Slipping off my headphones, I rub my temples. My vision is blurry, and it feels like my skull is pressing on my brain. I’ve been watching videos of Stephanie’s interviews for the last four hours.
My first report is due right as the semester ends, which means I have exactly five days to turn it in, while also, you know, being a freshman preparing for her first finals. It seemed like a great idea to have my work schedule mirror the school calendar back at the beginning of the semester, but I forgot to consider this part.
I stare at the blank screen, watching the thin black line of my cursor flash as the clock in the corner ticks on.
Fifty journal entries, five days, twenty hours and counting.
I think about the boys who carried me home singing just a few nights ago.
But they’re also boys who keep tallies in the hallways of how many women they’ve fucked so far, who made a very public list ranking the hottest girls in the freshman class, who make jokes like, “What do you tell a woman with two black eyes? Nothing, you already told her twice,” “What do you call the useless skin around a pussy? A woman,” and my personal favorite, the so-direct-it-barely-passes-as-a-joke: “Wanna hear a joke? Women’s rights.”
But do you decry the sexist joke because it normalizes misogynistic attitudes, or do you brush off the joke, so it doesn’t seem like you’re an alarmist and going after the little things? Because plenty of men make crude comments but would never dream of harming a woman, right?
Because there are women being shot when they try to go to school or having acid thrown on them, women being beaten and raped just for being women. Do we delegitimize our ability to speak out against those things when we take the bait and make feminism about being mad about shaving our armpits or men in “make me a sandwich” T-shirts?
I mean, after half a year I can tell there’s definitely something not right about the Greek system, especially for women and minorities.
But I can’t tell what’s uniquely Greek and what’s simply societal.
Do I blame these boys for basically continuing what society has been feeding them their entire lives? Wouldn’t that just be avoiding the problem? To blame them and then dust off our hands like that takes care of the problem?
When people talk about posters hung in the women’s bathroom of DTC last year that read, “Why do women have periods? Because they deserve them,” I am disgusted.
But I also know that Judeo-Christian teaching—which most of Western society is based on—says both that God punished Eve with the pain of childbirth and that women were to be shunned until they were “clean” again after menstruation.
They had to kill a dove to come back home after their period. Let’s be honest—frat boys’ bad jokes are nothing compared with bird murder.
And then there’s the girl who heard a male student yell, “No means yes, yes means anal!” at the participants in a sexual assault rally last year.
Anyone who heard that would want to vomit, right? What kind of uniquely awful human would say something like that? Fraternities that say stuff like that must be scorned by the rest of society, right?
Nope. We elect presidents from them. A quick Google search of the phrase reveals that George W. Bush’s Yale frat was using it as recently as a few years ago.
Uggghh. I slam my head down, and “ytbgbbv” appears on the screen.
Ah yes, exactly what I want to send to one of the top scholars in the world and the people paying for my college education.
I bite my lip.
What is there to do but state the facts? To simply present what I’ve found, what I’ve seen, what the interviewees have seen, accompanied by the data from other studies.
Like a reporter, I will show what happens without comment.
An anecdote, statistics on how that sort of thing is a trend, transition, another anecdote, stats, another anecdote. Repeat, repeat, repeat ad infinitum.
It feels a bit like a cop-out to not take a stance, but it’s fine for the first segment of my study, right? It would be irresponsible to rush to judgment. Reporting the facts I gathered is all I can do at this point, really. Everything will become more conclusive after another semester.
Before I do this, I add one more entry to my journal, although I had liked having an even number.
Entry 51:
Some fraternity men illustrate a sense of entitlement when it comes to sex. Some seem to view the Greek system as a sort of vague, horrendous barter system, where they supply the alcohol and party site, and female guests repay them with sexual attention. They see the status coming from membership in the organization as reason to demand sexual favors from women who socialize at the house. Women who refuse to engage in this barter—barring those with the excuse of being already claimed by another man (“I can’t because I have a boyfriend”)—are seen as “bitches” and “teases” who don’t hold up their part of what is seen by the men as an unwritten agreement.
At the same time, a number of fraternity men go out of their way to make sure the house is a safe place for women. They kick men out of parties who seem to be acting “creepy” toward female guests, offer to walk their female friends home from parties and, in at least one case, have threatened to fight a man who acted entitled to sex.
It’s impossible not to wonder whether this is a matter of groupthink or personal morality. Putting both these groups under the same umbrella when it comes to the treatment of women, simply because both groups are members of fraternities, seems deeply flawed.
I hit Submit and start trying to make sense of everything I’ve done so far. I use my notes from the interviews to get a general idea of what people said, but then have to go back and look at old tapes so I don’t misrepresent or misquote.
It takes hours to get a few hundred words done. I decide to sleep in the lab until I get things finished, four-hour intervals at a time, leaving only to go to class or back to the house to eat and shower.
After three days, twenty cups of coffee, half a disgusting-tasting energy drink I threw away, two sessions of crying and more than a few spontaneous dance breaks, I type the last sentence of the report.
My brain can barely process it. I’m done.
Well, with the first draft.
When my phone dings, I pick up my head and realize I’d fallen asleep.
I glance at the clock: three hours until delivery. I still need to proofread, at the very least, and Professor Price wants a hard copy.
Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.
I quickly reread the whole thing.
Actually, it’s not too bad.
I print it, read it again in hard copy, fix a few errors, print again, search for a stapler and glance at the clock.
Thirty minutes.
I sprint up the stairs and out into the early morning, my messenger bag smacking my butt with every step.
Professor Price’s office is on the other side of campus, but I can make it if I run.
I get to her door and glance at my phone. Ten minutes to spare. I stare at her name plaque for a second, trying to catch my breath before I knock.
“Come in,” she says from the other side of the door.
I have to exert way too much energy to open the heavy wooden door.
She smiles at me, and her skin gleams in the sparkling daylight coming through the large windows behind her. She adjusts her brightly colored blouse. She’s like the sunshine to my storm cloud.
“Good morning, Cassandra.”
I clear my throat and try to manufacture a smile. “Good morning. I, um, have my first report,” I say. “The Stevenson people wanted you to read and approve it for sometime after the holidays.”
She extends her hand, and I shuffle over to give the report to her. She slips on her glasses, which had been hanging on a chain around her neck. She nods and flips to the first page.
My stomach is in knots.
After a minute she looks up. “This seems really great, Cassie. You should be proud.”
“Thanks.” My voice sounds weak.
She looks up, and for a second her eyes scan me up and down.
I squirm, feeling dirty and greasy, unshowered in my wrinkled, two-day-old clothes.
“Cassandra, how many hours of sleep have you had this week?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But in the last few days?”
“Um, probably like four or five hours a night.”
She shakes her head. “Go home right now. I’ll send you my thoughts as soon as I’ve had a chance to read this.”
Tears fill my eyes, and I remember when I was in the fifth grade and cried in front of my teacher, then was mortified for the next five years. Suck it up, Cassie—no one wants a repeat.
“Okay.” My voice breaks, and a Nobel winner pulls a tissue out of her purse and hugs me, and I’m not quite sure how my life got like this.