Fraternity Gang Rape by Peggy Reeves Sanday

Author:Peggy Reeves Sanday
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2007-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

When a man has many partners, he is not only admired by other men, but he believes that women will think he is an incredible lover. Many men get bothered if they are having sex with only one woman because it makes them question their attractiveness and masculinity in the eyes of other women.

This brother was so worried about his attractiveness and masculinity that he set quotas for sexual encounters for certain time periods. Once he decided to have intercourse with thirteen new and different girls before the end of the semester. Setting quotas was the means by which he checked and evaluated his masculinity. He explained that the joy of sex was “not just the pleasure derived from the act, but the feeling of acceptance and approval of my masculinity which goes along with having sex with a new person.”

A man who sets quotas participates in the hunting-sacrifice mentality. In order to feed the masculine persona he has adopted to clothe the self, he must find, trap, and coerce a victim. He does this either by outright rape or by “working a yes out.” As this chapter will show, there is a thin line separating “working a yes out” and rape.

“Working a yes out” refers to encouraging or forcing a woman to consent to sex either through talking her into it or plying her with alcohol. Verbal coercion and the use of alcohol to get women to consent are common practices on college campuses as elsewhere. In their study of 3,187 women on thirty-two college campuses, Koss and her colleagues reported that 44 percent of the women reported that they had been verbally pressured to have sex; 12 percent said that men had attempted sexual intercourse by giving them alcohol or drugs (Koss et al. 1987).

Koss’s results are replicated by surveys on individual campuses, many of which use questions from her sexual experiences study (for other studies on date rape see Warshaw 1988). For example, a sexual harassment survey at U. in 1985, employing some of these questions, found that 44 percent of the undergraduate women interviewed had experienced behavior ranging from “unwanted deliberate touching, leaning over, cornering or pinching” to “actual or attempted rape or sexual assault.” Surveys conducted at campuses all over the country reveal similar results (Hughes and Sandler 1989).

This chapter reports conversations among fraternity brothers that illuminate the sexual ideology underlying “working a yes out.” As mentioned, these conversations do more than reveal an ideology; they also channel sexual expression and communicate expected sexual behavior. In telling one another what to expect, how to interpret sexual signals, and how to act at parties, the brothers encourage one another in what can only be described as rape-prone behavior.

The conversations took place in fraternity houses between male interviewers (trained by me) and fraternity brothers. The conversations were taped and transcribed with the knowledge of the brothers. The subject of the conversations included the XYZ incident, the difference between rape and seduction, homosexuality, pornography, and the relationship between sex and male bonding.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.