Rex Kerr
1 min readAug 10, 2023

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Ah--good point! I'd forgotten about fraternity culture. That's been a toxic mess for a long time. In my defense I can only point out that I, and the other halfway serious students, assiduously avoided the frat bros. I agree it's not yet a solved problem.

However, at least as of 2016, it seems somewhat distinct from the Man Box phenomenon as described in the Equimundo study. Although fraternity (and sorority) participation increased harassment, it decreased depression among those involved: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5123845/.

Frat bros may well be in a box, but it seems to be a different (related) box.

It's also worth noting that the Swarthmore frat bros of 2019, in reference to the documented events from 3-9 years earlier, write, "We were appalled and disgusted by the content [...] We cannot in good conscience be members of an organization with such a painful history." They were clearly--at least in the face of demonstrations--feeling the cultural pressure to NOT be "a man" like that. I rather doubt that their disgust was fully genuine; rather, I interpret it as, "oh #*@% they found out, thank god they can't pin it all on us, bail quick!" So, anyway, as documentation of a subculture with a serious problem: absolutely. As documentation that this is a general societal pressure: no, at Swarthmore it went the other way so hard that they had to close down. It wasn't, "Haha, boys becoming real men, what are you going to do?"

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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