Semantics And The Masculinity Behind Frat Hazing

This week’s discussion on modern manhood and gender gave me a ton of different concepts to indulge and contemplate over and I want to dedicate this post to expanding on male masculinity. Particularly with semantics and the language we use to communicate with each other. The reason why I’m interested in talking about semantics is that with regards to the contemporary lexicon or vernacular young people like myself use every day, it has come to my attention how uniformly inconsistent its become on so many levels.

Take for instance how most millennials don’t really use the term “dating” anymore, instead we say “hooking up”. Which is a bit counterintuitive for women, but not so much to men. Both men and women use this term, but both use it in two different ways and it serves as a win-win marker for both sexes. First of all, the term itself is vague (for good reason) from first base tongue action kissing to straight-up intercourse. If a guy uses it and says “I hooked up with Tina last night,” his guy friends would assume they had intercourse and he gets high-fives and labeled as a stud. If a woman uses it, but also adds a tiny detail and says “I only/just hooked up with Joe last night,” her female friends would assume they did anything but intercourse and she doesn’t get labeled as a slut. This benefits women and men, so I got to give credit where credit is due to our clever generation for coming up with yet another ingenious way for beating around the bush when it comes to sex.

I’ll be blunt and say that I am by no means an expert on these matters, but I do want to express some of my thoughts and understandings I’ve come to notice in the ways we create masculinity and what it means to be a man from personal experience. It certainly is a social construct of what we have passed down from generation to generation. Conversations about gender is an issue that remains important to both sexes, men and women that is especially prevalent to the generation of today.

Don’t get me wrong women’s lives have changed a lot, but men’s lives have changed too. I can think immediately of my own father who went to school with sex segregated classrooms, who served in an all-male military and who spent most of his working life with all-male co-workers. That world is completely gone, at least here in the U.S. There’s probably only a handful of male-only private schools, there’s no more all-male military and there’s practically no job where any male would have, where he won’t have female colleagues, supervisors or bosses. So men’s lives have changed too, but what hasn’t changed is the ideology of masculinity. Not being a “wuss,” making a ton of money and having the status to boot, be ever so calm, collected and cool with your emotions, and taking charge and being a confident risk-taker. These are all archetypical traits for masculinity that people from 2015 subscribed to just the same as the people in 1915 did.

To kick things in motion, I want to start with the pressure that young men feel to prove their masculinity and the fear of being considered a “wussy”. This fear of being an “effeminate” man is so constantly and relentlessly primed into adolescent boys at a young age and are policed vigilantly by other boys, even passed grade school. Growing up and even now I still hear what is probably the most common put-down (I’m certainly guilty of using as well) and it is “that’s so gay”. We use it so often that we’ve come to establish that its meaning has absolutely no implication with sexual orientation. When I say for example, “oh man, the teacher just assigned us last minute homework, that’s so gay,” it doesn’t mean I’m saying the teacher has an erotic interest in members of his/her own sex. It means it’s lame or bad and we justify the term by saying it’s not really referring to homosexual people, but if I said, “oh man the teacher just assigned us last minute homework, that’s so Black or that’s so Jewish,” people would freak out and bat every single one of their eyelashes. Using “gay” as a derogatory term is okay though, which again I have to say is counterintuitive.

This type of gender policing extracts from young men a sense of performance of masculinity that we are always involved in to making sure that others don’t ever get a chance to say “that’s so gay”. Similarly, I remember guys used to play this game in my high school and I felt that some of my friends were a little too invested in called “gay chicken”. And this game is also very popular among military groups or so I’ve heard, it’s a fairly simple game where guys basically take turns attempting to perform escalating homosexual feats with each other to the most extreme extent possible and the loser quits as soon as the feat becomes too homoerotic for them. Let me paint you a picture: you start off with some casual flirting telling the other guy his eyes look memorizing or by complimenting how he looks like he's been working out. Then you get a little physical, maybe a hand to the knee and slowly caressing your way up from there or a sexually arousing but gentle whisper into the canals of the other guy's earlobe. This even carries on to kisses on the cheek and borderline sexual harassment touching, but at the end of the day its just fun and games between guys being guys.

To take it a step further, we also added the phrase “no homo” at the end of every action or conversation to make sure we eliminated any possible trace of homosexuality. Guys are thinking constantly about the way we walk, talk and look like that the amount of energy we exude on policing ourselves so that others might not get the wrong impression about us is so facetious and so petty, because in the grand scheme of things it just sets us up for subversion and corruption later in life.

Furthermore there’s actually a pretty suave linguistic theorist who not only help paved the way for the “that’s so gay,” movement, but can also shed some insight behind the term, so here is one excerpt from one of his talks.

This is actually just a clip from The Interview where the film satirizes Eminem’s long history of how his songs were by and largely about calling other guys “gay” and “faggot”. When James Franco's character recites Eminem’s lyrics from his song Medicine Ball he says, “I said nice rectum, I had a vasectomy Hector, so you can’t get pregnant if I bisexually wreck ya,” Eminem does this not to directly accentuate any fears of homophobia, but proceeds to comically admit his own sexuality. The point though was that using terms like “gay” or “faggot” were but means to strip away a man’s dignity or manhood. If you wanted to offend a guy with just words, the best way to do it is to try to take away his manhood. I can vouch for this, (maybe not so much nowadays) but definitely for sure the middle school and high school me would tell you that this was by far the most effective way to really piss a guy off. It’s a kind of hurt that is deep-deep-down and visceral at the core of many men.

Another important factor that affects our generation’s male masculinity is the relationship between adults and young people. Think of our parents and our teachers and mentors who have all helped shape our individual experiences growing up. That too has certainly changed as well in this age where children are growing up "too fast" and "10 is the new 20". There is though without a doubt one crucial performativity that adults exclude themselves out of that most other cultures outside the U.S. don't have and that is the college fraternity initiation ritual a.k.a. hazing. What happens to the rookies of a football team or to the college freshmen who want to become members of a Greek fraternity when the adults leave? They’re no longer living within the boundaries of a normal society, but within the constructs of a gang-like mentality with gang-like rules. What happens is that adults start stepping back because if you don't know about it, you can't get in trouble for it (something we like to call plausible deniability, some law & order for you). Clearly some red flags should be flashing in the minds of these young men when coaches or teachers stop taking responsibility and start walking away.

There are hundreds of cultures all around the world that do very elaborate initiation rituals for their young males, where they send them off on starving pilgrimages or make them go through some arduous and difficult tests that at the end of these rituals, the young males are welcomed as full adults and most importantly by the recognition of other adults. Here in the U.S. though we have an interesting take on the rite of passage and as an example for critique we can see it here in this clip from Neighbors:

If I had to explain to outer space aliens what the concept behind these absurd ridiculous antics of fraternity initiations is that its homophobia in a nutshell. In the movie, there are a handful of students looking to pledge their allegiance to the college fraternity and they must endure very homoerotic stunts to prove themselves worthy of joining the “brotherhood”. One of the characters is renamed “Assjuice” for the entirety of the movie and even comes to accept the nickname by the end of it. The fraternity heads also make the pledges perform what is called “the elephant walk,” where guys are literally lined up side-by-side and hunch their backs so they can grab the penis of the person next to them and start walking along together. In the clip you see one of the pledges constantly disrespected and mutilated by taping him on a wall almost naked, forcing him to eat dog food and playing grotesque pranks on him relentlessly, all to prove his loyalty to the frat.

These initiation rituals don’t just apply to college-age fraternity groups, but also in sports teams, military and ROTC groups, and lest we not forget the Florida A&M hazing incident, so we know that it also happens in school bands as well. With that said, It’s painstakingly transparent and obvious that the more homoerotic the feats these rituals require, the more homophobic the culture. But that’s not the case here, in the context of the “that’s so gay,” term I described earlier, we’re not indicating homosexuality, no if the worst thing you can do to another man is to take away his manhood then that's exactly the best way to prove his loyalty to the fraternity. I mean think about it, these are the same guys coming straight out of high school, who were raised by the same type of policing with the gender constraints they’ve perceived as masculinity for their whole life up to that point. It’s not like they’re going to magically mature into refined gender ethically concerned scholars as soon as they entered college or turned 18 and are “legally” considered adults. Which begs the question of why?

What continually motivates guys to line up year after year, knowing full well the consequences of having to participate in these hazing rituals? Why would a bunch of guys go through all the suffering, pain, torture and humiliation? What would be the payoff for enduring such excruciating torment? And I think Neighbors also ostentatiously reveals that answer shown in this scene here and its summed up simply by three little words:

Bros before hoes. What these guys get for in return is “bros before hoes,” the notion that the bonds of brotherhood that you forge with your fraternity brethren are the most eternal and durable bonds you will ever form with another human being (more of hegemony at work). There’s such a romanticization of this notion that permeates through and through in our culture and sub-cultures (in Australia they're referred to as mates I believe). This is gender inequality with hierarchy elitism and conformity all bundled into one package. Sadly for women “chicks before dicks” or "sisters before misters" does not have the same resonance that “bros before hoes” has for men. I can’t speak much for sisterhood, but take any group of people male or female and have them go through the same painful and grueling treatment, that by the end of it all, what awaits them are friends for life. Who wouldn’t want that? Again though it's a matter of semantics, the meaning behind words tells us a lot about the kind of culture we live in, where in this case "brothers" does not indicate a relationship between blood relatives, but the sense of intimate camaraderie between men to rally together and form a conglomerate; a "wingman" of sorts or a "band of brothers," who will stick with you through thick and thin, looking out for one another. Think of weddings even, where we have the "best man" whose role is so much more active in the life of the groom than the bride's form of a "best friend" where they're even not called a sister or a woman, they're called a "maid of honor". Women just don't have that same kind of kinship they share with other women that men share among men.

In conclusion the language barrier of today has extensively become much more difficult to navigate and decode because we have so many more layers of noise that stands between the messenger and the receiver. Noise that we didn’t even hear 40 years ago and some of it still falls on deaf ears. I think these conversations are definitely worth having because the issues they strike are particularly salient and poignant to discuss if we wish to understand the ways in which we cultivate gender roles in the 21^st century. Much of it is due thanks to the incredible efforts of women and their movements for gender equality, but for a lot of guys though, we just haven’t quite caught up yet.

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