The Case for Eliminating Gender-Restricted Fraternities

Content warning: This article references sexual assault.

On Oct. 19, 2024, a young woman left her sorority event to meet a friend at the Cornell Chi Phi fraternity house. 

I keep thinking about that date—Oct. 19, 2024. About how that was her last year on campus, how she dropped out as soon as she could. About how hard she must have worked in high school to get to that point, and how the actions of others took that away from her.

I keep thinking about that phrase—“young woman.” About whether she would have thought of herself as a woman, as most of the media has come to call her, or even a young woman. At twenty—when you’re still on your parents’ health insurance, when you may not even have declared your major—do you see yourself as a full-fledged adult?

I keep thinking about that “friend,” who she must have thought of as belonging to the ‘not all’ segment in “not all men.”

The 2024 incident at Cornell’s Chi Phi chapter has incited another wave in the #MeToo movement—a wave of examining the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses. A wave of reckoning with how 56 out of the 57 young men who received those texts did nothing. 

Much of the answer to that lies in the institutions that brought those men together: The colleges, where 26.4% of female undergraduates experience sexual violence, as well as the fraternities, in which members are three times more likely to commit sexual assault than their non-member peers. The very communities designed to cultivate upstanding citizens and “build better men” have become notorious for being breeding grounds of violence. 

At the heart of Greek life lies the desire for the pooled social capital of multiple individuals belonging to an exclusive group. Whether as a social or professional organization (the two types of Greek life that allow gender-based admission), membership comes from wanting to accrue the prestige of a network and possess its aggregated resources. According to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, “groups like select clubs […] are deliberately organized in order to concentrate social capital and so to derive full benefit from the multiplier effect implied in concentration and to secure the profits of membership—material profits, such as all the types of services accruing from useful relationships, and symbolic profits, such as those derived from association with a rare, prestigious group.” Belonging affords an individual legitimacy, whether being invited to a party (a social profit) or obtaining a post-grad job (a material profit). The seal of one’s fraternity acts as a license, proof that one is part of a certain elite organization and is accepted by its other members.

These profits form the foundation of the solidarity that enables them. To obtain and retain such advantages, members must pledge loyalty to their peers and their group, proving this through initiation rituals that unite members via common experience and perhaps even shared trauma. In an incident that gained national attention this past week, 30 partially-clothed men were found covered in food, condiments, and other liquids in a dirty and overheated basement of a University of Wisconsin-Madison fraternity house. But despite the story’s virality, this is the norm, not the exception. Greek organizations (especially fraternities) across the country regularly engage in these kinds of practices. And it’s not just a symptom of their lifestyle, it’s the foundation. 

These types of humiliation rituals facilitate solidarity through mutual suffering and vulnerability, while teaching the value of silence and loyalty above all else. Being trapped, blindfolded, partially nude, and dripping in sweat and mysterious substances poses the question: “How much of your dignity are you willing to sacrifice for belonging?” Those who persist earn a bond with the fellow members who share this experience exclusive only to them, becoming brothers who will do anything for each other, who have learned that silence to the rest of the world and loyalty to the group are the utmost values. 

Defenders of Greek life will assert that these are not universals: that through these groups, they have found their communities and met their lifelong friends. But what are they providing that members can’t find in gender-inclusive organizations or affinity-based clubs without the problematic culture and history? 

It has become debilitatingly clear that the offices designed to protect students are either complicit or simply not enough, and it’s time to take radical steps towards preventing, not just remedying, violence. This means abolishing the institutions that statistically correlate with sexual violence. It means not only raising the son who will object, but who will never join a group with this embedded culture in the first place. 

Alexandra Lee can be reached at ahlee@wesleyan.edu.