Why Is the Frat Boy Culture So Sleazy and Sex-Crazed?

In the late 1980s the Florida News Herald reported that a Florida State University student had been gang raped by some fraternity brothers. Allegedly, the attackers painted the Greek letters of their house on her thighs, symbolically claiming her as they had also claimed her through sexual assault.

In 2001 Dartmouth College's campus newspaper, The Dartmouth, published graphic excerpts from Zeta Psi’s weekly newsletters in which brothers described their sexual encounters:

"She’s baaaaackk. And she’s dirtier than ever[;] if young [female name] hooks up with one more Zete, I’m going to need a flow chart to keep up.”

"Commenting on [Brother B]’s chances for a highly-coveted spot in the Manwhore Hall of Shame, [Brother C] said, ‘Are you kidding me? Rancid snatch like that makes you a fucking lock.’”

"Next week: [Brother X]’s patented date rape techniques!”

These two examples -- a gang rape fraught with symbolism and the misogynist publication describing sexual exploits -- are clearly extreme, but both of them are the logical outcome of a culture of masculine supremacy and sexual exploitation that has made its home in some college fraternities since the 1920s. While most do not participate in such acts, there is ample evidence to show that many, if not most, fraternity members are expected to report on sex they have for the entertainment of their entire house. College fraternities -- currently numbering three hundred fifty thousand undergraduate brothers with more than four million alumni -- have become a haven for a masculinity that takes sexual conquest as one of its defining characteristics. Indeed, the social science literature of the past three decades has shown that fraternity men are more likely than their nonaffiliated classmates to rape women, and some studies have estimated that as many as 70 to 90 percent of reported campus gang rapes are committed by members of fraternities. This makes fraternities a dangerous place for the women who frequent their houses and attend their parties. In their sexist logic -- and in their own words -- "Brothers Over Babes" or "Bros Before Hos."

But fraternities and the men who join them have not always behaved this way. So where did the culture of sexual exploitation and masculine bragging come from? Clearly, the men’s behavior is a product of time, place, and cultural circumstance, not simply an instance of "boys will be boys." Nor is the behavior a natural outcome of all-male organizations, as even fraternities themselves have not always behaved this way.

Dating, 'Homosexuality,' and Frat Culture

In the early twentieth century two phenomena that we now take to be commonplace were invented. The first was dating and the second was homosexuality as a discrete identity category. Both have impacted fraternity culture. Dating arrived on college campuses in the 1920s. Fraternities, established a century earlier in the 1820s, and sororities, which had been founded on some college campuses by the 1870s, were the hubs of the collegiate dating scene. With rare exceptions fraternity men and sorority women dated each other in an exacting scale that was governed by each organization’s popularity. The reputations of the individual brothers and sisters and thus of their collective memberships were in part determined by whom they dated. Fraternity members were judged by their attractiveness, their charm, and by what they called "their line," the verbal method they used to make themselves appealing to young women. Popularity -- evaluated through dating women -- came to define a properly enacted collegiate masculinity. And fraternity men themselves knew this; they picked new members based on the perceived expectation of potential brothers to attract women. As Dartmouth’s Zeta Psi boasted in 1924, "Brother ‘Stan’ Lonsdale has improved the already magnificent reputation he had attained in past years as Lothario and Don Juan put together, and as representative in the chapter in all women’s colleges within a radius of several hundred miles."