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.
Yeaahhh… with regret, I sort of have to flag this:
This kind of thing? Not helpful. I find the conflation of STEM in its entirety with the kind of ideology exemplified by the tanning bed casualty above… well, problematic. There are women in STEM, y’know.
Well, that’s distressing to learn. When I returned to my alma mater a few years ago and found that all the frats were gone from campus (and the house for the most rapey of all was now offices for the Gender Studies faculty, of all things), I felt like a person might upon returning to their hometown and finding that someone they’d thought would be a lifelong nemesis had quietly died a few years before. I had hope that the rape factories were starting to go out of style, not going underground to fester into an even more virulent form.
Makes sense, Buttercup. I guess I just think it must be possible to do all that stuff (get alumni dollars, develop friends and business connections, etc, without all the artifice and dysfunction of the greek system. And yeah, the outsider/insider dynamic is extremely obnoxious. If someone’s parties are going that wrong on a regular basis, maybe stop having parties for awhile, get back to whatever your core mission is– assuming you have one– think about why you as the host allow/encourage events to get that crazy… and then tighten up the guest list and your own standards next time. sheesh.
Writing a policy no one reads or abides by, then expressing bafflement when your neighbors want to know WHY f’ed up things continue to happen at your parties on a regular basis does seem like a “solution” that’s much more CYA than good faith effort to improve your operations.
(granted, I spent my formative years in the army, which is also artificial, dysfunctional and destructive… and yet provides lifelong associations with a lively cast of characters and practical benefits for the people who get through the initial period of hazing! ha I can almost see it from the standpoint of a bunch of 18-21 year olds far from home for the first time, but there has got to be a better way than either of those)
I remember what I was going to say. Unless Woody got sent back, he actually passed his troll challenge and was let back in.
You’re right that men could also be getting hurt at these parties, if the get in. I didn’t go to many frat parties at university, but I am under the impression that it is difficult for men not associated with the frat to get in. Even in the original article, he mentions that drunk men are turned away at the door. So maybe the reason we aren’t seeing men getting injured is just because they aren’t there or don’t have their brothers around to help if things get out of hand.
If they are allowing drunk women, but not drunk men, into the party, there has to be a reason. What possible reason could they have to let young women with lowered inhibitions into their house? Oh, right…to take advantage of them.
Ugh. Fuck this guy. Makes me a tad embarassed to have gone to MIT… thank god I never joined the Greek system.
thermonictriode, I think that was a sarcastic comment that alluded to the misogynist belief that women are not good at science & tech because only men are good at math & logic, and that having studied/work with something technical somehow makes you “rational”. So David is mocking this guy’s laughable “reasoning” because misogynists have such impeccable logic, using their own prejudices.
All I can think of is 2 things.
1 – 18 years drinking age? Lowering the age of drinking to 18 years will fix the problem of drunk people showing up at your party and ruining your evening? Buddy, I come from a country that has a drinking age of 16 (For your information, the minimum age of consent is 15).
Lemme tell ya, it does not fix the problem of drunk people crashing your party and it does fuck all to make people “pace their drinking”. The only thing is does is burn out the part of your brain that feels impatience with drunk people, because, again, there’s been some at every big party I have ever attended since I was 16.
2 – 22 pages? That’s it? How are you going to cover fire escape procedures, chemical responsibility, general safety, hazards, behaviour, alcohol, interactions, social dynamics and insurance responsibility in 22 pages? He says it like a mantra of protection: “All Behold Our 22 Page Manual Of Knowledge” but 22 pages for a manual is nothing.
Methinks Frezza there just doesn’t like books or women.
ralmcg, also because you’d be trying to solve a problem of which women are most of the victims, by punishing women, not letting them in universities.
As long as rapists are coddled and comforted and excused by the culture, there will be rapes (of female students, of female workers, of male students, etc…)
Only the falling one actually implicates the frat party. Alcohol poisoning you can’t really stop unless you’re carefully monitoring every individual (which is logistically not plausible) and getting hit by a car when you leave the party isn’t something the frat has any control over. Even the falling is a little suspect, as you could have balconies off limits during the party (stairs I don’t know). Not seeing huge frat-threatening problems here.
And how is this a problem, hmm? Alcohol poisoning is not plausible to prevent completely, and there are steps party-goers can take to respond to someone blacking out. I don’t recall any stories about a frat being punished for people blacking out during a party, so why are unconscious women such a big problem?
Well then.
I believe part of that manual (as was linked to earlier) is supposed to require that all alcohol be purchased by the frat, limited by the number of people present, and that people bringing in their own alcohol are to be turned away.
Needless to say, most of these rules are not followed, and the entire purpose is CYA for the parent organizations by allowing them to say that the local frat wasn’t following the rules, so the unfortunate events that happened weren’t their fault. It allows the parent organizations to blame any problems on the local frats while remaining above it all. The rules were never meant to actually be followed.
@kirbywarp, you have brought Bootsey as always to cheer us up!
Praise her.
“Ha ha, what a beta. He’s so beta he’s the president of Betas.”
Yes, but as the president of Betas, he’s the alpha beta.
{rimshot}
Thank you very much.
RE: genderneutrallanguage
The greatest threat to my house is TREES.
Fascinating. Please, tell me more. I’m taking notes so that the next time I get raped, I will fall on someone’s house and destroy it. I will have my woody revenge! Mwahaha!
RE: cloudiah
WOMEN ARE TREES. STOP THE PRESSES. WOMEN ARE TREES.
SOYLENT TREES IS WOMEN!
RE: ralmcg
I don’t think it would solve it since there would still be a problem of possible rape charges made against the men’s only university students by non-student women and girls.
Uh yeah, plus male-on-male rape happens. Wasn’t Richard Dawkins in a male-only school when he talked about a teacher who molested students?
Needless to say Frezza’s article is ridiculous and I’m really surprised Forbes published it. I came late to the show and didn’t get to read the whole thing but it’s right there is the subtitle “this headline is click bait.”
In my books rape is worse than murder. It’s the absolute worse thing than can happen to a person, it’s despicable and it is NEVER the victims’ fault.
That being said, whether the legal drinking age is 16 (Germany), 18-19 (Canada) or 21 (U.S.) for the year before, of and after that age young people are going to get drunk and have sex. That’s just one of the ways youth have fun. So the idea that each and every time two drunk* people have consensual sex it’s rape because you can’t give consent when you’re drunk seems completely absurd to me! And it flies in the face of actual rape victims who have been the target of a criminal and suffered a terrible trauma.
*I think it’s also worth mentioning that the word “drunk” covers the range from 2 or 3 beers to alcohol poisoning. Obviously the idea that you can’t give consent while drunk is meant to protect victims. The idea that ingesting alcohol relieves you of any responsibility for your words and actions sets a dangerous precedent that could just as easily be used to protect criminals as victims.
RE: Adrian
In my books rape is worse than murder.
As a survivor, I disagree. Rape is survivable. Murder is not.
Prefacing your rape apologism with hyperbolic statements doesn’t make it any less disgusting, Adrian.
I’ve put GNL on moderation; not sure if I’ll let through anything by him, but certainly he’s done in this thread.
thermonictriode, I wasn’t making fun of STEM; I was making fun of a certain type of dudebro who thinks he’s logical but isn’t, and who often (as Frezza does) has a techy background. Sorry if that wasnt’ clear.
@ Adrian: I have had lots of drunk sex, but it was my intent to have sex before getting drunk.
What makes it rape is when someone pressures a very intoxicated victim into sex the victim did not intend to have, and is too incoherent to say no to, or is totally unconscious.
You’re also ignoring the fact that a lot of rapists try to get their prospective target incapacitated to lower resistance…and to make her or him seem less credible. Rapists aren’t dumb, and they aren’t acting on impulse. They plan this stuff.
My impression is that Adrian thinks real rape is the kind from scary guys in dark alleys… ugh.
Also, isn’t it generally a straw man argument? Not many people think that the moment one drop of alcohol passes someone’s lips, they immediately become incapacitated and can’t be held responsible for anything that happens.
@Adrian:
Wrong. If it’s consensual, it wasn’t rape. If the consent was “given” while the person was intoxicated, it wasn’t consensual. This is a very easy concept to grasp, dude.
Wrong again. It is not a fiction, it is an observation; you cannot rely on your brain to work properly enough to make an informed decision while drunk. This is a scientific fact about the world that leads to conclusions, and one conclusion is that you cannot adequately give consent while drunk.
Oh so wrong. When drunk, you are held responsible for what you do, not what is done to you. Criminals do things, victims have things done to them. There is no slippery slope here.
Basically, Adrian, you are approaching fractal wrongness here, while pretending you actually give a shit about rape.
@LBT:
*sigh* CURSE YOU BLOCKQUOTE MONSTER!!! *shakes fist at the sky*
the only reason I bothered to comment was this quote:
“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.”
People have consensual sex when they are drunk, it’s a fact. I once had a FwB who would text me like clockwork every Saturday night as she was leaving the bar. I was usually drunk too. I did not rape her, she did not rape me.
Given how precedent works in the legal system and how lawyers are able to manipulate it I think it’s a bad idea for the idea that you aren’t responsible for your words when drunk to make it into the system. Because specific little details like that can be take n out of context and applied to completely unrelated matters.
Furthermore I think it’s bad that if two drunk people (regardless of gender) both say “let’s have sex” or something to that effect, one can later turn around and call it rape.
@cassandrakitty
What in my comment was rape apologism? If you’re going to call me a rape apologist please quote something I said. Again the only reason I commented at all is I don’t like the idea that being drunk relieves any person in any context of responsibility for their words and actions.
@blahlistic
“What makes it rape is when someone pressures a very intoxicated victim into sex the victim did not intend to have, and is too incoherent to say no to, or is totally unconscious.”
I couldn’t agree more. I agree with everything you said in that post.
There are also vindictive people who like to use the legal system in any way they can and lawyers who make a career of helping them.
What I was trying to get at is that rules, laws and policies at any level should be crafted to protect victims and minimize abuses of the system.
@LBT
A few years ago it occurred to me that only men could commit rape (please don’t throw some viagra or using tools scenario at me here) and when I realized that only men could do it and I thought about that fact it seemed to me that it was at the core of inequality between men and women and it disgusted me. So, yes, the statement ‘rape is worse than murder’ may be excessive and hyperbolic but I’ve come to believe that rape is the worst crime because it is the only one that is a one way street.
If I had met and talked to victims in person rather than just reading about it I might have a more refined opinion but it’s not exactly dinner conversation.
I’m sorry if I offended you in any way.