Infinite props to researcher Emma Pierson, who has completed an arduous, soul-sucking task no earthly mortal should ever have to suffer through. To analyze the rhetoric of college fraternity groups, Pierson mucked around in 16,000 comments on the “Girls” section of the self-described “dangerously entertaining college site” Total Frat Move. There, Pierson writes in the New York Times, she found a trove of demeaning sex jokes, hypermasculine posturing, and insults about women’s looks. On a site like TFM, the comments section is the dark, pustulous underbelly of a beast that was already pretty dark and pustulous to begin with.
TFM’s Girls vertical mostly consists of photos of college women, submitted by the women themselves or ripped from Instagram for the judgment of the TFM audience. The top comment on Tuesday’s Babe of the Day post represents the general gist of what goes on in this safe space for drooling man-children: “wouldn’t mind sticking my peepee in her and slapping her titties around, if you know what i mean.” In her analysis, Pierson pulls out some of the section’s most up-voted comments, including “there’s just something about those knee-high socks that screams ‘I do anal,’ ” and “would, but there’s no way I’m letting her spend the night.” The writer who selects and publishes photos of each Babe of the Day, Dan Regester, says in his bio that he’s an “advocate of shipping the homeless to Mars.”
One TFM member offered a theory as to why young men morph into Tom Cruise’s character in Magnolia when they gather in single-gender groups, as they do in fraternities and the TFM comment section: sexism against men and racism against white people. “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,” he told Pierson. “I think we feel it’s natural, biologically, to ogle girls … and [TFM] is a place where we can let that out.”
But the issue isn’t ogling women, an act that is relatively harmless when done through the barrier of a computer screen; it’s talking about them in ways that erase their humanity. Unfortunately, according to one expert in the field of young jerks, the misogyny in the TFM comments aren’t just lewd male bonding—they’re indicative of a developmental defect present in nearly all college-aged men. In a rare moment of public insight, Tucker Max—the “fratire” writer so famously misogynist, Planned Parenthood once rejected his $500,000 donation—told Pierson that the members of TFM’s target demographic are “basically animals that can talk” and more likely to “think like a sociopath” than not.
Of course, no one who’s been reading the internet over the past decade will gasp at the revelation that insecure misogynists hang out in the comments section or that fraternities are petri dishes overflowing with the bacterial goo of hate speech. Thanks to the phenomenon of email leaks, interested observers have gotten to see that, across geography and school tier, fraternity members speak horribly offensive things within their own ranks. For years, the University of Chicago’s Jewish frat, Alpha Epsilon Pi, passed around emails with anti-black and anti-Muslim language. At Dartmouth, a frat told its first-year members they needed to “move on” from hand jobs to blow jobs. In 2013, a member of Georgia Tech’s Phi Kappa Tau frat sent an email with the subject line “Luring Your Rapebait” that advised recipients to “encounter,” “engage,” “escalate,” and “expunge” women.
Chapters of the Kappa Sigma fraternity have been exceptional hotbeds for language that would appall most decent human beings. At Stanford, Kappa Sigma member (and now Snapchat CEO) Evan Spiegel sent homophobic emails that recounted peeing on women, joked about Thomas Jefferson “get[ting] some” with Sally Hemmings, and told fellow Kappa Sigma members to “have some girl put your large kappa sigma dick down her throat.” Another Kappa Sigma member, from the University of Southern California, sent an email encouraging his compatriots to perpetrate sexual assault against “targets” who “aren’t actual people like us men.” An email leaked from the Kappa Sigma chapter at the University of Maryland contained repeated racial slurs and the command “erect, assert, and insert, and above all else, fuck consent.”
As individual incidents, each of these emails turns the stomach; one can only imagine how unsafe and unwelcome members of those universities or those Greek organizations must feel. As parts of a broader fraternity system—and an even broader cult of masculinity—that accepts and rewards misogynist rhetoric, they paint a picture of a toxic subculture that emboldens the worst impulses of men coming of age. Indeed, one study found that fraternity membership is a strong predictor of sexually aggressive behavior. If this is how these men talk when they think they’re alone together, imagine how they act.
