Why is "Fratboy" such an insult?

I think we’ve covered a lot of the ground that needs to be covered here, and I’m bored enough to follow up my tongue in cheek first response with something more serious.

There is an association of wealth and privilege with fraternities. Rightly or wrongly, most of the time when you hear about someone who was in a fraternity, they’ve come from a wealthy family. It is my understanding that there’s also an emphasis on “second generation” pledges - you’re more likely to get in a fraternity if your father was in the fraternity. Many fraternities have a reputation for wild parties and hedonism as well.

All in all, it tends to create a stereotype of fraternities as a peculiar kind of American aristocracy. It’s wealthy, hereditary, and living better than the proles. That stereotype is bound to generate resentment.

Now, my own issues with fraternities are much simpler. I don’t like exclusive organizations. I don’t like organizations that I feel encourage ‘groupthink’. I dislike the notion of valuing brotherhood more than truth or merit.

Fraternities. The Army. The Police, to a lesser extent.

I never considered joining a Frat, even for a second. I never considered joining the Army, even for a second and despite prodigious recruitment attempts. I have never considered working in law enforcement, despite my father’s career in the field and a fascination with criminology. While it is most certainly not the case everywhere, the danger that I might be put in a situation that I would have to succumb to peer pressure to lie, else my life would be ruined by my comrades in retribution for my lack of ‘brotherhood’, was sufficient to discourage me from any of these paths.

I’m a strong believer in individualism, and I see fraternities as the opposite of that concept.

Of course – but your joke aside, the impression that films like AH create goes a long way, apparently, to forming actual views of real fraternity life… in the same way that juries expect CSI-level forensic evidence on actual cases.

Sorry - more than a little spaced out today. Don’t you agree though it is also an impression that a significant, and extremely visible, part of the fraternity community seeks to create itself as well? My interaction with frat boys (only as a mature student at law school) was with them playing up the Animal House image.

That’s absolutely true; college fraternities invariably love Animal House.

However, I’m not entirely sure whether Animal House is simply a semi-accurate depiction of fraternity life or whether fraternities shifted to fit the Animal House stereotypes after the movie came out.

I spent a lot of time while active with some of the really old local alumni- my fraternity’s Central Florida alumni club chapter had a dozen members in their seventies and older, mostly from the UF chapter, which was founded in 1925. They told lots of stories about panty raids and the like, but virtually none about doing anything really illegal.

Maybe I’m missing something here… but what is issue “y” in this case?

I didn’t say they ALL cheat, but I think a disprortionate number of them do. I know Bricker doesn’t want to accept anecdotal evidence, and that’s fine with me, he’s welcome to go on thinking that frats are academically pious if he wants to, but the archived test answers and pre-fab term papers were no secret on my campus.

I also have some direct personal observation. I earned some extra lettuce in college as a writing tutor (I did a little religion and classics tutoring as well, but mostly writing). I was several times offered cash bribes to write papers for people. Every single offer came from guys in frats. I was always assured that this was “how things were done” there.

I’m sure there are plenty of frat boys who don’t cheat, but enough of them did, and they were open enough about it, that I’m not going to give their aggregate GPAs any credence (and I’m excluding the academic and other purpose driven types of fraternities here. I’m talking about “frats”).

I think he’s saying that you asked, “why is frat boy an insult?”, but meant, “why do people hate fraternities?”

Great response.

To address the points you’ve made seriatim:

When you say “rightly or wrongly” you confirm the stereotype and simultaneously wave away any attempt at examining it for truth. No one (I assume) on this board would agree that we should let pass, unchallenged, a statement like, “Rightly or wrongly, most Democrats are soft on punishing terrorists.” Even if it’s a widely held view, if it’s wrong, the correct response is to explore and shine light on the error.

So your comment is spot-on when it comes to answering the “why,” but not so much when it comes to justifying the “why.”

Your second set of general observations are, in my view, absolutely unarguable. I’m willing to hear evidence to the contrary, but it seems to me self-evident that fraternities are all about the group – their very existence proves the point – and so to the extent the stereotype is “fraternities don’t emphasize individualism,” I think you’ve more than sufficiently shown that to be a justified comment.

I guess I should have been clearer, then. For example, I could have said in the OP, “So what, exactly, inspires the hatred from the masses when fraternities are mentioned? Is it deserved?”

A significant and highly visible number of them are douchebags.

Yes. If you don’t like the reputation, blame the guys that have earned it and spare us the pedantic cross-examinations about what are, after all is said and done, merely personal impressions based on personal experience.

A significant number of any group are douchebags.

There are tons of douchebags in the Army. Do you hate the Army?

A significant and highly visible number of liberals are X.
A significant and highly visible number of women are Y.
A significant and highly visible number of blacks are Z.
And a significant and highly visible number of anti-war protesters are AA.

Right?

And you’ll agree with this “merely personal impressions based on personal experience” defense when I fill in X, Y, Z, and AA – right?

I don’t think so. I guess it depends on your definition of significant, which I take to mean a number not attributable to the size of the sampling group.

Not all douchebag ratios are the same for every group. The D-bag ratio for frats is very high. They’re also very aggressive about it. They make themselves highly visible in heavily populated environments. Maybe chess club members are douchebags too, but they’re not particularly visible, so I wouldn’t know.

I didn’t say I “hated” anything. I wasn’t particularly fond of military culture when I was in it, though. I was very much a square peg.

It depends on what you fill them in with. “Women” and “blacks” aren’t valid fillers. War protestors may be.

As for the cheating accusation, I will add an anecdote of my own. I spent most of the 80’s at UC San Diego. In 1982 when I started, there were only three frats on campus and they were considered a total joke. By the late 80’s they had gained a fair amount of traction and there were twelve or so. There are probably way more now.

Anyway, during my freshman year a friend of mine asked for a favor. A good friend of his was in a frat at San Diego State and wanted to establish a chapter at our school. He agreed to meet with one of the alums from the national office or something about founding the UCSD Chapter. He begged me to go to the meeting with him so he wouldn’t have to do it alone.

So this alum dude in his 40’s shows up with a college guy active member and a hottie little sister from SDSU. We met for a couple of hours while they told us about how great frat life was and how everyone would know the names of the founding members in future chapters forever. Anyway, one of his main selling points was that frats have “the files” which were archived old tests and papers that we could use. It was sold as something that all frats have.

We weren’t at all interested so we never followed up. We did both get a bill for dues in the mail when the next quarter started. I never understood what that was all about.

You could also have made the same statement replacing “fraternity” with “Ivy League school”.

As much as it pains me to say it…I agree with Bricker. shudder

i was in a fraternity in college. Not a service one, or special interest or what have you, but a “general” social fraternity. Did we have parties? A few. Did we drink a lot? On the weekends. We did have at any given time a few brothers who didn’t drink, though. What we didn’t do was rape anyone (but please, continue to call me a rapist,) trash personal property, steal, or cheat. Did we have back tests in a filing cabinet? You bet we did. Why? Well, because they’re a valuable study aid. However, it wouldn’t help you to “memorize” anything because the tests weren’t the same thing over and over again. Honestly, what kind of stupid-ass professor does that? It doesn’t take a fraternity to keep an old test to memorize if it get used, it just takes a lazy professor and any group of people that have someone take a class at a later date than someone else…which is pretty much every group of college students.

What we DID do was raise thousands of dollars for cancer research, help a young boy in the area go to a private school to get a good education by collecting and donating cans for tuition, have a GPA not only higher than the school’s average, but among the top average of both all local fraternities, and among all our national chapters. (Of course, we cheated, right? Doesn’t count, does it?)

It’s ironic cheating is brought up, because while I was attending school the biggest group of cheaters that got caught weren’t Greeks. It was a bunch of guys in my freshman year dorm who all used each other’s final com sci I program. Almost a dozen of them just used the code from one guy, figured that just by changing the comments they wouldn’t get caught, but did. So see? i can bring up jsut as many anecdotes about how Greek life is good, and non-Greek life is bad as you can gthe other way around.

What this is really all about is people who aren’t douchebag jerks hate those who are, and understandably so. It’s easy to remember the doucebags who were in a fraternity (and I’d be lying if I said no one who was Greek was a douche,) than it is to remember those who weren’t. It’s simple confirmation bias.

I can guarantee you that even on campuses that don’t have Greek systems you’ll see groups of guys wearing striped polo shirts with cargo khaki shorts, a flat-brimmed hat, and Tevas with socks drinking Natty Ice and saying that their Calc II final was “totally gay, bra!”

Y’know what pisses me off about the “frat” stereotype today?

Groups of kids getting customized bar tour 2009 t-shirts printed up for their little fucking club with local bar names with checkboxes on the back, clogging the streets.

Only thing worse? The first group of these I saw was “Bioengineering Club Spring 2009 Bar Tour”. And they were starting at 4PM.