thread for contemplating the serious issues raised by the Men's Rights movement

dont buy it, at least not as an assumption. frat houses are (perhaps fairly) stereotyped as a danger area for rape which acts as a flashing warning sign to begin with in a way that equally treacherous house parties, off campus stoner apartments etc etc aren't. saying "fix it by tearing down the frats" is just once again distracting from the real issue and (not saying this about you all) creating an imaginary demographic for college aged rapists that makes the rest of us feel better about the situation.

― Everyone is awful except you. Wait, no, you are also awful. (jjjusten), Monday, August 18, 2014 12:00 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah but there are different "cultures" in different kinds of houses, and it seems like culture plays a strong role in this, at least that's what the article I posted suggests - did you read it? I mean it's not that no one living in my co-ed house made up of mostly ag school kids could have raped someone, but we definitely were not sitting around going "hey let's make some everclear punch and invite a bunch of freshman girls over." In fact we were markedly averse to doing stuff like that, in spite of throwing plenty of big parties. So I'm not saying it's in all frats or only in frats, I'm just saying that culture makes this kind of thing a lot more likely to happen.

i think you are extrapolating your house situation in a way that is maybe not terribly logically sound.

the purge was even more dogshit than you'd have think tbh

why should male-dominated institutions who throw parties in order to lure girls to their houses to drink alcohol and, maybe, "hook up" receive support and recognition from institutions of higher learning?

like, they were all explicit about this idea of wanting "girls" at their houses. even the "good" ones. at my middle of the road east coast liberal arts college.

poster for the purge was intriguing but reading the wikipedia précis was more than enough for me xp

thats to me the root problem here in general - we operate with an assumption that goes "i am not a rapist therefore those like me are not going to be rapists" which feels great but is a complete logical fallacy, and arguably leads to the problem at hand.

many xps

I don't believe that lad culture is exacerbated by the NUS in the same way.

Where does Uni Lad fit in?

Articles that have been reported on in the press include:
Sexual Mathematics – this article said that 75% of women aged 18–25 were "sluts" and advised readers that if a woman did not display any interest in having sex (which they described as "spread[ing] for your head"), "think about this mathematical statistic: 85 per cent of rape cases go unreported. That seems to be fairly good odds."[1][3] The article concluded with a mock disclaimer: "Uni Lad does not condone rape without saying ‘surprise’."[7]
The Zebra Abortion – this article described how, following sex, the writer told his sexual partner to take the morning-after pill. After responding by saying she wanted to keep the pregnancy, the writer considers "performing an elbow drop on her vagina right there and then", but decides instead to "look around the room for a chair or table I can smash onto her stomach".[8]
How To Pull a Fresher – Another article on the website gave advice on "How To Pull a Fresher", noting that fresher students were "especially vulnerable".[1]
The Angry Shag – This story described a man, during sex, smashing a woman's face into a wall "to knock some sense into her".[9]
The website also contained a 'shop' section that sold t-shirts with a variety of slogans, including a t-shirt fashioned in the style of the World War II-era Keep Calm and Carry On propaganda posters reading "Keep Calm – It Won't Take Long", a reference to rape.[10]

the problem treeship is that that is the prime motivator or at least one of them in most if not all parties thrown by college aged men.

not allies house. that was men and women, queer and trans people, of all sexual orientations, throwing parties in order to socialize with their peers. there wasn't this hidden agenda to it.

thats to me the root problem here in general - we operate with an assumption that goes "i am not a rapist therefore those like me are not going to be rapists" which feels great but is a complete logical fallacy, and arguably leads to the problem at hand.

many xps

― Everyone is awful except you. Wait, no, you are also awful. (jjjusten), Monday, August 18, 2014 12:15 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't understand how in any way this kind of thinking leads to the problem at hand.

really?

justen did you read the article I posted? Because it suggests that actually there is a pattern to most campus sexual assaults, and that they mostly occur among a minority of guys who live in situations where they actively encourage it.

not just being a jerk here, but how is that not a clear antecedent of our total misunderstanding of rape in our culture (or racism, or violence, or whatever ill you choose)

im not talking about the article, nor have i read it, im talking about the disingenuous "people not like me" framing of the overall argument.

He surveyed about 1,800 men, asking them a wide range of questions about their sexual experiences. To learn about sexual assault, he asked things like, "Have you ever had sex with an adult when they didn't want to because you used physical force?" When the results came back, he was stunned.

All told, 120 men in the sample, or about 6 percent of the total, had raped women they knew. Two-thirds of those men were serial rapists, who had done this, on average, six times. Many of the serial rapists began offending before college, back in high school.

Other studies at colleges and in the military have since found similar numbers — usually somewhere around 10 percent of men admitting to either an attempted rape or a rape, with a significant proportion of them reporting a history of repeated offenses.

"I was forced, really, to accept that these are college students, but there is this small percentage of college students who are sex offenders," says Lisak. "They are behaving like sex offenders. They are sex offenders."

Together, the 120 men in Lisak's study were responsible for 439 rapes. None was ever reported.

But Lisak had no problem getting details about how the men carefully planned and executed their assaults. They'd often ask a girl to come to a party, saying it was invite-only, a big deal to a nervous freshman. Then they'd get her drunk to the point of incapacitation so they could have sex with her.

In an excerpt from one of Lisak's interview transcripts, a college student using the pseudonym Frank talks about how his friends would help him prep for an assault:

"We always had some kind of punch, you know, like our own home brew. We'd make it with a real sweet juice, and just pour in all kinds of alcohol. It was really powerful stuff. The girls wouldn't know what hit them."

Alcohol was the weapon of choice for these men, who typically saw themselves as college guys hooking up. They didn't think what they had done was a crime.

"Most of these men have an image or a myth about rape, that it's some guy in a ski mask wielding a knife," says Lisak. "They don't wear ski masks, they don't wield knives, so they don't see themselves as rapists."

In fact, they'd brag about what they had done afterwards to their friends. That implied endorsement from male friends — or at the very least, a lack of vocal objection — is a powerful force, perpetuating the idea that what these guys are doing is normal rather than criminal.

Like "we all have a monster inside us" is a good thing to remember, but there must be a reason a lot of guys AREN'T participating directly in that culture, and to me it seems pretty obvious that because I was raised to think that using pure grain alcohol to drug a woman in order to have sex with her is a fucked up thing to do, I never did it and ultimately never wanted to live with or hang out with people who thought it was an ok thing to do. And it also seems possible to me, at the same time, that if I had fallen in with the wrong people at an impressionable age, I might have thought differently, but that's just speculation.

and now that i have read it, nothing in that article pins this on frats, you guys are just reading "ply woman with alcohol" and "not get opposed by other men in the group" and deciding that that is code for frats, which im saying is a total misreading and a huge diversionary problem

in fact, the only frat member mentioned in that article is used as an example of someone countering this situation

Yeah I mean "frats" might be a red herring, but I would say there's a certain kind of all-male house where this tends to be the culture, whether or not it has greek letters on it. And sure, that house could be ostensibly "hippie" too. No, I don't think closing frats solves the problem -- the same guys can still have an off-campus house together where they do the exact same shit.

nothing in that article suggests that the "six percent" can identifiably be placed in one social group, and nothing in that research allows for respondents with different self-perceptions or willingness to confess sexually predatory behaviour

The article makes it pretty clear that the guys did not even believe that they were "confessing" sexually predatory behavior, because they didn't see what they did as wrong.

It's possible that there are other guys out there who rape, yet are aware of the wrongfulness of it and feel so ashamed of it that they wouldn't even admit it in an anonymous study, but it's hard to believe that that's a huge contingent.

which leaves the possibility of many other men with an awareness that their behaviour is wrong who might misrepresent themselves in this kind of survey

Again, just hard to believe that's a large number of men.

nobody claimed that shutting down frats would destroy this kind of collegiate rape culture once and for all. but i think it's weird that the most obvious exemplars of this culture on campus are like, official, recongized institutions who on many campuses have the nicest campuses. this, at least at my campus, seemed to give a ring of legitimacy to some really fucked up social environments, and i think this is less than ideal

i wdn't speculate on how sizeable that contingent is, obviously people as a rule like to present themselves in a flattering light

*nicest houses, not campuses

The existence of lad culture is definitely a thing but frat culture strikes me as a very shall-we-say 'organised' and matter-of-fact brand of institutionalised insidiousness - like an accepted and inescapable part of university culture in the US. I don't believe that lad culture is exacerbated by the NUS in the same way.

I don't mean the NUS as such, rather the way that student unions are the centre of student social life through nights such as shagtag or pimps and hoes or golf pros vs tennis hoes and so on. The UniLAD spirit wouldn't exist to nearly the same extent if student social life wasn't its own little world held within the confines of the student union building

yeah survey methodology is filled with examples of inaccurate self-reporting, esp in situations where the answers cast aspersions on the behavior of the person surveyed, i would guess the "oh no way i would never" contingent is unsettlingly large

I'm not familiar w the relationships that Greek orgs usually have with their colleges, but it seems to me that the point on which frats are problematic is the support they get from the university? Permission to have a house, permission to do whatever it is they do, and continue to have the permission of the university to do it. So in the event that a frat house IS the scene of a, or repeated, sexual assaults, it is in some sense with the backing of the school.

Also:

nothing in that article suggests that the "six percent" can identifiably be placed in one social group

it kind of does suggest that, actually, because it describes the culture in which it occurs. Maybe they're not all frats, maybe they're not all guys who wear Abercrombie and Fitch or whatever, they are just mostly group houses of guys who actively plan and encourage this sort of thing together. And this jibes very much with my college experience, where there was a certain "type" of party house associated with seeking anonymous flocks of freshman girls and serving them high-alcohol punch, and there were certain houses where that was very much not the culture - houses were more likely to be co-ed, most of the partiers knew someone in the house or knew someone who knew someone, inviting random freshmen was highly suspect, etc.

And like I said, it could happen anywhere, I just think it's a hell of a lot more likely to happen in a place where it's actively encouraged rather than looked down upon. If you live with the kind of people who see someone wasted and show concern for them getting home ok rather than thinking it's a great situation to take advantage of, your worst potential is a lot less likely to be realized.

my concern would be that by locating rape culture in a specific social setting you're distracting men who don't belong to that culture from examining their own behaviours and beliefs, which is more important

^^^ yes times 1000

but the study identified certain attitudes and types of social environments that are correlated with higher incidence of rape

we didn't "invite" anyone, we'd just put word out that we were having a party, and people would come...to drink our free booze. I'd guess that if other campus organizations had served free booze they'd have been popular too.

yes and those attitudes and social environments can be best described as "college aged men" which is the point you guys seem to be missing

xpost

a friendship group that is made up of both men and women is probably less likely to foster these attitudes than one that is all men. frats and sororities balkanize the sexes to an extent, at least among the kinds of people who would get involved in those sorts of orgs in the first place

like, getting rid of the greek system is just one way that i think some colleges could work toward promoting healthier gender dynamics in their schools, or at least signal that that is something they value.

I assure you that our parties did not balkanize the sexes. women and men doing keg stands and funneling, ~~~~~~~together~~~~~~

like call it bro culture or whatever you want, but bro culture of that sort isnt just frat boys high fiving its like theater peeps at cast parties and the cross country team end of the season party and like a million other things as well, maintaining otherwise is just creating a distance between your inclusive "good" kinds of post adolescent men and those rapey scum outside of your social identification

the shadiest dude we all knew about in school was a "cool" guy in the film school who was talented and smart and the opposite of bro culture, at least in terms of its cliched signifiers. he was discovered later to be a date rapist, maybe serially.

i get all of that, i really do, but i also think that there are ways to fight these attitudes if men and women are forced to encounter each other in normal, un-sexually charged situations, and see each other as fellow students and humans. i don't see that happening in frats. they are more impervious to reform.

i also knew a guy who was like that, omar. i know that bad people come in all sorts of cultural boxes. what i am saying is something else, i think, and doesn't foreclose upon that reality.

The only party I ever attended in college that had an Everclear-based punch option was thrown by the women's choir.

It seems like if most campus rapes are happening in peer groups that encourage it, that's pretty useful information that we might want to somehow employ in preventing campus rapes. I don't really see how recognizing that is dangerous -- I'm not letting off the hook the "artsy" type who is also a rapist, nor suggesting that college me never had to check his own behavior just because he didn't live with a bunch of "bros." Everyone should learn where the lines are, everyone should be discouraged from these behaviors.

Dan, I think the atmosphere at my gigantic state U was probably a little different from *your school.*

And yet, there is still a pervasive rape problem on the campus of my school. It's almost as if there's a deeper problem here that can't just be blamed on the existence of fraternities...

tbf frats smell bad