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.
That RA had quite the yarn to tell.
Also, as many others have pointed out, the fact that he focuses on the frat’s rep and not the harm being done/allowed to happen is telling.
@GonnaNormallyLie The person equating injuries sustained while drunk and rape is the author of the Forbes article, not the commenters. Odd how you use his sins to take women and/or feminists to task. Go Natteroff, Loser.
Yeah, My instincts were right. I saw this article and it’s head line and hoped for awhile that it was explaining the effect of sex with a person who is intoxicated on a level Frat boys would understand. But of course I can to my sense and passed it on by. At least I know I was on the right track.
All requests (including the request for an open thread to talk about Angelia Magnum and Tjhisha Ball) have been forwarded to David.
ralmcg, may be poor wording there. I don’t think rape charges made against men is a problem. I think men continuing to commit rape is the problem.
And I know it’s been addressed already, but:
Did you ACTUALLY just say “chicks”?
Added another message to David asking for GNL to be modded or, preferably, banned. He’s always been one of the most boring trolls, even when not blatantly being a rape apologist as here.
Seconding this. Please, people (and most do this) put up a note if whatever you’re linking to is going to be foul and likely triggering.
Thanks for the advise, everybody, on how to post here. Especially about warning people before posting links.
When you cut out all the fluff The Article did have a point…
Cherry-picking!
But seriously, I second the proposal for bannage, as deserving for rape apologists and people who misuse trees for awful metaphors.
Ooops, blockquote monster. First sentence is a quote from GNL.
Unlike frat boys, I’ve never worried about being drunk around trees. They’re also less likely to throw up on my shoes.
Time for cute birds break.
@ ralmcg – we had men-only universities for most of history. I doubt it reduced the incidence of rape and sexual assault – the “Launderesses” who cleaned the lads’ rooms at Cambridge University were so much regarded as fair game for the scholars that the word became a euphemism for prostitute (odd that “scholar” did not become a euphemism for “rapist” isn’t it?)
Mr Bluecat was at a men’s only college at Oxford which did not become coed until the 1980s. And – guess what? The women’s colleges, when they began to exist, were worse funded and taught fewer courses. Did this prevent rape? Hard to tell. In Mr B’s experience there was a lot of sexual assault – male on male.
Am I the only one who reads a column like Frezza’s and instantly wonders just how many times he committed date-rape when he was just a lad, and so is caught trying to heal the cognitive dissonance from hearing that it was actually a bad thing he did? Especially when they start going on about how the boys just can’t help having sex with women who are too drunk to consent, I want someone to ask them on-camera how often they did that. Because if they claim the number was zero, they’re living testimony to the fact that their can’t-help-it premise is bullshit. If it’s greater than zero, they can at least be forced to admit that.
Know what I think about the Bill Frezza article. It’s for the birds.
And it it was about people dying/getting hurt while drunk at Frat parties, he wouldn’t have singled out women, because the bros aren’t immune to, say, falling off porches, etc. He singled out women for two reasons: one, misogyny and victim blaming, and two, that 22-page manual that is probably completely ignored helps with liability for the bros, but possibly not for their guests.
Sorry, should have said Bill Frezza’s article in my previous post.
I’m serious about the liability concerns. From the Atlantic article I quoted earlier:
From here: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/02/the-dark-power-of-fraternities/357580/
Upside down Kisa disapproves of parties in general, and frats in particular.
http://imgur.com/bKNjWiG
RAPE IS NOT SOMETHING PEOPLE DO TO THEMSELVES.
That smacks of “separate but equal”, and it never works.
When I first read the article this morning, I was convinced it’s satire. It took me well over a minute (used to make completely sure via research) to believe it actually wasn’t.
PS: I’m being as serious as a triple bypass.
Nope. You’re not the only one. If one out of 5 or 6 women have suffered an attempted or completed rape that doesn’t mean one out of 5 or 6 men are rapists because they usually have multiple victims. It does mean the number of rapists out there is pretty large though. As much as we would like rapists to be easily spottable creeps in trenchcoats lurking in alleyways we all know they walk among us looking like normal guys. Even if a man is considered a respectable and productive member of society, if he starts spewing rape apologia, I actually just make the assumption that he is likely a rapist. One of the rapists who has convinced himself he wasn’t one because our culture likes to say it doesn’t count as rape if she was drunk/wearing revealing clothes/had previously consented to the rapist/led him on by making him out with him/is a slut etc.
Why else would a man try to excuse rape if he wasn’t himself a rapist? I think women engage in victim blaming because they want to believe that if they behave a certain way it won’t happen to them but I can’t think of another motive for a man to do it.
What’s the point of the greek system, anyway? I imagine not all of them are terrible– my husband belonged to a nerdy one for music majors and is/was, as far as I know, pretty benign. But it seems like a lot of them basically exist to help people cheat on tests, party hard, and facilitate rape. I didn’t go to college til later in life and greek life wasn’t a “thing” at my school, so I’m probably missing something here, but shouldn’t college be busy/demanding enough without adding a bunch of fraternity/sorority obligations and drama to the plate? Are they adding something… beneficial, on the whole?
Somehow I think the problem rapists aren’t the kinda people who go to college with the purest intents of learning. I mean I’m certain they don’t see themselves as rapists, almost no rapists do, they see themselves going to school to “have fun”.
Vivat academia, I guess.
ceebarks – the universities like the alumni $$ that flow back from fraternities, while the members get lifelong friends, perks, and business connections. The problem is they’ve spiraled out of control. Many fraternities have gone underground or moved off campus, outside the jurisdiction of the college. Legally, they’re hard to touch.
Which is why the article is so disingenuous. On the one hand, it has a smug air of “MY frat has a 22-page policy manual that protects us in the event of an incident. Drunk bitches be on their own.”
On the other hand, he concludes with: “Unless and until…individuals are held responsible for the consequences of their own behavior…”
In other words, individual responsibility is only for victims outside the system, who aren’t backed by a deep-pocketed institution with huge amounts of financial and legal resources. And yet somehow, they’re a huge threat.
Kisa is adorable, upside-down or right-side-up.
Not adorable: [TW: rape threats] anti-social-justice misogynists respond to women naming their rapists by threatening anyone who names their rapist.