Brock Turner Committed Sexual Assault at My Fraternity—Our Culture Changed Overnight.
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Brock Turner and I were in the same class at Stanford, and it was at Kappa Alpha, my fraternity, where he committed the assault felt round the world. That was early in my freshman year before I was a member, but I was there for the fallout my Sophomore year, when we watched our house filmed from afar and broadcast on national TV, the face of party culture whose ugliest side has been called rape culture.
Our frat caught the attention of the same media covering events like the presidential race, and wars. Were we really that important? In the same way, the shot heard round the world was the release valve for years of political tension, the Brock Turner case was the last straw of tolerance for decades, centuries, of white male privilege. Fraternities embody distasteful conservative values on college campuses — bastions of progressivism — and their presence is difficult for many to tolerate. Kappa Alpha’s original founder was Robert E. Lee for god’s sake. How does an institution founded by a man who fought for slavery continue to flourish anywhere, let alone on a leading college campus?
I say dump the rituals, toss the name, and get rid of all the bullshit. Everything institutional about KA was onerous and we faked it anyway because the university required a national charter for us to keep the house. But it is a legitimate manifestation of masculinity to live together and stretch the geometric limits of our stomachs with toxic drink and impress each other by stapling our ball sacks to tables. You can’t take that away. That said, the culture around sex could use a refresh. I remember waking up after a blackout underneath a gyrating girl who I didn’t recognize, and who I desperately wanted to get away from. Too ossified drunk to move or protest, I dealt with the emotional fallout the next morning.
One day, a short woman in her thirties with a briefcase slung over her shoulder showed up at our back door while a dozen of us were playing Snappa, a drinking game involving dice and a piss-yourself amount of beer. It was the height of the Brock Turner assault coverage and we were used to having the administration drop by to “check on us” (looking for violations that they could use to ban the fraternity). I got up to meet her:
“How can I help you?”
“Hi! I’m from the New York Times. I was wondering if I could interview you or one of your fraternity brothers.”
I was stunned. The New York Times was asking to interview me, a jarhead spending his Wednesday night drinking a dozen light beers while singing along to the chain-smokers. Even drunk, I saw that of all the possible worlds in the multiverse, there was not one where this conversation went well for me.
“I’m sorry, not at this time. Have a good evening.”
The Brock Turner case was rarely discussed inside the fraternity. Increased administrative scrutiny meant we were on guard for infractions, but outside of punitive pressure, the impact of the case swept through the house as an undetectable electromagnetic wave. The world was looking for someone to blame, Judge Persky was the proximate cause, but the fraternity culture of body-counting loomed. We believed that Turner was as sore, a malignant tumor, a sociopath, to use the clinical term, who once excised, allowed the party organism to return to health. He hadn’t been a member of the fraternity, and based on the descriptions of those who knew him, he almost certainly never would’ve been.
But the truth is, it’s hard to know. The internal response was a rising, unspoken demand for enthusiastic consent from women in all sexual encounters. The more excitedly, or aggressively a girl showed interest in a brother at a party, the more the encounter was encouraged, and vice versa. Desirability, rather than aggressiveness drives peer esteem. In other words, traditional gender roles began to blur. We never discussed grey area cases, because we held ourselves to a standard that the woman had to make the first move.
It was each man’s responsibility to make themselves desirable enough for this to happen, if not, celibacy was the honorable path. The girl who I awoke to find gyrating on me, and of whom I was later shown pictures of straddling me at that night’s party, meant that at least for that night I was the opposite of Brock Turner, not a victim, but an anti-assailant.
