<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Before I was a loyal Dartmouth frat pledge made to swim in a kiddie pool of human filth, I was a normal, hardworking kid. Grew up in a middle-class suburb in Jersey. Played lacrosse. Had a girlfriend. I&amp;#039;d always wanted to go to Dartmouth because my grandfather had gone there and so did my older brother, who was two grades ahead of me. Both were in frats. The school is dominated by its Greek system, and joining a frat, we were told, would connect us with top jobs, hot girls, secret societies, and an endless winning streak that would last until we died. It wouldn&amp;#039;t just make us men, older bro said \u2014 it would make us &amp;quot;real people.&amp;quot; Yet from the beginning of pledge term, I sensed that there was something fucked up about the misogyny associated with being &amp;quot;a real person&amp;quot; \u2014 from bros calling girls sluts and slampieces, to their tireless efforts to get girls drunk and hook up with them, only to speak degradingly of them later. My frat&amp;#039;s basement was spray-painted with the words FLETCH HATES WOMEN. It was a predatory conspiracy. I got the sense too that all the hazing warps guys&amp;#039; concept of consent. The frat basement was a place we as pledges came to associate with forced drinking, nudity, humiliation, and submission to those higher on the social hierarchy. Most of our hazing events took place when we&amp;#039;d been ordered to drink such extreme amounts of alcohol that we couldn&amp;#039;t have possibly consented to them. But we were indoctrinated that this type of exploitation was totally normal. This brainwashing was subconsciously projected onto any non-brothers, i.e., women, who entered the space, and I think it rewired some guys. Take my frat brother Fitz*. Before pledging, he&amp;#039;d been a polite kid who&amp;#039;d never drank or had sex. That&amp;#039;s why I can&amp;#039;t shake the grimness of a conversation in which he told me we &amp;quot;like, had to have a threesome&amp;quot; with a girl I was hooking up with ... and in a tone suggesting that her orifices were listed on a menu for him, he asked to &amp;quot;have the mouth.&amp;quot; When I first pledged, I had a pretty serious girlfriend: Blair, a driven, gorgeous classmate. A catch. My hazing became a barrier between us. The night I was baptized in the kiddie pool of vomit and urine, I stumbled to Blair&amp;#039;s dorm, too drunk to speak, and peed on her floor. I was the worst boyfriend in the world. It wasn&amp;#039;t until I saw the hazing from the other side that I was able to grasp that something sick and dark had metastasized in the house. My senior fall, I watched these younger pledges slosh around in vomit as my brothers howled animalistic chants. I pictured myself the night I was in their position: an incapacitated disaster who cared so much about feeling &amp;quot;elite&amp;quot; that he forgot everything he&amp;#039;d worked for \u2014 the guy who hurt Blair and deserved to lose her. I knew that wasn&amp;#039;t me. So I got out of the house. When I rushed, I thought being in a frat would toughen me, make me &amp;quot;somebody,&amp;quot; slip me some sort of privileged American dream if only I did what my bros told me to do. I thought I&amp;#039;d remember it all fondly despite the trauma, that as long as we didn&amp;#039;t get caught, we&amp;#039;d move on to bigger, more powerful clubs. But now I look back on it as the pointlessly sick place I clung to after the high-water marks of adolescence receded and Blair drifted away, where I came to realize, finally, that a fraternity was not a place where good men were made. Andrew Lohse is the author of the new book Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy. Follow Andrew on Twitter. This article was originally published as &amp;quot;How Hazing Warps Frat Guys&amp;#039; Views on Consent&amp;quot; in the September 2014 issue of Cosmopolitan. Click here to subscribe to the digital edition! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/college/news/a29845/how-hazing-warps-frat-guys-views-on-consent/>