# Why is "Fratboy" such an insult? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 6, 2009, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126 "2009-04-06T14:10:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 6:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/41 "2009-04-06T18:09:58Z")
> [@Zeriel](#): > > Even at the big state school I attended, there was a notable difference between the kind of fraternity that called itself a “fraternity” and the kind that called itself a “frat”. The latter typically referred to the former as pretentious snobs (and then got busted for underage drinking and noise violations). > > Frankly, I found that 90% of the people I know in real life who ostentatiously called me a “fratboy” and lumped me in with the kegslurpers, even after a comment that Phi Mu Alpha really wasn’t in the same scene as the stereotypes, aren’t people who I care to associate with anyway, since they usually demonstrated poor reasoning abilities and broad-brush prejudices in more areas than just that. > > I think going back to the OP, probably the reason why “fratboy” remains an insult speaks less about fraternities in general and more about the kind of people who are likely to say “Yeah, I’m a frat boy! Come to our party at the house!” rather than “Oh, I’m in \. We’re having a little get-together at brother X’s apartment tonight.” You have a point about the different kinds of fraternal organizations, but I think most of the people who refer to “frats” or “fratboys” are using it as a shorthand for the party houses, not necessarily for every conceivable type of fraternity (though I’ll grant that some of them might not be aware that there _is_ any other type but the party houses). ---
**Author:** ![BrightNShiny](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7bcc69/32.png) [@BrightNShiny](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrightNShiny)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/42 "2009-04-06T18:16:13Z")
I’m not sure if this is on topic, but I vaguely remember a scandal in the early 90’s involving a fraternity at an Eastern college. Their book or diary (or whatever you call it where they recorded all the goings on in the fraternity) was leaked to a newspaper, and (IIRC) it had some pretty ugly stuff in it. Does anyone know what I’m talking about? I, of course, got all my information about “frat boys” from watching the movie [Fraternity Row](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076052/). ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/43 "2009-04-06T18:34:37Z")
> [@emmaliminal](#): > > You know, there’s also the factor that calling someone who is clearly older than a typical undergrad a “fratboy” is to imply that this person is immature, which isn’t entirely a slam on actual frat boys. The stereotype often refers to adults who talk about their frat days as the best time of their lives, and go on about all the partying they did, how boring life is now that they’re settled down, etc. The stereotype generally refers to adults who act like they are still in a fraternity, especially someone who is in a position of adult responsibility: -Favoring employees who “fit in” over performance -Encouraging excessive drinking, rowdiness or other unprofessional behavior -Approaching their responsibility in a lackadaisical manner ---
**Author:** ![Garula](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ea666f/32.png) [@Garula](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Garula)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/44 "2009-04-06T18:43:54Z")
I was in a frat in college. A relatively small one with no national ties (anymore). Calling it a “fraternity” was more tradition than anything, though, since it had gone coed decades before I arrived. There were parties and such, but they were relatively tame. Dues were pretty low and were reduced or waived for anyone with financial hardship. The physical house is in pretty darn good condition as well. Sure, people would suck at cleaning it at times, but very habitable. Our house GPA wasn’t the highest on campus, but then again we had a very high participation rate while most other houses would only submit the grades of a few of their top students. Alumni connections are very strong and our email mailing list gets plenty of activity during workdays. Oh, and we had the largest concentration of boardgame geeks and roleplayers on campus (at least while I was there). I don’t really have a point, except to say that I’m very hesitant to tell certain people that I was in a frat because I worry they’ll get the wrong impression. There certainly are Greek organizations out there that defy the stereotype, though. On a side note, what most people think of a stereotypical fratboys we used to call “sweet dudes.” (Because they think they’re totally sweet.) ---
**Author:** ![MeanOldLady](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/meanoldlady/32/10737_2.png) [@MeanOldLady](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MeanOldLady)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 7:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/45 "2009-04-06T19:11:26Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > Ultimately you join a fraternity because you like the guys and would want to spend the next several years (or longer) hanging out with them. Some of my best friends are still the guys who I was in a fraternity with 15 years ago. Why not just hang out with your good friends then? I’m still friends with people from college and high school, and we never paid fees or were hazed/initiated/whatever into an organization. Anyone can answer this, really. ---
**Author:** ![Algher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Algher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Algher)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/46 "2009-04-06T19:18:53Z")
> [@MeanOldLady](#): > > Why not just hang out with your good friends then? I’m still friends with people from college and high school, and we never paid fees or were hazed/initiated/whatever into an organization. Anyone can answer this, really. I lived in a house, so read this with that in mind: 1. I lived in a house with 50 of my best friends. I could not have done that in the dorms (where I do not control who lives there). I could not have gotten an apartment either, since that would only hold a couple of us. The house gave us critical mass - there was ALWAYS a buddy around to hang out with. As a gregarious, social guy I LIKED that aspect. 2. The total cost of living in the house was not much more per term than living in the dorms. We cleaned our own house, instead of paying the university. We each did kitchen duty instead of paying for kitchen help (we did have a cook for 10 meals per week). It is cheaper to buy a keg or two than for each dorm room to have someone pick up a 6 pack. When my personal finances went to hell, the fraternity helped me out - a level of assistance I could have NEVER had with a university dorm or an off campus apartment. 3. Hazing / Initiation for us was nothing like that of the movies - other than Animal House style with too much midnight drinking. No swats in my tight whites, swallowing goldfish, etc. ---
**Author:** ![MeanOldLady](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/meanoldlady/32/10737_2.png) [@MeanOldLady](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MeanOldLady)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/47 "2009-04-06T19:30:32Z")
I was never really concered about the hazing, and took all the lore that comes from the movies with a grain of salt. I guess I never understood the point of joining. I didn’t live in a sorority house, but I made good friends with good people, and after freshman year we did get to choose our roommates. Kind of, there was a big lottery thing that I don’t feel like getting into. In any case, even when I didn’t live with my friends, I was still close to these people, and someone was always available to shoot the breeze with. Time of day was not an issue. ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/48 "2009-04-06T19:30:45Z")
Friends don’t haze each other, or charge them money to be friends or define friends as simply whoeber is willing to pay the dues. Who can possibly have 50 “best friends” anyway. When people say things like that, it just makes me think they have a very shallow idea of what constitutes “friendship.” I also don’t see anything appealing about the idea of living with a mob. ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/49 "2009-04-06T19:45:09Z")
> [@WoodenTaco](#): > > Christ, the question originally posed was “Please explain the negativity surrounding the label ‘fratboy.’” Of _course_ people are going to be repeating stereotypes. Get off your high horse. Well, not exactly: > [@Bricker](#): > > So what, exactly, inspires the hatred from the masses when fraternities are mentioned? Is it deserved? I can’t see that it is, but I’m open to hearing arguments to the contrary. I grant that this extraordinary repetition of the stereotype does, in a sense, explain what “inspires the hatred,” but there’s been very little to meaningfully address the “is it deserved?” question I also posed. Most of the commentary seems to be, in essence, “Of course it’s deserved, because [repeat stereotype item].” This is … illuminating. I hope we can agree that there’s no shortage of drunk, boorish behavior in non-fraternity college situations. So what makes fraternities the target of so much backlash? Someone above disclaimed jealousy as a motive, but I wonder if it’s as simple as that. A couple of folks have related experiences that suggest anyone could join, but so far as I could observe, the fraternities were not offering membership to all that desired it. And while there’s also sneering about lack of social skills (“You have to pay to get friends?”) it wasn’t my observation that fraternity members were socially unskilled; most were appeared to act as thought they had been part of popular cliques in high school. They were probably folks that felt better about themselves in groups, to be sure, and I imagine that from “popular crowd” in high school to fraternity or sorority in college was not a big leap… but this is not remotely the same as “socially unskilled.” ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/50 "2009-04-06T19:46:59Z")
> [@emmaliminal](#): > > You know, there’s also the factor that calling someone who is clearly older than a typical undergrad a “fratboy” is to imply that this person is immature, which isn’t entirely a slam on actual frat boys. The stereotype often refers to adults who talk about their frat days as the best time of their lives, and go on about all the partying they did, how boring life is now that they’re settled down, etc. > > Like saying “My husband has the sense of humor of an eight-year-old” (after he cracks one too many fart jokes) isn’t a slam on actual eight-year-olds. That’s a very valid observation, but from the rest of the thread’s commentary, it would seem there’s plenty of animus here against actual, 18-22 year old fraternity members. ---
**Author:** ![Zeriel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/58956e/32.png) [@Zeriel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zeriel)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 7:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/51 "2009-04-06T19:52:28Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > You have a point about the different kinds of fraternal organizations, but I think most of the people who refer to “frats” or “fratboys” are using it as a shorthand for the party houses, not necessarily for every conceivable type of fraternity (though I’ll grant that some of them might not be aware that there _is_ any other type but the party houses). Really, the latter ignorance is the only reason I stuck my nose in. I’m rather proud of my little fraternity. ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/52 "2009-04-06T19:55:54Z")
> [@Zeriel](#): > > I don’t know how big your chapters are, but my little brother who lives in Clear Spring, MD, just joined the KoC. Congratulations to him! Local units of the KofC are called “councils” and there’s usually one per local Catholic parish, or one council serving a couple of smaller parishes near one another. Local councils in a state all come under the authority and direction of the State Council, so unfortunately I wouldn’t be likely to even know of his local council. But it’s a fantastic organization, which last year alone donated to charity $31,235,000 at the national level, and had $113,676,000 in charitable donations come from state and local councils, Fourth Degree assemblies, and Squire circles. And as part of our annual emphasis on hosting blood donations, nearly 400,000 Knights were blood donors. I wish your brother well as his journey as a Knight of Columbus continues! [/KofC hijack] 😃 ---
**Author:** ![hajario](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hajario/32/171_2.png) [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/53 "2009-04-06T19:57:41Z")
I didn’t even consider joining a frat when I was I was i school. I thought that they were ridiculous. I don’t have much to add to this thread but I will share a funny prank that a friend of mine pulled. It was Hell Week or whatever the hell they called it and my buddy found a list of TKE pledges and their phone numbers. You could tell by the phone numbers that some of them lived in the dorms. He called one of them at midnight and told him, “Pledge Smith. You are to go to Roberto’s\* and buy four combination burritos. You will leave them in the middle of tennis court number three with an eight line poem on why you should be a TKE. You have half an hour. Go.” He then soothed his late night munchies with some of his friends while mocking the lame poem. \*T.K.E. Is the place for me For brotherhood and fraternity … \* Hilarious. \*a cheap 24 hour Mexican place ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/54 "2009-04-06T19:58:04Z")
Believe me, **Bricker** , there’s no jealousy. On my campus, virtually anyone who wanted in got in. There was no competition for it. Nobody cared. As it happens, I was older than the average student, and had a live-in girlfriend off-campus, so the idea of abandoning peace and quiet and maturity and my future wife to go live on campus with a mob of loud, obnoxious drunks was completely appalling to me. Suggesting that frats have done nothing to earn their reputations and that people who don’t like them are “just jealous” is childishly glib. I wasn’t shut out – quite the opposite – I was hounded by recruiters. I just didn’t find anything remotely attractive about it. ---
**Author:** ![Zeriel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/58956e/32.png) [@Zeriel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zeriel)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/55 "2009-04-06T19:58:14Z")
> [@MeanOldLady](#): > > Why not just hang out with your good friends then? I’m still friends with people from college and high school, and we never paid fees or were hazed/initiated/whatever into an organization. Anyone can answer this, really. Part of it is the critical mass thing, part of it for me was that my fraternity was a clearinghouse for people like me–that is, non-music majors and music majors who were into music as a charity and music as a bonding experience. I’m still friends with a lot of folks who were never in my fraternity, too, but more to the point is that there is no way I would have met 90% of my fraternity brothers without the fraternity as an organizing force. You could argue that it was really just a club with dues and initiation (we didn’t, and don’t, haze), but A) every club worth being, in my experience, in had dues and I paid far more for, say, sailplane flying club than the $75/semester I paid. B) we got dues back anyway, the bulk of them went to our own charitable projects and expenses (like, say, gas money for our touring music groups when we were doing charity performances) C) the initiation process was more or less just a formalized version of the typical getting to know you crap friends do anyway, formalized because you were getting to know 30 guys at once. Not “hazing”, but stuff like a night for why the older guys joined, what the fraternity has to offer, a night for discussing philosophy and deep thoughts in the group context, etc. It’s not for everyone, I’ll be the first to admit that. But it works for some of us, and not everyone for whom the fraternity model works is a “fratboy”. ---
**Author:** ![Zeriel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/58956e/32.png) [@Zeriel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zeriel)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 8:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/56 "2009-04-06T20:09:00Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > Believe me, **Bricker** , there’s no jealousy. On my campus, virtually anyone who wanted in got in. There was no competition for it. Nobody cared. As it happens, I was older than the average student, and had a live-in girlfriend off-campus, so the idea of abandoning peace and quiet and maturity and my future wife to go live on campus with a mob of loud, obnoxious drunks was completely appalling to me. Suggesting that frats have done nothing to earn their reputations and that people who don’t like them are “just jealous” is childishly glib. I wasn’t shut out – quite the opposite – I was hounded by recruiters. I just didn’t find anything remotely attractive about it. Frankly this is why I was one of the (obviously many) who more or less continually voted against “buying a house” and “joining the Interfraternity Council” when I was a collegiate. It seems that 90% of asinine crap on Penn State’s campus was from IFC fraternities and Panhellenic Council sororities, and the independents were all pretty normal people. For the record, I never lived in fraternity housing as we didn’t have any. Closest I ever came was having three of my brothers on the dorm floor I was on at once, but that’s because we were all in the honors dorm anyway–I never even had a fraternity brother as a roommate, for any number of reasons mostly boiling down to “I see these guys four times a week anyway”. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 8:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/57 "2009-04-06T20:12:07Z")
> [@MeanOldLady](#): > > Why not just hang out with your good friends then? I’m still friends with people from college and high school, and we never paid fees or were hazed/initiated/whatever into an organization. Anyone can answer this, really. Well, the short answer is that at my school fraternity “rush” typically started first semester of freshman year. So you don’t really have a whole lot of good friends yet. Fraternity rush was sort of part of the freshman year process of making friends. And the Greek system at my school was so predominant that pretty much everyone thinks about it at some point. 1/3 to 1/2 of all male students join one of the 35 fraternities by sophomore year. Let me put in another way. When I meet an alumni of my college, inevitably one of the first questions they ask is “were you in a house?” Pretty much it’s just another way people go about making friend. Kind of like joining a sports team or school newspaper. It certainly doesn’t preclude you from hanging out with your non-Greek friends or friends in other fraternities. It’s not like the movies where each house only hangs out with it’s own. Some guys will join a house sophomore or junior year because they met some guys they like. Some fraternity guys will move off campus either because they want quiet or the house is over capacity. ---
**Author:** ![Toolie](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/41988e/32.png) [@Toolie](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Toolie)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/58 "2009-04-06T20:13:00Z")
I think that the people who are called “frat boys” and “sorority girls” are working toward a different type of socioeconomic lifestyle (and are immersing themselves in that associated culture), and that lifestyle differs from what their detractors may desire. The members of this Greek culture, over time, have built up tight associations with each other in the form of fraternities and sororities that help reinforced their cultural expectations and are used to pass on the same ideals to each new generation that are influenced to join. The fraternity system has been built and maintained by a type of middle-upper class people who work together to achieve a certain type of homogeneous lifestyle - through their parties, peer-pressure, aesthetics, and exclusivity they help reinforce that culture and discourage deviation from it. But that lifestyle is disliked by a good amount of Americans for a number of reasons. It seems - from what I see in my experience - that the people who toss terms like “drunken, date-raping, racist, pretty-boys who needs to buy friends” are similar to the people who also look down on the “suburban, cul-de-sac living, SUV driving, fast-food eating, mall shopping” lifestyle. Since these people levy charges on the Greek lifestyle that are similar to the charges they levy on the suburban upper-middle class American lifestyle, maybe the two are really different shades of the same color. It’s not unreasonable to think that the Greek system is a pretty efficient mechanism for keeping kids (or pushing them) into that upper-middle class suburban culture that’s loathed by so many others. For example, the Greek system assists greatly in finding suitable partners from the other fraternity/sorority that espouse the same upper-middle class suburban preferences and who have similar cultural expectations. Members can also use their connections with their like-minded peers to jump-start their upper-middle class aspirations - like their careers in fields such as business, finance, marketing, or engineering. Their Greek systems can provide the connections necessary to quickly accelerate up the company hierarchies. The same reinforced aesthetic ideals help individuals to get married sooner to their trophy spouses (who espouse their same aesthetic ideals). After buying fantastically overvalued houses in the suburbs, they can then repeat the cycle encouraging their offspring to attend the same fraternities and sororities to reinforce the same cultural expectations… A lot of people have problems with that upper-middle class suburban lifestyle. I think throwing the term “frat boy” at kids who are heading in that direction (or seem to be coming from that direction) is a manifestation of friction due to a social (or maybe even class) difference. Thus their members end up being called “frat boys” as a pejorative. [QUOTE=Zeriel] As for my freshman year roommate, their Boomer alumni were so embarrassed at their shenanigans that they sold the frathouse out from under the current collegiate members. There’s a pizza shop and a church in there now. [/QUOTE] For the record, I wish I was still within walking distance of Canyon Pizza. ---
**Author:** ![shiftless](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9c0ed/32.png) [@shiftless](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shiftless)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 8:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/59 "2009-04-06T20:25:45Z")
Don’t forget that to be insulted as a group one has to be in an identifiable group. So “Fratboy”, to represent privileged drunken male college students, works a whole lot better than “male college students that party a lot”. Has a nicer ring to it. Plus there are those of us who do think it is sort of like buying friends, or perhaps having them assigned to you. I don’t know how it works. But really, having a bunch of guys paddle your ass …? If I were to sneer and call someone “fratboy” (which I wouldn’t) it would mean someone who would do anything to be part of a group, and not in a good way. There would be contempt and a tinge of jealousy too maybe, at the way they all stick together and help their members over everybody else. There is a sort of unfairness to a group of people who agree to give each other advantages whenever they can. I know, that’s the whole point but it smacks of a kind of institutionalized pseudo-nepotism or something. ---
**Author:** ![Zeriel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/58956e/32.png) [@Zeriel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zeriel)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2009, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126/60 "2009-04-06T20:26:07Z")
> [@Toolie](#): > > For the record, I wish I was still within walking distance of Canyon Pizza. You know, for having been here over a decade I’ve never actually eaten there. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-fratboy-such-an-insult/492126.md?page=4)