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BU suspends frat for advertising 'blackout' party like a bunch of sexist pigs

The Daily Free Press reports on the "withdrawal of recognition" for Kappa Sigma for the way it joined with a group called Blackout University to advertise a party at Royale in the Theater District:

The promotional materials for the party, which was scheduled for December 10, 2014, included shirtless or nearly unclothed women, with some being forced to drink alcohol. A video included on the promotional webpage stated, "No sluts were harmed in the making of this video."

BU Today reports on a letter sent by a university official to the frat and its national office, which says it's time for the group to "develop a method to reexamine your own behavior as members of an all-male organization within a culture of violence that often regards sexual assault as acceptable behavior or as ‘just sex' ."


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Comments

Question..

where do they get girls to willingly participate in this? No snark..

I mean if I was asked to take part.. okay I'm not a good example because I'd say yes.. but I am a guy.

OK let's say I was female.. not sure how appealing this would be to me. I mean naked, forced to drink? Come on.... this sounds so unsafe.

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I mean if I was asked to take part.. okay I'm not a good example because I'd say yes.. but I am a guy.

And that, right there, is where rape culture comes from.

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You can't just go around accusing people of being rapists.

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Fortunately, he didn't. He pointed out that a statement like this helps enable a culture in which this sort of thing is allowed to happen.

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He, being a gay dude, wanting to go is somehow promoting rape?

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You don't think gay people can experience rape or encourage the culture that facilitates it across genders and sexualities? Because rape culture is not exclusively a heterosexual problem.

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I was trying not to get all sexual about it since it seems to annoy people on here.

But since you're accusing me of 'rape culture'

lets see. I'm a gay guy first off.

Secondly to have a bunch of frat boys touch my nearly naked body in the dark?

I'd say yes. And honestly it pretty much describes the last underwear party I went to at a bar.

Not sure what you were implying other than trying to start a fight with me. I was asking a real question while trying to poke fun at myself, but you decided to take it to another level.

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Is a word you should be using here.

Not helping.

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removed.

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Only guys would like to be touched in the dark by members of the sex they're attracted to?

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YJAAIWRT!

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Based on your comment, I don't think you have read or learned much on what "rape culture" means. The Wikipedia article isn't perfect, but it would at least clue you in that talking about rape culture is not the same thing as accusing someone of being a rapist. It's somewhat like the idea that you can unwittingly be part of a racist culture even if you are not actively trying to harm others.

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it doesn't matter. Sorry. I've said what I wanted to say, and clarified it which was the post above. That's all.

I'm not going to split hairs over this.

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where do they get girls to willingly participate in this? No snark..

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Promise free alcohol (no small thing to a 19 y/o with no fake ID) and an exciting party. Naiveté and cognitive dissonance do the rest of the work for you.

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Here are a few reasons a woman may end up there:

1) She doesn't even see the flyer. She's taken by a friend, or hears about a party by WOM.

2) She thinks the flyer is a joke, and doesn't want to be seen as "touchy" or "humorless" or any of the other negative qualities often attributed to college women. Which follows with...

3) This is basic, but social pressure. If a young woman is joining a sorority, she has a strong desire to belong to something. She is probably not going to be quick to back away if she is pressured by her sorority to go to a frat party.

The whole sorority thing not only never appealed to me, but I found it repellent. Nevertheless, I certainly went along with plenty of things when I was young that make me wince now.

More to the point, why aren't you asking an why entire frat of guys thinks this party is a good idea?

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She just wanted to go to the party.

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Why would an entire frat think this party flyer et al is a good idea?

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And they know that not all women are dainty wall flowers and they understand that women are sexual beings just like man, and are perfectly capable of making decisions for themselves. And will willfully put themselves into a situation like this.

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Not all women are Charlotte.

Some women are Samantha

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Most women enjoy being awake during sex, so long as they are having it consensually with a person or people to whom they are attracted.

The very idea of drugging someone in order to have sex with them, whether with alcohol or something else, means that she isn't going to be aware of what happens to her. Not enjoying herself, just, at best, checked out. Or possibly dangerously ill.
Your argument is like saying someone wants to see a film, goes to the theatre, pays a for ticket, then deliberately takes Ambien to sleep through it.

Thanks for demonstrating exactly what I meant by the negative terms used to describe college women, by the way.

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You're an independent woman capable of making her own decisions in life. Except when you're not.

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The party was held in a nightclub, not a frat house. Most young women attending aren't identifying themselves with the ha ha "sluts" on the website.

If you can't figure out why a college party promotion isn't the same as a special interest hook up ad on craigslist or in the Phoenix (RIP), I don't have time to waste explaining it.

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The party never happened anyway.

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77 universities are currently under federal investigation for failing to properly comply with standards governing reporting of sexual abuse rates, consistency in the policies they use to adjudicate reported assaults, handling offenders and dealing with victims. Universities that have been determined to have violated federal standards can lose funding, though that rarely (if ever) happens. Far more likely is that students and people with standing can sue the university and win significant damages in court. This is a huge liability for universities, particularly at a time when they're losing state appropriations and are having to raise tuition so much for students.

There have been a lot of high profile cases recently which have spurred action on campus rape, and in particular, Obama's attention is now on the subject. One of the least graphic cases I recently read about took place at a college in Texas. There was a frat party. As girls walked in, a member of the frat marked an "X" in red on their hands. This happened to some of the girls attending. It was a clue to the person serving drinks to lace their alcohol with roofies, so the girls could be raped or assaulted later in the night. Apparently some of the drinks were mixed too heavily with the drug. A young man also drank from one of the cups given to a friend of his, obviously not realizing it was laced. Because of that, he and a couple other students got so sick they had to be taken to the hospital. Obviously, the emergency medical staff identified what happened, and now that fraternity and the university are in a ton of trouble.

It doesn't matter that a rape didn't take place at this blackout party, or that the party was eventually cancelled. It was only cancelled BECAUSE of action taken by the university. Rape is the most common violent crime on college campuses today. The statistics are overwhelming. Most men aren't rapists -- in fact, very few are. But the ones who are rapists do it OVER AND OVER. They get away with it. And part of the reason why they're able to is because of rape culture.

Rape culture says if a girl went to a party and got drunk, she is culpable in her own rape. It says women need to police every aspect of their behavior, from what they wear to the time they walk home from work, and if they're ever in a risk environment where something happens to them, it's their fault. Rape culture says rape is just a miscommunication and not intentional. Rape culture says rape is an accident and not a crime. Rape culture protects rapists by assuming that women who report rape are doing it for ulterior motives or to just mess with guys because reasons. Rape culture supports the myth that "legitimate" rapes are when a stranger jumps out of the bushes and assaults a woman with a weapon while she's walking home, when most rapes are committed by someone the victim knows, either inside his or her home or in a place the victim expects to feel safe.

In the case of this video and these flyers with the university's name on them, it is gross and pathetic that any handful of people would think this is an appropriate way to market a party. But this isn't an isolated event. It's one of many. You need to step out of your box and look at what's going on around the country, and the prevalence of sexual assaults of college students.

I realize this post is overlong for people with poor reading comprehension, but if you want to educate yourself, go here: http://endrapeoncampus.org/

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Being sexual and wanting sex are forbidden - unless you are too drunk or wasted and it "just happens".

That's because they have been brainwashed by a particularly noxious form of "abstinence only" education that holds that women don't want sex, men want sex, and women are in charge of preventing sex from happening. So, if a woman actually wants sex, well, she has to get drunk so it won't be her fault.

Seriously - that's how this sort of warped thing happens.

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Where in Boston does that happen? I didn't realize the Palins were from here.

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The one my husband worked for even hired a trendy road show to "teach" boys that they weren't responsible for themselves, and "remind" girls that they were responsible for the boys.

Small high school - three or four pregnancies a year, girls saying "I got drunk".

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I knew a few Catholic school girls in my teens. They were way more promiscuous than public school girls. Not drunk, stone cold sober. The logic has always been that oppression breeds rebellion. The ones you describe may have truly been drunk, or maybe they were just trying to lessen the amount of trouble they were in.

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Yeah, no. I had 18 years of Catholic education in this Archdiocese and not once was there abstinence only. In the 5th grade the nun teaching the class instructed about condoms and all this other stuff.

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You tell us that over and over again.

Everything went to shit in recent times with the Abstinence crap.

Your experience isn't recent. My husband's is (2009). These road shows were contracted to perform their dangerously foolish indoctrinations at multiple schools in a short time frame to keep costs down.

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Things relating to sexual matters in Catholic school are more regressive in Massachusetts now then they were in Oklahoma in the late 1960s.

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This is what I assume the party would have been like:

http://download.lardlad.com/sounds/season3/like3.mp3

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That you have a healthy level of self-esteem.

Sometimes young people do stupid $hit to feel like they belong to something. Add alcohol and the results can be disastrous.

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In my early 20s I used to do things to 'feel like I belonged'.. many many many very questionable situations. Many that had to do with sexual situations.. both wanted and some not so wanted. So I totally get that.

I have since gotten over all of that and now feel like I don't need to 'belong' to anyone.

Mama Cass did say it right "Make your own kind of music, even if no body else sings a long!". And she's right.

But yes I understand the thought process behind this...

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I went to BU, and the kids there who are attracted to the Greek life (about 10% of the undergrad population) are mostly the least smart and least mature kids. They're kids whose friends from high school went to State Keg U and they desperately, desperately wish they could football tailgate on the quad and funnel beers 4 nights a week, instead of having to live in an interesting, cultured city with plenty of better things to do and better drinks to drink.

People frequently wondered aloud why they did not transfer to Keg U instead of spending four years whining that "there's nothing fun to do in Boston," showing up to class on the verge of puking, and acting like morons in the GSU by screaming and glaring at people who dare sit at "their" tables.

There were 1-2 frats/sororities that were truly and genuinely full of nice people who didn't find their niche out of the gate, but most of them were full of immature idiots.

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Assholes prey on chics with low self-esteem.

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There are many reasons to derecognize a frat, but a stupid party theme isn't one of them.

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Not the poster - the promotional video and other materials implying what was to take place at the party.

A party theme, and an explicit video depicting illegal activities which are to take place are two separate things.

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Is there a gun being held to anyone's head while they're forced to participate in or attend such an event?

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It's called peer pressure. Were you never that young?

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I never allowed someone to force me to do something I didn't want to. Now, I'm in no way wading into the "rape" discussion that is going on in the comments to this post. I am simply talking about people participating in these "Blackout" event.

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It's not just a poster. It's not just a stupid party theme. It's recklessly and willfully promoting sexually coercive behavior against women. What part of this do people not understand?

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Women see the promotional material, see the promotional video and decide they want to go anyway.

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It sickens me that this sort of disgusting behavior still goes on at universities. I wouldn't be surprised if half of these pigs will see jail time in the next few years for sexual assault. Cowards.

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I would be surprised if that high of a proportion saw jail time for sexual assault ever, much less in the next few years. It's just not a highly reported/prosecuted crime.

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How does one get into an institution of higher learning when they are dumb enough to do this?

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It's BU, if you have a NY or CT drivers license and mommy and daddy's money, you're in.

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It's remarkable how quickly the discussion here became about the judgement of the women choosing to attend rather than the men promoting the party. We have a long way to go.

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As in, immediately.

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...the very first comment.

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Asking why a girl could want go to this isn't judging

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there are apparently many, many, many, MANY male commenters here who, I sincerely hope, will never know the joy of sex with anyone by their own disgusting sweaty hands. this is appalling. the amount of victim-blaming and "she should know better, nyuk nyuk nyuk!" comments above are APPALLING. men shouldn't rape. men shouldn't JOKE about raping. I wish the kids behind this stupid ad would get expelled from BU - not just their fraternity.

and frankly, I wish some of the above upholders of rape culture would get banned from UHub. go back to the Herald where you belong - or, better yet, the Stone Age.

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In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking
Now heaven knows, anything goes

Good authors too who once knew better words
Now only use four letter words writing prose
Anything goes

The world has gone mad today
And good's bad today
And black's white today
And day's night today
When most guys today that women prize today
Are just silly gigolos

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I'm in the leadership of another fraternity at BU. To clarify a few things:
1) The video and promotional items were not created by Kappa Sig
2) This event was suppose to be at a club, there were not going to be naked people or forced drinking at Royale

I saw this as a teaching moment to ensure that the brothers in my fraternity are aware of how to correctly market events and to make sure we always treat women with respect.

--cheers from Allston

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Would you want your sister, or if you have have children, daughter attending a party like this?

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The whole "theme", as depicted by the promotional materials, is unacceptable.

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People who are not familiar with Greek Life and clubs don't understand. How a party is promoted in a video and how it actually turns out are completely different. Some fraternities create fliers with pictures of girls in bikinis to promote a party they're having at a hotel. That does not mean actual girls in bikinis are getting off the T at Hynes and walking into the Hilton. The odds of there being crazy forced drinking are small since a) drinks are incredibly expensive at clubs and b) the club has staff that would kick people out for being obnoxious or overly intoxicated. Basically this would be a normal night at Royale with a high concentration of guys from one fraternity.

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People who are not familiar with Greek Life and clubs don't understand.

That would be, what, 95% of the population? Maybe those "familiar with Greek life" should stop expecting everyone else to "understand" or accommodate their egregious behavior.

(I was a Theta Xi by the way)

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Kappa Sig will present when they appeal the suspension.

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Because God forbid we judge based on facts and statements from people affiliated with the institution.

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