Many of you may have had occasion to read the email entitled "Luring Your Rapebait," recently featured in The Huffington Post and CNN, among other news sources. A member of the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity at Georgia Tech sent an (extraordinarily misguided) email to his chapter, meaning to give advice about how to pick up girls at parties. The email went viral after it was picked up by the website Total Frat Move (TFM) last week. In case you haven't read it: highlights include "Grab them on the hips with your 2 hands and then let them grind against your dick" (advice on how to dance with girls), "ALWAYS START WITH THE MAKING OUT!!!! NO RAPING" (on what to do when dancing with girls) and "IF ANYTHING EVER FAILS, GO GET MORE ALCOHOL."
I know the guy who wrote the "rapebait" email.
Matthew was a friend of a friend. Another friend (let's call her Lexi) and I met him when he walked us back to Lexi's car one night, which was parked in the garage across the street from Phi Kappa Tau at Georgia Tech. It was 3 a.m. on a Friday night in February. It started to snow, very lightly. I was sober and freezing. We sat on a swinging bench in front of the Catholic Center just off Greek Row and had a heart-to-heart, and he lent me his flannel sweater. That is Matthew. I got to know him better after that first experience. In my personal experience, he is the kind of guy who has heart-to-hearts on porch swings at three in the morning. A clueless, sweet, aspiring engineer.
Matthew was also a Social Chair aspiring to attract more girls to his frat parties – a perennial problem at Tech in general and in particular, at his frat.
Now reconcile the two images. One is Matthew the TFM headliner with his 7 E's (in case anyone is keeping track: Encounter, Engage, Escalate, Erection, Excavate, Ejaculate, Expunge), and the other is Matthew the harmless, gangly, future engineer.
It's impossible to reconcile the two without making concessions. And concessions are all that people make when resolving frat party culture with sober people culture. Concessions are not the fraternal ideal – they're a sad idealization of Van Wilder. Matthew's email is a pantomime of that idealized culture of successful parties, where girls are hot and boys are tall and debonair – everyone drinks together and hooks up at the end of the night. There is a fundamental disconnection between this culture and the sober, thoughtful and above-all politically correct university culture to which everyone should belong.
The media has said a lot in response to the misogynistic email. Matthew's email was pilloried in Jezebel for its writing style. This incisive critique of the email includes the word "rapey." Jezebel's use of a word like "rapey" trivializes rape and belies the criticism it offers. The tone of the critique makes it clear that the author is secure in her feeling of superiority over the culture that produced this email. But guess what? It's pop culture. The cliché is so familiar to everyone because it has already been incorporated into a kind of "low" culture that everyone consumes. "Spring Breakers," anyone? "Blue Mountain State?" The email is a symptom of the general malaise.
On the other hand, it is terrible that someone even typed the original words, "If anything ever fails, go get more alcohol." Since his email was leaked, Matthew has offered a public apology for its content, which was also picked up by the national media. The email is a bad to joke about situations that lead to rape. Obviously. Very few people would disagree with that statement. But there are also very few people who follow that logic to the end and recognize the glamorization of the worst elements of pop culture. Rape is the extreme result of everyday (or every weekend) objectification. Objectification is the true name for behavior that we take for granted in situations like the one described in the "rapebait" email.
Lexi texted me a link to the email reproduced on the TFM website, and I nearly fell out of my seat when I read it. Matthew, the one who lent me his flannel when it was snowing outside the Catholic Center? But it wasn't that Matthew who wrote the email. It was Matthew the Social Chair who wanted to poke fun at his brothers who didn't know how to hook up with girls at parties. It makes sense in the latter context, but not in the former.
Admit it: you are aware that there is a context in which that email makes some kind of sense. It's a pantomime, yes, but a pantomime of something you can recognize, if you are honest. Instead of congratulating yourself for reposting that guy's embarrassment and hashtagging it #RapeCulture, you could think critically about the culture you are endorsing the next time you visit a new frat house full of strangers. It would require actually thinking outside of the cultural box. When you're there, sober yourself up enough to remember that strangers do not owe you anything.
The world of the "rapebait" email, considered soberly: the whole set-up is an elaborate, unspoken arrangement through which frat bros host big parties with booze and (if it's a good party) sweaty dancing; girls come and ingratiate themselves with the bros in the hopes of free alcohol and some social leverage. Objectification is only to be expected in this "culture." When people don't know each other outside such a norm, girls dress up to look pretty and boys are just constituent parts of the libidinous whole.
I reject that culture. Or more accurately, I'm over it at this point. The first step is to recognize the disconnection between the values of that culture and the values that we ascribe to as university students. And, when we're ready, the next step is to be the same people on the weekends as we are during the week.
Rebecca Berge is a College senior from Woodinville, Wash.
Illustration by Mariana Hernandez
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