AGRAWAL: Are we to blame for fraternity culture?
I love Rutgers. I am as much of a Scarlet Knight as one can be. While picking between colleges, I very fondly remember going on Reddit and seeing people rave about the vibrant social life here.
Humid basement fraternity parties playing pop music and fraternity brothers trying hard to exert dominance by yelling in the background? I was sold. Obviously, that is the state school experience.
I realized later that it was not the same for men to go partying. At the start of every semester, the party enthusiasts are found loitering the College Avenue campus, trying to collect as many women as they can, as if women were Pokémon characters. It was all about the ratio, they said.
To those of you incognizant of fraternity culture, "ratio" refers to the number of girls one guy would need to bring with him in order to be let into a party, usually ranging from 3 to 5 girls per guy. If the guy fails to comply with the ratio, he is made to pay an unreasonable amount of money to get in.
A possible reason behind this is that it increases the chances of a fraternity brother getting with a girl while also allowing them to have more "options" to choose from.
Surely, there are people wondering about the insanity embedded in this arrangement. It is clear objectification of women and patriarchy at its peak. Young males perpetuating sexist practices by being given the excessive power to call the shots and discriminate between different groups is loathsome.
I know this, you know this and the girl next door knows this. Despite being aware of the implications of the hypermasculine fraternity culture, we find people out on the streets every Friday night, me included, walking in groups trying to get into these parties. Why? It is not that we are blind to the downsides. It is that the social pull is real.
Adapting to college life means adapting to a cultural environment vastly different from anything we have experienced before, bringing with it a new set of social norms and values that we inevitably absorb. While it might seem obvious to avoid the party down the street known for problematic practices, what seems like "common sense" is often shaped by the specific subculture one identifies with.
In 2010, psychologist Christopher Frith studied whether the human brain would be activated differently when we conform. He summarized, "Our results show that social conformation is, at least in part, hardwired in the structure of the brain."
We are naturally inclined to adapt to the group, and let us face it, college groups are often loud, party-oriented and sometimes obnoxiously fraternity-driven. What we would never tolerate elsewhere somehow becomes normal when it is wrapped up in the "college experience."
But there is another layer here. Parties act as a much-needed escape. College is a pressure cooker, with academics, clubs, jobs and social life creating a whirlwind of commitments. The intense structure of the week makes people desperate for a release, a chance to check out of "real life."
Party culture offers an environment where students can let loose, forget the pressures and simply be in the moment. People go along with the flawed system because it provides a temporary sanctuary from everything else. It is not that students are oblivious to the sexism. It is that, in the chaos of college life, the chance to escape often outweighs the urge to critique.
In the end, it is a complicated balance. Yes, we can recognize the deeply flawed, often misogynistic rules driving these social spaces. But when the need for release is so strong, many are willing to put their beliefs on pause.
Perhaps the challenge is creating inclusive, pressure-free social experiences that do not ask us to trade away our values. Until then, the ratio, and all it represents, remains just one more quirk of the college experience — a weird reality check in a place that is already pretty surreal. College is messy, and sometimes, you just go with it, flaws and all.
Khushi Agrawal is a sophomore in the School of Arts and Sciences majoring in Cognitive Science and Information Technology and Informatics and minoring in Digital Communication, Information and Media. Agrawal's column, "Scarlet Perspectives," runs on alternate Tuesdays.
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