Like most myths, there’s a strong element of truth behind it. Fraternity parties were bacchanalias. The problem is that this was no mystery, and was precisely why people went to them. There would be drinking. There would be dancing. There would be sex, if you were lucky. Debauchery? It could happen.
The difference wasn’t that women were unaware of the fact that they were going into the lion’s den when they decided to try their hand at being Sigma Chi’s sweetheart, but that the sexual revolution was on, and if women wanted to drink, to get drunk, to have sex, so what? The fight wasn’t over sex or no sex, but the chauvenist belief in the virtue of the virgin.
If a woman chose to have sex, that was entirely her business. She was no more a slut than the guy. That, at the time, was the radical shift. Women with adult prerogative. Women with the right to do whatever the hell they wanted to do, even unmarried sex, without fear that she would be tainted in perpetuity as a harlot. It was revolutionary. It was long ago.*
During a fraternity party at a West Coast college in 2016, a drunk boy and an equally drunk girl went into a bedroom. Two freshmen noticed them go upstairs. They rounded up several other students and found the couple. One student, flanked by the rest as backup, said to the boy: “Hey, dude? You can’t do this.” Another student offered to walk the girl home.
The students who thwarted a potential crisis were neither women nor members of a sexual assault awareness group; they were freshman members of the fraternity that hosted the party. They had been counseled by their chapter president, who told me this story, that it was their mission to prevent sexual assaults and to treat women right.
Want to guess who’s the hero of this story? Hint: it’s not the girl who, equally drunk with a boy, who asserted her autonomy to make her own choices without some frosh deciding that he knew better about how she should conduct her sex life than she did.
There were, even in the bad old days, rules that applied. No one forced themselves on anyone else. No one “took advantage” of someone who was passed out. This shouldn’t be confused with the sudden epidemic of “blackouts,” where women appear fully functional, totally capable of enthusiastic consent to the fellow she’s with and all who observe her, but after the next day’s regret, suddenly realized she was in a blackout state and has no memory of her ripping the clothing off the guy. No one ever spoke of such things years ago,** Now, it happens constantly.
But drunken sex? Happened all the time. Maybe your father and mother did it. Maybe your grandparents. Maybe they even fought for their right to to do it, because the days of a man refusing to marry a woman who wasn’t a virgin were history. The point was that women could make their own choices, whether to get drunk, to smoke a cigar, to have sex.
If this is really the future you were hoping to accomplish, to have your choices as a woman subject to the review committee of random freshmen or sniffling scolds because you’re unworthy, incapable, of deciding for yourself whether you want to go to a party, get drunk, have sex, and need a committee of men to oversee your decisions and veto what they decide are inappropriate ones?
Forget the sex part, as that’s inflammatory these days because the Sexual Revolution failed, and it’s back to being a moral and traumatic act that will destroy your life rather than a physical one for fun, and consider whether a good fraternity is the one that will decide for you whether your exercise of free will is morally acceptable?
If this saves you from yourself, and that’s what you want from others because you think so little of yourself, of your freedom to make your own decisions even if you may later regret them, then praise the new fraternity for defending your womanhood. All if cost you was your autonomy. All it cost the women who came before you was their fight to establish themselves as the equal of men, with the right to make their own decisions no matter what men thought of them, and the right to have sex whenever and with whomever they wanted. But if you want the fraternity boys to save you from your poor girl*** choices, you be you.
*The headline given this op-ed, “A Frat Boy and a Gentleman,” brings to mind an old joke. Calling a fraternity a frat is like calling a country a…well, you get the idea.
**There is always someone, upon reading such things, who comes forward to swear it happened to them during the Summer of Love, but they just didn’t bother to mention it to anyone until now. Right.
***Face it, woman are capable of making adult decision. Girls?
Pi Beta Nanny curated from Simple Justice
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