I am a member of the class of '96, and a former member and officer of Zeta Psi fraternity. It was with utter dismay that I recently read The Dartmouth's story (April 18th, "Zete's Graphic 'Sex Papers' Exposed") on the fraternity's weekly newsletter. I felt that someone with distance from Zeta Psi should speak to this issue, and to the larger issue of the Greek system at Dartmouth.
First, we should all immediately turn our attention toward the members of Zeta Psi and the organization as an institution, and demand apologies. What these people did was wrong. It was terrible. Institutionalized misogyny is as bad as institutionalized racism. There is simply no difference. What would our reaction be if this newsletter contained racial epithets instead of, or in addition to, these gendered constructions?
This kind of discrimination is the breeding ground of patriarchy. It provides men with justifications for more than just sexual crimes. Domestic abuse, sexual double standards, the glass ceiling, even our society's inability to see reproductive labor as legitimate labor all are reinforced by actions like those of the Zeta Psi members.
That said, there is a disturbing mechanism that allows for such behavior to continue. We can see it in the statements made by the members of Zeta Psi. I was a member of Zeta Psi from my sophomore year through the end of my senior year. In my memory, we never ran a weekly newsletter with this kind of content. Of course, this is just the problem, memory, or lack thereof.
In The Dartmouth's coverage, members of Zeta Psi made a number of references to the newsletter, especially with misogynistic content as institution. It is not. The most reprehensible aspect of this is the blatant disregard for the fraternity's history, and the total lack of collective memory that survives in the Greek system and at Dartmouth as a whole. With constant turnover, student institutions are at the mercy of the more charismatic members, and reactionary appeals to "Tradition," and "Institutions" become easily wielded for whatever cause seems appropriate, or inappropriate.
These students have no concept of why or how fraternal societies came into existence. Victorian men were fearful of their class and gender status as femininity grew in importance in the middle class. Middle class men then began to create fraternal institutions to shore up their perceived loss of manliness, what we would now call masculinity. Fraternities were created because men felt their masculinity threatened. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the existing system today is still anxiously striving to prove it's members' manhood, a dangerous game.
We see the results of this game in the current Zeta Psi newsletter. The justifications for its existence are its prior existence. This wonderfully circular argument allows the members of this and every fraternity to continue with customs that are horribly out of date, and to revive and alter older customs beyond a shadow of their former selves.
Whatever happens to Zeta Psi will not eliminate the problem as it exists. We know that fraternities exist as a devise to harden and codify the members masculinity; likewise, we are aware of, and sanction, the primary means for this sexual exclusion. Derecognizing one fraternity will only make room for the next reactionary institution to arise.
The Dartmouth community will need to seriously consider how to eliminate such attitudes on campus. Ridding the campus of the Greek system may help the situation, but it will also give rise to a number of underground fraternities that are more extreme and more dangerously ritualized than the present system which is relatively open.
Dartmouth is at a crossroads and though the Greek system lies at the center of that intersection, the problems that arise in its presence are not inherent in the system itself, but rather magnified. We all know that eliminating the Greek system might be a step in the right direction, but how will Dartmouth deal with these problems once the Greek system is gone?
