"Frat Boys Make Good Grown-Ups"

[lifesaver]

I mentioned a while back how I had read the following article a few years ago and would see if I could locate it. Well, I have. This is from GQ November 1995. The author is Mark Adams. I think its a great greek read.

"Frat Boys Make Good Grown-ups"
Mark Adams

Ten years ago, when I received my SAE pledge pin at the University of Illinois, the fraternity boy was still an innocuous icon of goofy campus high jinks, still living the cliché of the beanie-wearing, goldfish-eating scamp. But the young bucks who pulled into places like Ann Arbor, Berkeley and Chapel Hill for the first time this fall are being greeted with a much different portrait, that of a date-raping, hate-mongering scoundrel who epitomizes the decline of the American university. Nowadays, complete strangers expect me to break down sobbing like Jimmy Swaggart, "I have sinned!" when my fraternity past is "outed." America's puritanical contempt for fraternities, like its contempt for adult bookstores, is exceeded only by its fascination with what goes on inside them.

Unlike federal crimes, the misdeeds of a frat' boy have no statute of limitations. I confess to being guilty of most of them: dispensing silly nicknames derived from bodily functions; engaging in intricate handshakes; and making the occasional foray into pyromania (the house had too many futons anyway). But mark you, I learned more about how the world operates in that beery house than I did in any economics class—and I'm referring to more than my discovery that you can catapult a melon great distances using two-by-fours and surgical tubing. The acquaintances of mine who most disapprove of my past—typically Ivy Leaguers who proudly shunned the "elitist" Greek system and instead erected DIVEST NOW shantytowns on the quad—often scold me for having associated with what they unfairly assume was a homogeneous mob of uncouth, right-wing assholes. As every member of the Greek system knows, a fraternity house is an ego crucible in which one quickly develops the peace-making skills that prevent each semester from become a repeat performance of Lord of the Flies.

Now, I won't pretend for a moment that I joined a frat because I thought it would make me a better human being. Like any repressed post-adolescent freshly dumped on a collegiate playground, I was out for a good time. I found it. My fraternity brothers and I spent our weekends up to our armpits in unlimited sausage products, rivers of Schlitz and 500-watt stereos seemingly incapable of emitting anything but Rush and Van Halen. And we drank that beer with dozens of gorgeous women—the house's "little sisters"—who actually enjoyed hanging around the building we lived in. A fraternity is your average 18-year-old male's dream: a low-rent version of the Playboy Mansion, with a lot less sex and a lot more punching other guys in the shoulder.

The question I am asked most frequently and accusingly about frat life I, "What did you have to do to get in?" Granted, the first or "pledge" year can be harrowing. (Confidential to the SAE class of 1999: Beware the mysterious appearance of large vats of vanilla pudding.) But the bulk of pledge-year unpleasantness involves performing menial tasks and memorizing inane house history, not having intercourse with goats and electrical appliances. Like Woodstock stories, hazing tales tend to grow exponentially in outrageousness over time. I wish I'd kept a list of all the objects I've been told that someone's friend's second cousin was supposedly forced to copulate with or pick up between his butt cheeks. ("Oh I swear it's true!") The media don't help matters, habitually blowing out of proportion stories about purported fraternal atrocities while taking a "kids will be kids" attitude toward the rest of the student body's indiscretions. A few years ago, when I saw a front-page headline in The New York Times about the bust of three houses at the University of Virginia, I expected to read how the Delts had kidnapped a troop of Campfire Girls and used them to smuggle Stinger missiles to Cuba. What I found instead was a tale of overzealous drug agents gloating over a haul of pot and mushrooms that wouldn't last from Chicago to Milwaukee on the Black Crowes' tour bus. Drugs on campus—who knew!

What gets lost in the maelstrom of fraternity horror stories is the sense of tolerance and commitment that living with a hundred guys between the ages of 18 and 21 forces you to learn. If someone gets on your nerves in the dorms, you can petition to switch rooms. In a fraternity, escape isn't the answer. Compromise is. Remember the jazz-dance major who struggled with his gender? I showered beside him every morning without puerile, knee-jerk, "don't drop the soap" fear. The farm boy who chewed tobacco while he ate? He sat next to me at dinner. That’s why fraternity men make such good brokers and congressmen—they already know that in the real world one has to cut deals with cretins and idiots, and that you can't run away from everyone whose interests and foibles don't jibe with your own.

One of my fondest college memories involves an SAE brother of mine whose views on virtually everything were so opposite my own that a warm friendship grew out of our mutual antipathy. He was a huge country-boy ROTC cadet, and his loyalty saved me one snowy night from a well-deserved pummeling outside a club in downtown Champaign. My beer-loosened tongue had irked three of my fellow undergrads—Rugby players, no less. Just as my antagonists were circling in for the kill on a deserted comer, my fraternity brother came charging through the blizzard in full army uniform. He strode past my would-be attackers and, without breaking his lockstep, tossed me over his shoulder like a sack of De Kalb corn. He carried me the half mile back to the house, muttering the entire time about how a strong U.S. military had once again made it possible for a wiseass liberal to shoot his mouth off.

In the spirit of compromise, I didn't disagree.