We No Speak Americano: Please refrain from getting your freak on

Un­for­tu­nately, I have gone through that rite de pas­sage that the fe­male stu­dents of Dart­mouth must go through at least once in their un­der­grad­u­ate lives, namely hav­ing their heart bro­ken by a das­tardly Frat boy. What’s worse is that he told me that he “wasn’t like all the other guys”, that he was “dif­fer­ent”. Sadly that re­la­tion­ship didn’t last very long, much like some­thing else I might add...

I came to Dart­mouth think­ing that the frat broth­ers would be re­spectable, suit-wear­ing gen­tle­men, whose idea of a party was stand­ing in front of a roar­ing fire hold­ing brandy glasses and dis­cussing the im­pact of Greece’s econ­omy on Eu­rope. Maybe there’d be a string quar­tet in the cor­ner. And then the but­ler would open the front door, and I’d swan in in a flurry of snow, fur coat brush­ing the mar­ble floor... who am I kid­ding. I’ve seen“The So­cial Net­work”. I fully ex­pected to end the evening danc­ing on a table in my knick­ers.

But still. I was not ex­pect­ing pub­lic uri­na­tion. Nor the ab­sence of much-needed hand wash­ing. I did not an­tic­i­pate just how un­hy­gienic beer pong could get. I was hor­ri­fied by the amount of sweat I got drenched in, of which only 2% was my own. I was not ex­pect­ing to get so sticky. I shall be send­ing Tri-Kapp the bill for a new pair of shoes.

Sat­ur­day nights back in Ed­in­burgh are spent watch­ing the X-fac­tor with my fe­male flat­mates, eat­ing ce­real in our py­ja­mas, be­fore call­ing it a night at 9.30. My fresh­man days — a pe­riod of my life which is slightly blurry due to the vast amount of ethanol that I con­sumed — oc­curred two years ago. Now I am catch­ing up on my sleep.

So I sup­pose that, while your frat par­ties are novel so­ci­o­log­i­cal ex­am­ples of male dom­i­na­tion and re­sem­ble the mat­ing rit­ual of the phoeni­copterus and­i­nus, the very essence of what goes on is not new to me. I have had four years of male col­lege stu­dent crap being pulled on me. The frat base­ments are the play­grounds of broth­ers, some of whom tech­ni­cally are men but act like lit­tle kids. Some lack the imag­i­na­tion to em­ploy ef­fec­tive se­duc­tion tech­niques, and there­fore can only ap­proach a girl who is so ine­bri­ated that she prob­a­bly thinks she’s being hugged by a Tele­tubby.

So the next time a man-child, think­ing he’s all that be­cause he has a room up­stairs which he shares with the frat dog, makes a crappy pass at me, I shall an­swer thus: “Sir, I am not an 18 year old girl. I am a 22 year old woman. You are re­ally not The Shit. There­fore please re­frain from rub­bing your­self on my leg.”

Kind re­gards.