Classlessness on Campus: No End in Sight

Earlier this month, an e-mail surfaced, purportedly from a Kappa Sigma fraternity member to his brothers at the University of Southern California.  Before I discuss it, I want to be clear: Anyone, male or female, who is angered and disgusted by this garbage has every right to be. As Margaret Hartmann noted in Jezebel, it demonically covers all the bases: Sexism, racism, objectification of women, and rape. In a word (and here’s a time where English falls short), it’s despicable. Some have suggested that its very over-the-top nature indicates that it’s a hoax, some rival fraternity’s effort at besmirching the chapter’s reputation.I actually don’t think the chapter was “punked.” I could certainly be wrong, but to me this thing reads authentically and would be more transparently outrageous if it was written as a weapon.  As offensive as the message was, in the world in which it was circulated it’s not so shocking as to be obviously planted by one group against another.I guess the only reason I don’t have a stronger reaction to it is because it’s also so laughably pathetic. The guy who wrote this is many things, but some darkly skilled operator in the world of seduction is not one of them. His salutation to “the distinguished gentlemen” of his fraternity is reminiscent of something a fantasizing, pimply teenager would concoct in an effort to channel Sean Connery as if he headed up some secret society of black-tie wearing spies instead of tending an ant farm in a bedroom festooned with action figures.He’s also oddly obsessed with the penis itself, and not just in the cultural, archetypical way that many men seem wired to be. Read carefully if you can stand it; he writes like a clever seventh grader and can’t drop an appropriate comma to save his life, but he can lithely romance words to evoke the feel of a male sex organ doing this or that. Of course, if he has a preference for men, I have absolutely no problem with that.  But my guess is that he would, and thus might have been betraying a secret that nevertheless scratched its way toward the surface as he typed.He also evokes Tucker Max, the accurately self-titled “a__hole” who has built a fair amount of name recognition appealing to the lowest common denominator by claiming to live and memorialize the life of a misogynistic scumbag and bathroom humor expert. Max’s star is probably fading, but not because the market for what he peddles is drying up.  Rather, poor Tucker is knocking on the door of his late 30’s. The exploits he claims to continue to have are getting less and less believable and more and more objectively pathetic, true or not.  He deserves credit for skillful branding.  The problem, though, is that the shelf-life for him as the focus of it appears nearly exhausted.As I’ve noted before, research doesn’t support the idea that an otherwise non-sexually violent man will suddenly become so because of exposure to things like Max’s latest story or this frat boy’s infantile rating system. But language matters, and the danger of this kind of dreck is that it might lead some guys to just shrug when an actual rapist in their midst is springing a trap at a party or similar social situation.  If women are truly targets and not people, what’s the harm?  Every culture on earth looking to eradicate an enemy begins by dehumanizing that enemy.  That's Tucker Max and this alleged Kappa Sigma author in a nutshell.I will note, for the sake of my newly found antagonists in the so-called Men’s Rights Movement, that both genders can play the destructive objectification game.  This is evidenced by the cleverly titled “F__k List” Powerpoint presentation created by a young woman at Duke last spring.  She apparently bedded a baker’s dozen male student athletes, rated them all in excruciating detail, and then prepared a gag thesis with the results.  Some of what she notes about these guys, while probably quite true, is also gratuitously cruel.  It’s bad, but I find it less offensive than what Max and the Distinguished Gentleman produce, and not just because she targeted men instead of women.  Rather, it appears to me that she engaged socio-economically advantaged participants who were likely looking to use her just as crassly as she eventually used them.  I don’t think she’s evil, but in combination with the smarmy, pseudo-scientific tone she takes throughout her masterpiece, the picture I get it is of a tiresome adolescent who sees herself as remarkably wittier and more clever than she actually is.Still, if the idea is not to treat each other like disposable toys, then her prank, Tucker Max’s whole career and the alleged brother's miserable message should spark outrage and be challenged. To the extent they have been, it’s an appropriate thing. But when one considers that Max has achieved a level of fame and wealth as a result of his trash, or that the Duke student is apparently being offered book and movie deals for hers, the only conclusion one can come to is that there’s still a society out there rewarding this stuff.  That won't change anytime soon.