asian dude, kinda fat but strong as an ox. When I made Specialist he hit me so hard it literally hurt for about a month (constantly for a few days, and then when I would take a deep breath for several weeks after that). All in good fun--and the fucker didn't knock me off my feet like he said he was going to.

 

I chose comfort over brotherhood and got placed in the engineering dorm, one of only 4 dorms that had a/c units freshman year. I wasn't an engineering major, nor did I have any desire towards that field, but it was a brand new building in the center of campus. I'd be crazy not to!

My dorm was an unofficial frat with plenty of events and activities, just with a bunch of nerds. Geniuses at everything but social dexterity. Our sister dorm was 30 feet away but it might as well have been in another universe. We knew a few girls, but they were engineers themselves.

Then I took some advice that changed my outlook on chasing women in college - make friends with some girls you are not attracted to, at all. I don't remember where I got this advice, but it worked.

They introduced me to their hot friends (who then introduced me to their hot friends), I was getting more than I could ever need, and I decided joining a frat was not something I needed to do to get laid often. Finding platonic female friends is like a network of vagina.


I went to a few frat parties, but couldn't imagine climbing that social hierarchy for something I didn't need.