The Link So this frat up at nebraska has weirdo initiation rituals that include throwing ice at pledges while they are playing leapfrog. that's the normal course of business, it seems. why in the world would anybody tolerate that? why in the world would anyone want to do that to another person?
I thoroughly enjoyed my time in. Almost every groomsman i have in my December wedding is from my fraternity days and I graduated in '97. Yes, some of that type of hazing is ridiculous. I would have walked out as well on some of that stuff. Other parts of it do build bonds and relationships. Some of my best friends to this day are my pledge brothers. I'm godfather to 3 of their kids, we take vacations together, play golf, have dinner.. You won't ever get it if you didn't go through it. From the outside some of it looks stupid. From the inside, guys did some funny crap during those rituals that we still laugh at 17 years later.
I "got" it about 15 years ago. Now, probably not so much. Matter of fact, I wouldn't last one day as a plege today. "You want me to do what? Tell you what, how about you go f**k yourself instead."
norberg speaks for me as well...I cannot imagine doing some of the stupid ****...never mind the homoerotic **** that is often attached to this type of story.
I seriously miss some aspects of fraternity life, but they all revolve around ginormous amounts of booze and lots and lots of 18 year-old girls.
my fraternity brothers kind of replaced my highschool football teamates. pledging was like fresham year. then three years of varsity. Banging any chick in school, including freshman and sophmores. This thread has come up dozens of times. It seems the people who hate fratenity's the most and talk the most **** are the people who were not in one.
I was in a fraternity. No surprise. What I don't get is people who wouldn't rather drive a stick and who don't back into a parking spot.
I hated the homo stuff that BigWill talks about and used the fraternity to meet people, eat lunch with people, and play sports. However, when I went through it I was amazed at the number of mama's boys who couldn't handle the hazing. It seems like we have more mama's boys today. I think some of it, like what happens in the military (where much of the hazing was derived), helps build character.
When I moved to Austin for graduate school, after living in a frat house for 3 years in Knoxville, I would wake up every morning and wonder who kept throwing their leftover queso from Taco Cabana against my front door, and after a while I realized it was me. It just took awhile to adjust to life without pledges to clean up after me.
Apparently it's a way for insecure boys to get insecure girls. Funny how it takes all that alcohol to make the magic happen.
I can't speak for fraternities, but I pledged a sorority. They made a big deal during rush about "celebrating the individuality of each girl" and so forth. Then, after I signed on the dotted line, they started trying to remake me in their image. They didn't like my hair, they didn't like my clothes, they didn't like my glasses, they didn't like my friends. So I depledged because I thought it was a bunch of ********. Still do.
I don't have anything against fraternities in general. Personally I feel I would not have liked being in a frat because I liked to bounce around freely and make friends interested in different things. The music fraternity at UT was interesting and I was friends with a few people who were in it, but I have never liked the clique-iness, as it tends to make me uncomfortable when I feel I am a tagalong or an extra wheel in a friend's seperate social group, and I don't like giving other people that feeling either. All that being said, there are certain kinds of fraternities that concern me, and this is that kind. Honestly, I suppose I don't have an issue with some stupid idiot letting a floozy jam a foreign object up his pooper if he's cool with it. But the environment that fraternities like this create can attract some unseemly people (though they may not necessarily be in the fraternity itself). I always objected to my female friends going to the particularly seedy parties (the ones they new they could slip into even though they were underage) as I have heard stories of passed out girls being taken advantage of, particularly younger girls who were easily persuaded to overindulge or who showed up alone. This environment also tends to encourage an extremity of binge drinking that has led to deaths, although personally I feel the current legal age limit is responsible for more underage binge drinking deaths.
