At a big school like the University of Connecticut, frat parties exist year-round in the limelight of many students’ lives, drawing large and eager crowds night after night despite living in infamy for sweaty and predatory environments. It’s a curious phenomenon, but not a harmless one at all. There is a central pattern to a frat party: the allure which draws young women in and the subsequent aggression, often by a masked actor. It is much like a trap, but like any trap, it can be disassembled.
It’s well worth mentioning that the parties themselves are less than desirable. First, you locate a list of phone numbers and arrange a ride from a pledge, who, if you’re lucky, only narrowly avoids a life-threatening car crash a couple of times. When you arrive, you follow a line of people down rickety stairs into a basement that’s distastefully humid and smells like a White Claw’s armpit. “Hey, do you want some sky-blue or acid-green or piss-yellow liquid from a mysterious bowl? Are you sure?” A drunk man bumps into you and spills his beer all over you. Hopefully not down your back, but I’ve been so unlucky before. You suddenly have to use the bathroom and worry there will be a long line but are pleasantly surprised. That is until you realize it’s because someone has puked all over it. You cave and pee in the woods like everyone else. If the party is not yet shut down, you take your chances with another ride from one of the pledges, or rebelliously — maybe because it’s February and you’re freezing in the tube top you felt compelled to wear — call an Uber home. If this seems kind of ridiculous, that’s because it is.
Then, we have to ask ourselves what convinces us to go to these parties in the first place. In my experience, the largest takeaway from attending a frat party is a sense of validation. The feeling gained, however fleeting, is that you are pretty, popular, desirable, fun-loving, laid-back and whatever other traits society says you need to be. But, as nice as it might feel in the moment, it is a hollow feeling. In the end, chasing validation only strips us of our own innate power and yields to those who grant it to us.
This dynamic is not accidental. Frat parties depend on it, because how else could they ensure steady attendance every week to such a deeply uninviting event? In this way, frat parties are traps and it’s hard to deduce what their end goal is. They are infamous for rape and sexual assault. This is not urban legend; it does happen at UConn. By their very design, frat parties are clearly unsafe and predatory environments for women. An event with secretive locations, which strangers have to transport you to lest law enforcement intervene, should strike you as really, really creepy. The fact that intoxication of the partygoers — a demographic deliberately limited to women — is effectively a necessary component is equally off-putting. It is not a benevolent force which convinces young women to dress up, get drunk and corral themselves into a basement each weekend where a select ingroup of men who hold authority can prowl through the crowd.
The way to break this pattern is remarkably simple: don’t go.
Regardless of one’s intentions, attending a frat party not only proliferates them but contributes to societal acquiescence of their misconduct. It signals that it doesn’t matter what goes on in the shadows at frat parties as long as people can say they’ve had a good time. There is much to be said, then, for refusing to attend, even if you incidentally find yourself to be safe. That choice tells fraternities, society and maybe most importantly yourself that it matters when something happens that is not okay. There is no party, after all, if no one goes.