We learned earlier today that evil females are trying to destroy one of the few remaining safe spaces for men in our culture – professional football. Now we learn that evil drunk females have their blurry sights set on another man space: College fraternities.
The brave soul bringing this crucial information to the men of the world? The impressively tan frat man Bill Frezza, who presented his case in a post on Forbes.com with the subtle title
Alas, the Femborg Collective must have caught wind of this little breach in security. The piece was quickly taken down, and Frezza was relieved of his duties as a contributor to Forbes. (You can still see the Google cache version here though.)
So what did brother Frezza argue? Basically, that drunken women are actively infiltrating American frats – and threatening to bring them down by being drunk and female. While frat brothers are carefully policed by well-meaning elders like Frezza – the head of the alumni house corporation for his MIT fraternity – the ladies are uncontrolled and uncontrollable:
Fraternity alumni boards, working with chapter officers, employ a variety of policies designed to guide and police member behavior. Our own risk management manual exceeds 22 pages. The number of rules and procedures that have to be followed to run a party nowadays would astound anyone over 40. We take the rules very seriously, so much so that brothers who flout these policies can, and will, be asked to move out. But we have very little control over women who walk in the door carrying enough pre-gaming booze in their bellies to render them unconscious before the night is through.
(Emphasis mine.)
Damn those drunk gals, all liquored-up on booze that our frat brothers didn’t provide, honest, come on we all know those bitches were drunk when they got here right fellas let’s keep our goddamn stories straight.
Yes, boozed up males also show up at parties, sometimes mobs of them disturbing the peace on the front steps. But few are allowed in, especially if they are strangers. … [I]t is … irresponsible women that the brothers must be trained to identify and protect against, because all it takes is one to bring an entire fraternity system down.
So how exactly do these terrible gals do their damage? A variety of devious ways.
Alcohol poisoning due to overconsumption before, during, or after an event. Death or grievous injury as a result of falling down the stairs or off a balcony. Death or grievous injury as a result of a pedestrian or traffic accident as the young lady weaves her way home.
That’s right. Some of these gals are apparently willing to give up their own lives in order to make frats look bad.
Oh, but some use an even more devious weapon:
False accusation of rape months after the fact triggered by regrets over a drunken hook-up, or anger over a failed relationship. And false 911 calls accusing our members of gang rape during a party in progress.
It’s gotten so bad that Frezza feels compelled to tell young frat brothers that maybe it’s not such a good idea to have sex with drunken women, or even to bring them to your room for a game of Jenga.
Never, ever take a drunk female guest to your bedroom – even if you have a signed contract indicating sexual consent. Based on new standards being promulgated on campus, all consent is null and void the minute a woman becomes intoxicated – even if she is your fiancée.
The solution? Lower the drinking age to 18. That’ll show ’em!
No, really.
Unless and until the drinking age is reduced to 18, students relearn how to pace themselves while drinking, and individuals are held responsible for the consequences of their own behavior, rather than blaming the institutions that house and educate them, the only defense is extreme vigilance.
This is how you can tell that Frezza really did go to MIT. Because this is STEM logic at its finest.
Oh, I noticed this at the end of his piece:
Bill Frezza is the President of The Beta Foundation, the house corporation for the Chi Phi fraternity at MIT.
Ha ha, what a beta. He’s so beta he’s the president of Betas.
Months after the fact? This is some “women are permanently affected by sex” bullshit – we’re such delicate little flowers that months later we’re still stewing about it and feeling the need to blame someone else?
He gets so close to the actual problem here: indeed, telling men not to rape, or do things that might be rape, is a fantastic idea! Now if only he could muster some concern for the victims instead of the poor, persecuted perpetrators.
Seriously, of all the things to try to blame on women, he picks frat party rape? This is a thing so widely understood to be dangerous to women that even the mainstream acknowledges it.
<a href="http://mentalfloss.com/article/19437/why-drinking-age-21"Apparently 21 used to be the voting age as well, but when the Vietnam draft included men as young as 18, people got pissed that you could be shipped off to war and die overseas before you could vote, so the voting age was lowered to match the drafting age. They tried lowering the drinking age as well, but a sudden uptick in drunk driving fatalities put the kibosh on that. While technically each state can set the drinking age wherever they want, any state that sets it younger than 21 loses out on that sweet, sweet federal highway money (and also, driving across state lines to drink was part of what caused the aforementioned fatalities).
Blahlistic,
I love MRA-X ray glasses and totally stealing it if you don’t mind.
Or “it wasn’t rape because I don’t feel bad about it” (a la Warren Farrell on child-molesting dads).
Adrian,
You’re wrong.
Translation: “please don’t prove me wrong”. Also, even if we limit ourselves to cisgender people, there are plenty of sex acts which don’t involve an erect penis and which can therefore be forced on an unwilling penis-having person. If your definition of rape only includes nonconsensual PIV, you’re excluding a shitload of victims of all genders and that’s fucking terrible.
Protip, Adrian: if your defense of “real victims” sounds exactly like an MRA whining about “false accusations”, you might want to reconsider your position.
Woody,
“It’s not misogyny if someone else disagrees with it!” Seriously, Woody, fess up: are you a liar or are you really this stupid?
Because fuck you.
Re: drinking ages: Germany actually doesn’t have one. 16 is an informal cutoff point, i.e. if you appear to be under that, bartenders and waiters can legally refuse to serve you, because you’re clearly not mature enough to handle it. But they generally don’t ask for ID. They go by the way a person is acting. And if they’re acting like a giggly, snot-nosed kid, no beer for them.
On the other hand, the driving age there is 18, and the idea has often been floated of raising it to 21. Speed limits have been imposed on segments of the Autobahn, too, and punishments for all kinds of careless driving, including impaired, are much stricter there than over here. Eg., if you are seen merely staggering drunkenly toward your car, keys in hand, you can count on spending the night in jail. You don’t even have to get behind the wheel.
German universities don’t have frats, either. And on top of that, tuition was free there last time I checked, although you really do have to be in the top of your high-school class in the advanced stream if you want to get in. This pretty much weeds out the rich-but-stupid types you so often see in US frats. You can’t buy your way into the German university system; you have to earn it.
I mention all this because these factors play in to the differences between the two cultures. It’s not that drunken rapes don’t exist in Germany (far from it), but that the whole frat-boy culture that facilitates so many of them on this side of the pond is just not there. And with it, a whole subgenre of sexism unto itself. It’s not that Germans are so much more sober or feministic than North Americans (ha, ha, hardly!), but that the culture on the whole disapproves of irresponsible behavior that much more. Social disapproval makes up for whatever isn’t controlled by law, at least where alcohol is concerned.
BTW, I specifically picked a uni that had outlawed frats. In the case of my alma mater, it was because an out-of-control party in 1983 ended up literally demolishing the house where it was held. I enrolled there in 1986. Last thing I wanted was to lose my virginity perforce to a tub of Purple Jesus.
And yeah, chalk up this German Canadian as being puzzled by the whole existence of frats, too. Why are they even a thing at all, let alone still? Seems to me like the whole shitty essence of the old boys’ network, triple-distilled into some seriously bad juju.
X-mray?
Also, the argument I recall was that too many 18-year-olds were giving booze to their 15- and 16-year-old friends — so the de facto drinking age was two or three years lower than the legal age, so if you raised the legal age to 21 the de facto age would be 18.
Society has totally screwed-up attitudes toward sex and booze, and then you put the two of them together in a 18-year-old who’s away from their helicopter parents for the first time … I’m always amazed that things aren’t worse. Then there are those public-service ads that say a parent is a criminal if they let their kids sample a drop of booze in their home, even though everybody knows that once they get to college they can drink themselves stupid any time they want. If for fuck’s sake you’re not going to enforce the law at college, don’t preach to me about how I try to prepare my kids.
I was exposed to alcoholism at an early age — my mother and two of my three neighbors had drinking problems. I went to prep school with a bunch of guys who thought that if you didn’t barf you hadn’t drunk enough yet. I’ve lived all my life in a state that avoids an income tax in part by putting liquor stores at rest areas on the interstate highways. Arrrrggggghhhhh!
Re: They tried lowering the drinking age as well, but a sudden uptick in drunk driving fatalities put the kibosh on that. While technically each state can set the drinking age wherever they want, any state that sets it younger than 21 loses out on that sweet, sweet federal highway money (and also, driving across state lines to drink was part of what caused the aforementioned fatalities).
It’s kind of doubtful that raising the drinking age was really the causative factor in lowering highway fatalities.
In any case, if you really wanted to lower highway fatalities, you could, you know, raise the legal limit to drive. Right now we have lax legal limits to drive, and a high drinking age, which makes *no* sense.
MRA-X-Ray glasses then?
…They allow you to see any tiny thing that *might possibly be* misconstrued as anti-male, meanwhile rendering all the huge swathes of glaring misogyny everywhere totally unrecognizable.
No, x-mray specs. That works best.
From the link I borked the first time (sorry):
(The article goes on to note some reasons why these things may not be related after all, but this is nevertheless the reasoning that led to the change)
Orrrrrr you could do what they do in Germany, which is have a really damn good highway patrol, enforcing much stricter driving laws in general.
But somehow, I don’t imagine that would fly in the low-tax-mad, flibbertigibbertarian US of A.
Uh-huh.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11243104
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The age for buying alcohol was lowered to 18, from 20, in 1999. There has been regular debate about it since, but in 2012, MPs voted 68 to 53 to keep the age at 18 — contrary to the Law Commission’s recommendation to return the age to 20.
Short-term studies have linked the change to an increase in the serious-crash risk for intoxicated drivers directly affected — those aged 18 and 19 years old.
Now, in the first long-term study, Massey University researchers Dr Taisia Huckle and Karl Parker have found this increased risk has become the new normal.
In the years leading up to the change, drivers aged 18 or 19 had roughly the same chances as those aged 20 to 24 of having an “alcohol-involved” vehicle crash that caused injury or death.
That increased in the years following the change, putting the younger drivers at 15 per cent greater risk in the first six years, then at 21 per cent greater risk up to 2010
—-
There being very few cars capable of driving to Australia from NZ, it’s difficult to ascribe this to “blood barriers”
Haven’t seen any of those (then again, I’m in Canada, not the U.S.), but…
Really, that’s just idiotic. The fact that I had occasional bits of alcohol in my mid-teens (hard apple cider, and my parents were ‘big family dinners should have wine’ types, though neither ever drank more than a couple of drinks per day) meant that there was absolutely no mystique to it when I got to University, and I already knew what it did and how to pace myself.
That sounds like the sort of ‘public service announcement’ that will be completely ignored by the people who really need to listen to it, and will only be followed by the people who would probably be better off teaching their kids moderation rather than laying down a flat out ban.
I understand that the police is already, at least sometimes, keeping an eye on official frat parties specifically because there might be underage drinking? Also I doubt frat parties would hire any security other than a few of their own fratboys.
Indeed, that’s probably why Frezza advocates lowering the drinking age: it would mean less legal scrutiny in general plus no more of those occasional lawsuits when frats inevitably get caught serving drinks to freshmen. Also, if college women are deemed old enough to drink, it’s easier to blame them for rape and whatever else.
Obviously, lowering the drinking age and getting rid of “dry” campuses would move some of the student drinking from frat parties and random house parties to real bars, and that might actually improve safety, but I doubt that’s what Frezza had in mind.
The PSA that was so harsh on parents who might let their kids experiment with alcohol at home was sponsored by the same state that runs liquor stores at interstate highway rest area. Welcome to the State of Hypocrisy.
There is an enormous alcohol problem on college campuses, and I don’t think anyone really knows what to do about it — assuming they wanted to do anything. The problem is that there’s a lot of competition among colleges to attract paying customers (I.e., students), and they are afraid that if they get a reputation for being the teensiest bit strict on alcohol, the students will go somewhere else.
You can argue about how severely influenced by alcohol someone has to be to lose the ability to consent to sex — I think everyone (at least everyone with a useful opinion) agrees that at some point before passing out a person loses the ability to consent, but I have not heard any real firm ideas about how to determine when that point has been reached. But I think nearly everyone will concede that while drunken hookups may be fun in the short term, they do not contribute much to developing caring and respectful interactions with members of the opposite sex (not to even mention non-binary people) and probably do contribute quite a bit to rape culture in that they tend to promote sex without any kind of emotional contact.
We have a culture that tells people who are too young to drink legally that the consequences of having one drink are more or less the same as having ten, so if you’re going to drink you might as well get drunk. I always felt that trying to inculcate sensible attitudes toward alcohol, more or less against everything that’s out there in our culture, was one of the most, if not the most, important task I had to accomplish as a parent.
I was actually that paranoid straight-edge guy who never drank, because by the time it was on the table, we’d already lost two system members to rape, and I was positive that booze would only raise the number. I STILL only drink at home, for that same reason. (Of course, now I’m on a medication that forbids alcohol, so that’s that.)
RE: Bina
Orrrrrr you could do what they do in Germany, which is have a really damn good highway patrol, enforcing much stricter driving laws in general.
I dunno, the US has a LOT more road to cover than Germany. I’m not sure that what works there would work here. (Also, I’ve heard Germany is a little less car-necessary than the US? Am I totally off-base on that?)
Yeah, lots of issues where Europe has a “better” take than the U.S. are logistical. People forget that not only do most areas of the U.S. lack anything like decent public transit, things are REALLY far apart here. I commute almost 40 miles one way to my job. My family lives very close from a U.S. perspective – they’re only 150 miles away from me. The spread-out nature of the U.S. greatly increases the complexity of a lot of these issues.
Yes. outside of urban areas? if you have no car, you pretty rapidly have no job either, because you can’t get to work.
I don’t avoid drink b/c of possible meds interactions, as I’ve found the interaction is to make me get drunk faster.
I avoid booze because it’s a hard struggle to stop drinking once I start, and that’s bad.
I don’t drive anything but sober…now. I do not and did not drink and drive.
Sadly though…
When younger and much more likely to do stupid crap, I drove 4 miles very carefully and slowly home…on six hits of windowpane acid.
I freaked out because there were all these PEOPLE at this PARTY and so as soon as I stopped melting into the COUCH, which I did for about 45 minutes or so…I decided I needed… to go to my place where it was SAFE…from all the PEOPLE…
Not good at all.
….Though I’m pretty sure it took me about 30 minutes to drive 4 miles. Cars should not turn into silly putty and engage hovercraft mode when you drive, though, nor should stop signs wiggle and turn aqua.
Don’t do this, kids. I was lucky I didn’t hurt anyone.
RE: maistrechat
People forget that not only do most areas of the U.S. lack anything like decent public transit, things are REALLY far apart here.
YUP. Like, people are astounded that I get around without a car here. They seem to think it’s utterly impossible. Of course, I’m disabled. I do miss the better public transit in Boston, but what can you do.
There’s a reason we have games like this in the USA!
…so wait, his name is seriously one letter away from Freeza?