The “paying to make friends” statements make no sense. Fraternities are pooling together the money of their members so they can hold parties. What’s wrong with that?
Toolie makes some good points. Greek organizations can often be viewed as an extension of the high school jock/cheerleader, popular crowd, elite university, SUV driving, McMansion living affluent upper-middle class suburban corporate drone culture. It is a culture that is based on superficial tradition, comformity, institutionalized elitism and entitlement.
OTOH, there’s no particular virtue in being poor, antisocial or underemployed.
It’s no a class envy thing either. Just because somebody doesn’t want to join a frat doesn’t mean they’re “poor, anitisocial or underemployed.” The latter two characterizations, in particular, apply just as often to people in frats as people who aren’t. It’s not like most of the upper class frat boys have jobs. Everything is handed to them by their parents. And non-Greek students are “antisocial?” Where does that come from?
Through my fraternity I have scores of friends - people I can call up in an instant for help, a couch, a guest room, a loan or just to have a drink. I have no problem stating that my circle of friends is quite large. My wife’s personality is different from mine - her circle is quite small. This is a difference between us, and this is why I was attracted to and enjoyed fraternity life. I admit that it is not for everyone, but it also is not the picture that is regularly painted in the anti-fratboy rants.
Nobody charges to be friends. There are dues and fees paid. Mine covered rent, food, parties, insurance, etc. As I said before, living in my house was not significantly different in cost than living in the dorms.
Everything was handed to me by my parents? Nonsense - it was my fraternity that helped me when my parents cut off all means of support.
You are defending against miss characterizations of non-Greeks in a thread that is partially about miss characterizations of Greeks - that is priceless.
I graduated from the University of Idaho recently and while I’ll allow that it’s impossible that all frat boys are bad, I never never met a good one.
The Greeks on our campus were pretty loathsome; lots of crime, lots of girls harassed. They were always so smug and superior but completely without reason. The yard areas around the dorms were always relatively clean, in contrast, the houses on Greek Row were ramshackle, yards full of beer cans and garbage. Of course, in front of these run down, unkempt houses they parked Hummers and Mustangs.
Also, and I know these last two are petty, our Greek kids had a couple of peculiar quirks that mystified the rest of the campus.
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They didn’t like to cover their legs. Bear in mind this is northern Idaho, it’s not particularly warm most of the year. Yet fratboys could always be counted upon to be wearing board shorts, polos, and flip-flops topped by one of those ridiculous straight-brimmed bill caps tipped to the side - ALL OF THEM. It was bizzare, they’d cruise around in 2’ of snow wearing flip-flops and board shorts - WTF? Same was true for sorostitutes; miniskirts year round and most of the time they’d wear those winter boots with the faux shearling on the top, they’d wear those in September when it’s 80. So weird!
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Scooters. I’m not sure what the frick and frak made the Greeks think that scooters were neat but Day-um, they all seemed to tool around on 'em. Scooters, in northern Idaho, I can’t believe they didn’t all get their asses kicked. They all obviously had disposable incomes, why not buy a motorcycle? Nope, all scooters all the time. Sometimes they’d ride double. You can’t ride bitch on a scooter and expect anyone to treat you like a man.
Unfortunately, the fraternities of my grandfather’s era are gone, the fraternities of today have earned their poor reputation.
The rest of the universe has friends too, you know.
**Dio **seems to think that you can’t have more than a couple, though. He was slamming my comment about the joys of living with 50 of my best friends, claiming that anybody who says that doesn’t know what a friend is.
Bricker,
That’s a good question. The answer I would have given to your question would have been different for any of the past twenty one years that I have “been in college”: first as an undergraduate student, then as a graduate student, faculty member, and now as an administrator (half-time).
As an undergraduate, I was utterly insulated from the college-fraternity sphere: my university had no greek organizations. I recall one attempt from a group of girls (several of whom I worked with) to form a soroity, which failed within a year having succumbed to several stereotypes.
As a graduate student, I was placed into a situation where I was older and far removed from the traditional college scene–at a college where the greek organizations were highly visible (although only comprising ~20% of the campus population). This college had no frat houses, but did have a de facto frat row. Anything you heard that had anything to do with this situation was generally “bad”: drunkness, arrests, injury, etc. But nobody reports the good news.
As a faculty member, and now a(n) (quasi-)administrator on a campus with a visible and active frat life, and as a property owner whose backyard abuts an apartment complex rich with greek life, I have to admit: my attitude on greeks has softened considerably.
Do frats seem to consist largely of college dudes strongly inclined to drunkness, drug use, and sex attainment? Absolutely. Yet… so is nearly every other college dude. The difference seems to only lie in organization: frats are strongly organized in these pursuits; dudes hanging out, less so. As a group of similarly dressed, similarly behaving college males, who are involved in campus activities, they stand out–and when you see them later, after the activity, drinking and barfing and behaving deplorably, you remember it. Fucking Sigma Nus, right? But on any given night you also have a group of not similarly dressed yet similarly behaving college males (and really, the females can be just as “poorly behaved”) engaging in the same behavior–you know, acting like college students–but since they lack the insignia, they are just anonymous college students making too much noise.
I could go on, but I’ve typed enough. Little Nemo said it succinctly: it’s the group thing that stands out. Give the group matching T-shirts and it appears, for some reason, much worse than it is. Ergo, somehow, frats suck.
Never a greek, not even close,
Yossarian
Since this thread is basically anecdote vs. anecdote, here’s one of my own.
In my experience, I never noticed a difference in backgrounds or class amongst my Greek vs. non-Greek friends. Here is a brief list of some of my friends I made through my fraternity:
- a guy from the east coast paying for college through ROTC
- a middle class Indian guy from Nebraska
- a first generation son of Polish immigrants who was the first of his family to attend college
- a middle class Asian guy from Detroit
- an upper-middle class son of a successful businessman
- a son of missionaries from Hong Kong
- a son of small town public school teachers (myself)
- Hi Opal (did I do that right?)
I never joined a Fraternity, although most of my friends were “brothers”, so I could go to all the parties. That seemed to make more sense than cleaning up puke or feces to prove I was worthy of membership.
Fraternities aren’t bad, but the members often give Lambda Lambda Lambda, or Delta a bad name. (Delta certainly did not deserve Double Secret Probation!)
To me, “Fratboy” is a general description of anyone who likes to coast their way through life, use third grade adjectives like “stupid” or “bogus”, get away with as many date rapes as possible, yell, “Daddy! I need a lawyer for another DUI!”, and graduate without ever reading a single story or math problem, because you already have a copy of the exam. It doesn’t apply to EVERY fraternity brother.
As far as describing Rush Limbaugh’s audience, yes, fratboy is correct. All a “fratboy” knows about money and government is what dad told them.
During the past NCAA finals, I had lots of what might be called “conversations” with plenty of drunk fratboys. The ones that stick out: Bush planned 9/11, we never landed on the moon, and none of these guys washed their hands in the bathroom before groping their girlfriend of the week.
From Urban Dictionary:
fratboy 167 up, 148 down
“1. A synonym for ‘rapist’
2. A closet homosexual who feels the need to impress other closet homosexuals by being a faggot and raping drunk girls
3. One who lacks the ability to think and/or act without following a crowd.”
or:
“A primate which oddly has opposable digits and some verbal ability. These knuckle-dragging shaven apes are known for their ability to somehow coax or force sexual intercourse with feeble-minded women, often through the use of Rohypnol, alcohol, or other judgement-imparing substances. Often majoring in business or communications, they are oddly absent from class, barely scrape by, and get a job through their fratboy daddy’s connections. Fratboy interests include rape, steroids, SUVs, Abercrombie, any music devoid of meaning and taste (including, but not limited to: Jay Z, Nelly, and Dave Matthews), homoeroticism, Natty Light, and whatever Mtv bullshit they readily swallow. Since the names in the Greek alphabet are multisyllabic, they often shorten their designations to grunts. For example “Lambda Sigma” is far too complex for their feeble minds, and it would thus be changed to “Lam Sig” and followed by the obligatory “yo.” Fratboys can be identified by their steroid-induced bulk, backwards preworn hats with their Fraternity designations on them, and wardrobe exclusively bought from either Structure, American Eagle, or Abercrombie and Fitch. Fratboys and those women who associate with them should be gassed.”
or the verb:
“v. to take a drunk lady by force
Help! Someone call the cops, Biff is trying to fratboy me!!”
I’ll point out that those are the only three definitions. None say “the most eligible and successful guy a gal could marry.”
Now see wouldn’t it be fun to do that for 8 weeks?
And not to mention the pranks you get to pull on other fraternities.
Although I wonder what your comments would be if I told you about a bunch of Greeks ruining an event hosted by non-Greeks?
Well, it would appear to come from your imagination because that’s not what I said. And I noticed you are awfully quick to throw out sweeping generalities as long as they apply to other people.
My comments were in response to **Toolie’s **assertion that most fraternity guys were aspiring towards that upper middle class suburban lifestyle. Also a sweeping generalization.
I think most people, given the opportunity, wouldn’t mind living in a nice house or driving a nice car. So when people make denegrating remarkes about “upper middle class suburban lifestyle” I have to ask what lifestyle they are aspiring to?
Congratulations. I believe it was said that fraternities are a good way of making friends, not that they cornered the market on them.
The difference between a fraternity and a dorm is that typically all the guys in the house know each other. That should not imply that out of all 50 they are all best friends or even like everyone.
Quite frankly I find the knee-jerk reactions a bit surprising. Just because people like certain aspects of being Greek does not mean that being Greek is the only way to acheive that. It’s not even mutually exclusive. I mean once you move into the house, you don’t just sit around “being a frat guy” all day. You get involved in other activities and interests.
Personally, I liked my experience because there were so many fraternities on campus. If I went to a bigger school where they had two fraternities peopled by fat, drunk and stupid assholes, I wouldn’t have bothered.
OOOOP! Sorry, dopers. I typed Rush Limbaugh but meant Newt Gingrinch.
Damn close, anyway. (Sometimes I think that Newt has a fat constume he dons before the “Rush” radio show.) 
Who ruined an event? He just played a joke on one guy.
I worked for the campus radio station. That was my hang out place and where I met many of my college friends. The other half of my friends were fellow Deadheads. Who gets more prank attempts than a radio DJ who’s on the air? We thought it was hilarious when someone got us good.
I was briefly and left because we didn’t see eye to eye on things like drinking and sex. However, I’m going to defend them. Did they like to drink? Yeah. Did they seek to have sex? Yeah. However they didn’t seem anymore inclined to do so than many of the other college students I knew.
They also weren’t the ‘jocks’ of high school. I’m a geek. Its not hard to find that out, but they had no problem with that and were sorry to see me go.
Also, if you have no problems with one night stands with willing partners, they didn’t treat women badly. In fact the one time someone (not a member) tried something at a party they threw him out so hard he got turf burns.
Yes there were dues. But there were also dues for the Karate club and the Newman society. They, like the fraternity, used them to host events.
Now are there fraternity guys who act like jerks? Yeah, but its hardly a universal thing.
So could you perhaps provide an indication of what criteria would lead you to conclude whether the “is it deserved?” question is adequately answered?
I feel I should point out that anyone can enter any definition for any term they want on Urbandictionary.com. I highly suspect that many of the individuals who added the 22 definitions I found had bad experiences with fraternities or were simply unpopular or oddball Goth kids who resented them.
I guess that’s the difference between “fratboys” and GDIs. The guys living in the house have the responsibility to clean up after the party while all the independents get to show up, get drunk for free and then be on their way to complain about what assholes we are.
Sorry, no. Good try, though.
There are two schools of thought on the “right” way to do “Hi, Opal.” One of them is to make “Hi, Opal” the third and final item on the list (that is, only use “Hi Opal” when you need a third item to make a legitimate list). The other way is to use it in any list of any length, and make it the third item, then continue with the remainder of the list. Clearly, the point is that “Hi, Opal” is the third item on the list.
Obviously, it can’t be the second item on a two item list. If you find yourself needing a second item, the accepted form is:
First (well, only) list item
???
PROFIT!!!
2 words: “Secret Society”
And yes, K of C counts. I’ve seen them in uniform.