able to, on the wholesome end, throw a sink out the window without being written up for property destruction. On the unwholesome end, frats provide social cover to engage in extraordinary interpersonal violence, through the hazing process; to purchase and consume as much alcohol and as many drugs as one wants to; and to throw parties at which everyone is there at the pleasure of the “brothers”—particularly the girls.
As early as the 1920s, Syrett writes, fraternity culture started to explicitly invoke sexual coercion. “If a girl don’t pet, a man can figure he didn’t rush ’er right,” a fraternity member says in the 1923 novel Town and Gown. In 1971, William Inge wrote a novel called My Son Is a Splendid Driver, based on his experience in a University of Kansas frat in the twenties. The characters go on dates with sorority girls, take them home, and then go back out to solicit sex from prostitutes. One night they participate in a “gang-bang” in the frat basement. “I felt that to have refused,” the narrator thinks, “would have cast doubts upon my masculinity, an uncertain thing at best, I feared, that daren’t hide from any challenge.” The woman at the center of the event yells, resigned and aggressive, “Well, go on and fuck me….That’s what I’m here for.”
Thirty-five percent of UVA students belong to a fraternity or sorority. When I was on campus, people outside the Greek system were referred to as goddamn independents, or GDIs. Because first-year students live in dorms, and mostly can’t buy alcohol or throw parties, a huge amount of partying at UVA takes place in frat houses, on frat terms. (Due to the Greek system’s dogged adherence to gender traditionalism, sororities aren’t allowed to throw parties at all.) There is as much individual variance within the Greek system as within any other: I was welcomed into it despite being openly averse to many of its central features, and Andrew, my partner of a decade, lived in his UVA frat house for two years, volunteered at the daycare across the street on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and remains a sweeter, more sincere person than I am. But it’s been well documented that men in fraternities have a higher perpetration rate than college men in general. A recent study at Columbia showed that they are victimized more often, too. The fraternity environment doesn’t create rapists as much as it perfectly obscures them: every weekend is organized around men giving women alcohol, everyone getting as drunk as possible, hookups as the performative end goal, and a lockable bedroom only a handful of steps away.
Jackie’s false accusation, in this context, appears as a sort of chimera—a grotesque, mismatched creation; a false way of making a real problem visible. In 2017, in a beautiful piece for n+1, Elizabeth Schambelan wrote about her own lingering obsession with Jackie’s story, which she observed, in retrospect, was guided by a sort of fairy-tale inevitability: a girl in a red dress walked into a wilderness and encountered a pack of wolves. “In retrospect, the failures of its naturalism seem so clear,” she writes. “The dark chamber, the silhouetted attackers….But most of all, it’s the table, the crystalline pyrotechnics of its shattering. That’s the place where the narrative strains hardest against realism, wanting to move into another register altogether.” Jackie had woven another version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” which Susan Brownmiller once argued was a “parable of rape.” A girl is intercepted on her journey by a wolf, a violent seducer, who then disguises himself, and falls upon her, and eats her up.
Schambelan quotes two anthropologists, Dorcas Brown and David Anthony, who in 2012 wrote an article tracking the association of wolf symbols with “youthful war-bands” in ancient Europe “that operated on the edges of society, and that stayed together for a number of years and then were disbanded when their members reached a certain age.” These war-bands were “associated with sexual promiscuity,” Brown and Anthony write. They “came from the wealthier families…their duties centered on fighting and raiding…they lived ‘in the wild,’ apart from their families.” In Germanic legend, this organization is called the Männerbund, a word that means “men-league.” The men disguised themselves with animal skins, which allowed them to break social restrictions without guilt until their time in the Männerbund was over. “At the end of four years,” Brown and Anthony write, “there was a final sacrifice to transform the dog-warriors into responsible adult men who were ready to return