Is Sexist Rhetoric a Total Frat Move?

In the gender-segregated world of college fraternities, sexist rhetoric isn’t exactly astonishing. There are numerous allegations of sexism against fraternities, and studies show men who join are far more likely to commit assault after joining even when controlling for factors like prior history of assault and alcohol use. This makes you wonder just how fraternity men talk about women.

To investigate, I turned to a website that claims to capture fraternity culture: Total Frat Move (TFM), which receives 8 million monthly visits, according to a site administrator. Its “Girls” section posts pictures of women for users to comment on, and I analyzed its more than 16,000 comments.

While TFM does not provide a perfect representative sample of fraternity members (non-affiliated users may also comment on the site), it does grant a far larger sample than a news story about a sexual assault at one fraternity chapter. And many TFM commenters are fraternity members; as one told me, the site’s jokes are “geared towards those in [G]reek life.” To give you a taste of what wins approval on the site, here are some of the most up-voted comments on women’s pictures:

• There’s just something about those knee-high socks that screams ‘I do anal’.
• She looks like her life will consist of manicures, attending her children’s equestrian events, and country club fundraiser dinner parties.
• Dear Santa, I can explain… My dad wasn’t around much.
• Would, but there’s no way I’m letting her spend the night.
• Someone tell Kelly that I’ve seen her butt, and I’ll pee there as soon as I can…

The most frequently mentioned body part is “ass” (outnumbering “smile” 25-to-1, and “eyes” 10-to-1), followed by “tits.” “Face” comes in third.

I asked fraternity men who posted on the site and fraternity men I knew socially whether fraternity men really talk this way in person. They mostly agreed that while men were much cruder when talking only to other men, they were less crass in person than TFM comments implied. A TFM commenter told me, “I do think the vibe and attitude is not far off from how fraternity guys actually talk, but it’s much less exaggerated and embellished in real life.” But one of the widest-read authorities on heterosexual masculine hookup culture disagreed: Tucker Max, who wrote bestsellers chronicling his drunken hookups and is credited with creating the “fratire” literary genre.

“Of course frat guys talk like that,” Max told me via email. “Young guys are basically animals that can talk. I don’t mean that literally of course, but the developmental psych evidence is very clear; most young men have vastly underdeveloped empathy, compassion, and other higher order thinking capabilities as compared to women their age. If you make it a rule to assume that a guy under about 25 probably thinks like a sociopath, then you’re going to be more right than wrong.”

Fraternity men offered more nuanced, social explanations for their behavior. One fraternity man told me that fraternities seem to produce more extreme behavior because men do not want to disappoint their brothers. Another said that fraternities encourage sexually explicit commentary because social standing is tied to sexual prowess. 

A TFM member said commenting on women on the site served as “one of the things guys can do that separates them from the girls. I think we feel like in a society that is currently trying to knock males, especially white males down a peg, this is a way we can all go to try to maintain our masculinity that in the ’70s and ’80s was so prevalent but now we’re being told is wrong to have. I think we feel it’s natural, biologically, to ogle girls…and this is a place where we can let that out.”

Many men also emphasized that comments on TFM were jokes or satire. But jokes are not harmless: studies provide some evidence that hearing sexist jokes does make men more tolerant of rape, which 5 to 10 percent of college men admit to committing.

So why would women submit their own images to the site?

A TFM administrator told me that the women volunteered, but one woman said she’d never heard of TFM before someone else submitted her Instagram pictures. A random sample of women’s pages on TFM showed roughly one in five had been taken down or made private.

But some of the women must willingly offer their images. Many are featured on the site as TFM Sweethearts, whose self-submitted profiles I studied to learn more about their motivations. Two-thirds were single, and they overwhelmingly appeared to be white. They were most disproportionately likely to come from Nevada, Alabama, Arizona, Kentucky, and South Carolina; most majored in Marketing, Psychology, and Nursing. A majority mentioned further schooling or work in their post-graduation plans, and only 9 percent mentioned marriage or family. They were impressed by men with manners: more than two dozen mentioned liking it when men opened doors.

So why are manner-appreciating, career-oriented women volunteering to be judged by men who talk about peeing in women’s butts?

One Sweetheart explained that fraternities have had Sweethearts for over a century. A Sweetheart is “viewed like a member of the fraternity…she’s highly respected.” Perhaps it is this respect that makes TFM ban comments on the Sweethearts’ pages, though it allows comments on the featured “TFM Babe of the Day.”

The contradictions in fraternity culture confound. The respect shown towards the Sweethearts contrasts with the base judgments directed at other women on the site. Fraternity members aspire to be gentlemen but spew sexist vitriol. Sweethearts seek chivalrous partners, but nonetheless associate with such men. Men who told me they loved their own fraternity added that fraternities in general were harmful. A man who joked on TFM about girls’ daddy issues addressed me via email as “Ma’am,” and defended the site by saying:

“We do not have prejudices, regardless of what the satirical comments may lead others to believe. We address social and political issues. We offer prayers for those who need them and we love our girls and will defend them to our dying day.”

Fraternity men are often civil and charming in isolation, but that is a poor defense of fraternity culture. One might say of the characters in Lord of the Flies, “But they’re such nice boys individually!” If that’s true, then get them off that island.

 

Emma Pierson is a Rhodes Scholar and computer science PhD student at Stanford who writes about statistics at Obsession with Regression.