I still see difficulties with the project. First, the nature of insults is that they are rarely justified; there’s an intrinsic element of hyperbole and rudeness. One could argue that calling anyone any basic insult – pig, moron, geek, fucker, whatever – is unfairly derogatory towards individuals that actually are any of those things. Second, exactly what kind of non-anecdotal data could justify this particular insult? Do you mean to ask for statistics on how prone to party, rape, cheat, be materialistic, or act superior fraternity members are in contrast to their peers in the dorms?
What you’re really asking is why so many people have such a poor opinion of fraternity members when obviously not all fraternity members are assholes. But that variety of opinion is rarely based on objective fact, and frequently based on aggregation of anecdote. Are you also asking why people who reject stereotypes based on “protected classes” are willing to stereotype frat boys? That’s a valid question, but it doesn’t have anything to do with “justification.” We could talk about the difference between denigrating the historically oppressed and the historically privileged, but is that where you want to go with this?
Another frat boy here. I live near my university, and I recently volunteered to join the housing corps (ie., alumni volunteers who keep track of the chapter’s investments and accounts to make sure the money that’s supposed to pay next year’s rent/mortgage payment isn’t being used to buy beer.)
For me, it was about making friends quickly. I was pretty introverted in high school, and in college I decided to make a point of meeting as many people as possible. It just so happened that the fraternity I chose was mostly made up of guys who shared many of my interests, and so on.
Fraternities amplify certain qualities, depending on the person and the fraternity. Some are full of date-rapists, so they tend to recruit (and encourage) other date rapists. Some are full of good students, and they tend to recruit other good students. Mine was full of guys with something to prove, so while we had good grades, won lots of intramural sports trophies, and so on, we also got into the occasional brawl (no serious injuries) and drinking contest and the like.
It did what it was meant to, though- I learned how to talk to people I didn’t know. I can go up to any total stranger and strike up a conversation. There was no way I could have done that otherwise. Plus, 75% of my closest friends are guys (and girls) who I met through the fraternity. I met my future wife at a fraternity-hosted party.
Well, for one thing, we could look at academic achievement. Greeks consistently have higher grades than college student bodies as a whole. Would you consider that relevant?
I’ve give your another reason people have such animosity toward fratboys. You may only have one guy in the frat get accused of cheating or rape or assault, but you’ve got the whole frat covering for him. See: Pikes, FSU, 1988.
I tend to look at the structures and other patterns that evolve during a discussion.
It’s amazing to see this particular awful pattern evolve. I tried to illustrate this earlier with my “geek”/“dork” comparison. Consider this: What if we replaced the subject at hand, “Why is Fratboy such an insult?” with “Why is Nigger such an insult?”
Seriously, go through and look at some of the arguments and replace “fratboy” with “kike” or “nigger” or “chink” and replace all university Greek stereotypes with associated racial stereotypes.
Can you seriously sit there and say that your propagating of Greek stereotypes in order to justify the of degradation of a group of people (no matter who that group of people might be) is productive toward “fighting ignorance”? You’re going to go ahead and degrade a whole group of people with stereotypes based on their group membership or social status?
The question was answered as to why it’s an insult - that much is obvious only after a few posts. But how can you just sit there and discredit objective evidence with an statement so rooted in ignorance like “No, because they cheat.” How on Earth are you fighting ignorance when you’re stooping to a level lower than any of the other people you probably proclaim yourself to be better than when you throw around ignorance like this?
How isn’t it a comparison? Replace it with Republican or Democrat or Single or Married or City Resident or Country Resident or Military Serviceperson or Antiwar Protester, or whatever.
Or they form study groups with a nice helping of peer pressure. Or their national/local academic standards for continuing membership are significantly higher than the university’s basic standard.
I don’t even know where we were gonna keep the cheat sheets. Since our sole long-term storage for a while was in the office of our faculty advisor, the hardest grader in the college of music. I’m sure HE would have let us get away with that in between failing the occasional brother who thought the letters meant an easy ride through theory and composition.
I saw a documentary from the 1970’s where two fraternity brothers stole the answers to the psychology test from a dumpster, and shared it with the rest of their house. They found out from the Jewish fraternity that they had stolen the wrong test, however, and all failed, resulting in them being disciplined by the Dean. And throwing a toga party.
In answer to the OP, while I have no doubt that there are many diligent, decent, upstanding frat boys, the party hearty aspect is what appears to be put to the forefront deliberately by many fraternities. And the interaction non-fraternity members have with frat boys many times will be totally normal, but won’t be seen as interaction with the fraternity. At law school, the undergrad frats were visible to me on Saturday afternoons as I walked to and from the stadium for fottball games, and saw their loud, obnoxious drunken behavior, often involving abuse of women, or obscenities yelled at my (then 4 year old) son. The themes of the parties seemed to be charming as well, such as the ever popular white trash parties, where rich southern boys (and rich New Yorkers at school in the south) would don conferederate flags and mock people poorer than themselves.
That was the face frat houses put out, and why I came away from law school with an incredibly negative view of frats. Well, that and research work on rape on campuses.
These type of people existed when I was an undergrad, at a place with no fraternities. We called them Oriel/Christ Church students, mainly. Generally though, I didn’t have to come across them. Their residences weren’t the party center of the university, and I didn’t have to deal with them in the same way.
This. There’s a HUGE resentment from college students who are driving clunkers and working two part time jobs and living on White Castle burgers and canned chili towards those who go to school in a new car with their parents’ credit card and have absolutely no financial worries. This isn’t to say that all frat boys fit that description, but a large proportion of those who do fit that description do join fraternities and sororities.
Also, the fact that some 18 year old college kid is driving a $40,000 SUV and going on shopping sprees at Abercrombie & Fitch doesn’t say a thing about them in terms of character- they may be one of the nicest, most intelligent people you’ll ever want to meet but they happen to come from a wealthy and indulgent family and I’ve actually known some college kids like this and I’ve known kids from poor families who party just as hard or are just as obnoxious as any fratboy ever dared be. But, the envy and resentment factor of those who don’t have these options weighs heavily against them. And luckily there are enough who are vapid, spoiled, selfish, and intellectually bland to justify the stereotype for people who want it justified.
There’s also the notion of the legacy, the person who gets in not because their grades were stellar but because their father, grandfather, great-grandfather, etc., all went there. It’s seen as an unfair advantage that tampers with natural selection.
I would guess that few people who use “fratboy” derogatorily are from wealthy homes or had pleasant college experiences.
Another part is media exposure and portrayal. From real life:
Stunts like this one from an Auburn U. frat partyseveral years ago (white fratboys dressed as KKK members and in black face) are not typical, BUT they’re going to get a whoooooooooole lot more airtime on TV and talking heads decrying it than it really deserves (and that’s not to imply it doesn’t deserve censure, it’s just that they go overboard). However, if a fraternity raises $15,000 for local charities or half its members go to help with Katrina relief efforts (which some did), it’ll be mentioned in the local paper and maybe get 2 minutes on the local news channel but won’t be in the national media at all.
Then there’s the movies: in films like Revenge of the Nerds and Class and other paint-by-the-number Ivy League movies, the heroes are always the kids-from-poor-families/outcasts/non-WASPs and the (one-dimensional) villains are always the kids from the wealthy suburbs with names that sound like law firms (“Bently, McKay and Schuyler are here with the keg!”) and Roman numerals after their name, or else jocks. It’d be almost unthinkable to have a movie in which a rich WASP kid and his Barbie like girlfirend are the good guys and the bad guy is the Jewish/black/immigrant/gay/nerdy/otherwise-non-country club WASP-type from a poor family who’s there on scholarship- takes out the David v. Goliath angle. Movies like School Ties and Scent of a Woman, which are actually set at prep schools rather than colleges, have basically the same characters: there aren’t frats but they’re very definitely the pre-frat preppie cliques and the hardworking good hero. A lot of people who never even went to college (or at least not to one with a big Greek presence- many colleges you’d never know that frats existed) see these movies and it reinforces the stereotype.
This is a reason why when the Duke Lacrosse team (Lacrosse… it even sounds elitist doesn’t it? Not quite water polo but getting there) was accused of gang raping the strippers, it was just assumed in the media that they were guilty before it ever went to trial. That’s because it was presented as “rich preppy entitled white guys (and they weren’t all rich, preppy, entitled, or white) v. decent women who have to work as strippers” (and they weren’t that decent) open and shut case because they were frat boys and or jocks- isn’t it obvious? (Nancy Grace especially had a field day leading the villagers with torches and dogs.) The reversals in the case that pretty much proved that most if not all were completely innocent didn’t receive nearly as much play because the morality play aspect was gone.
Slightly (okay, massively) off-topic: I always wondered why nobody seemed to care about The Substitute movies. In the first one, Tom Berenger beat up a bunch of Hispanic kids; in the second one, Treat Williams beats up a bunch of black kids.