My Life as an Immigrant- What the Hell is a Fraternity?
And dashed dreams of a mini-sexual revolution
This is the fifth part of a series of posts where I look back on my experience as an immigrant.
This one was both fun and embarrassing to write.
Fun, because I got to reminisce about a time when I was very young and pretty much immature.
And embarrassing for similar reasons since it made me reflect on the ideas, assumptions, and beliefs that I held back then as a 19-year-old college student from Turkey, especially about women.
I hope you won’t judge me, at least not too harshly, while reading it.
I was planning to write about this topic last week. Instead, I ended up comparing my experiences as a 19-year-old college student in the United States with the experiences of an Ottoman female intellectual from the 19th century. I guess that is the thing with writing. It takes you to unexpected places.
This week, however, I do want to go back to what I had in mind for my previous post and talk to you about the strange idea of fraternities and sororities, which was something completely alien to us non-American students but which was also something we had to get used to because the whole social life on campus revolved around them.
If you are wondering what the hell a fraternity or sorority is, like I did back when I first started college, I won’t bore you with an exhaustive explanation and history. Let’s just say, they are organizations for male (fraternities) and female students (sororities), with each fraternity and sorority claiming to represent certain interests, values, and goals. Since they were first inspired by fraternities in ancient Greece, these organizations are named through various combinations of Greek letters, and the whole thing is known as the Greek System.1
More significant for the purposes of this narrative, however, is the fact that these fraternities (or “frats” for short) and sororities each had a specific house on campus where their members could live. This was not why they were significant, though, at least not for us first-year students. What really mattered was that it was these frat houses where the parties were held on weekends.
You might be reading this and thinking, “What the hell is the big deal? Yeah, there were frat parties, so what?” But I assure you, dear reader, that these parties were important. I mean very, very important. The drinking age in the United States was 21, and since almost all of us first years were under that, frat parties were the only place where we had access to alcohol (there were also many valiant efforts to fake ID our way into bars and clubs, but that is another story that I don’t want to get into right now).
This was a particularly big deal for the American students. I mean, back in Turkey, we could drink pretty much whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, since age 16 or 17, but that was definitely not the case for the majority of our American friends. So, when the weekend rolled around, they went out to drink like their lives depended on it, and, as I said, the only place they could really do that to their hearts' content was these frat parties.
Moreover, for those of us who identified ourselves as heterosexual males, frat parties mattered for another, even more significant, reason. It was where we could meet girls. Well, at least theoretically. (I’ll explain what I mean in a minute.) Although my Turkish friends and I were more or less indifferent toward alcohol (I mean, sure, we liked drinking, but it was not a quasi-existential matter for us like it was for some of our American friends), things were different when it came to girls. There, we closed ranks with our American comrades.
Look, it was not like I was raised in a very traditional family or grew up in a conservative environment. As I have written before, I came from an upper middle class background and attended one of the best high schools in Turkey. This did not mean, however, that I was very good with girls while I was growing up. In fact, the opposite was true. I was horrible with them.
Added to this was the fact that the only thing we (my Turkish friends and I) knew about romantic relations in America came from some of the popular movies that we watched (American Pie, anyone?) The conclusion we (myself included) drew from them was the (very much mistaken) idea that having a relationship with girls in America would be much easier than what we were used to back in Turkey (I cringe with shame as I write this).
So this was the mindset that we “Turks” had while we went to those parties. And what a damn shock it was! We thought we died and ended up in heaven. We felt like everything we saw in those movies was true.
I’m not talking here about the actual frat houses as a place, which, frankly, were almost always pretty horrible. First of all, it was a hassle to get in because we either had to know someone from the frat or had to convince the guy at the door, who was some random dude who derived his veto power over us from being a member of that frat but acted as if he were the incarnation of the ancient Egyptian god Anubis, guarding the gates of the underworld and weighing our hearts to determine whether we would go to heaven or hell.
Plus, once we did manage to get in, it was always packed with a great number of drunk guys and girls stumbling around, the floor sticky with spillover beer. Add to it the loud music blaring from the speakers, and frankly, the whole thing was a total mess.
For us, however, it did not matter one bit how shitty it was because there were girls. The first time I’d been to a frat party, I could not believe my damn eyes. Girls dancing with guys in what seemed to me a very explicit, very sexual way, grinding their (ahem) backsides, and a lot of other things. I had never seen or experienced something like that, so I was in shock, mostly in a positive sense.
We were like kids in a candy store, all of us, including me, dreaming that we would surely have our own personal sexual revolutions in the next four years. The whole thing looked so easy. We would just meet someone, dance with her, and then, well, go have sex. I remember writing back to my friends in Turkey, describing what I had seen in juicy detail, and they responded by saying how jealous they were and how lucky I was.
The reality, however, was not like that at all. Although I did keep going to the parties, the mini-sexual revolution that I envisioned in my head failed to materialize. I would dance with a girl and try to talk to her, only to see her go off and dance with other people. It was a frustrating experience to have, to say the least. I was a skinny guy from Turkey whose romantic life was not very great to begin with, and getting my hopes (which, again, were mostly just in my head, so maybe “delusions” would be a more apt term) raised and dashed week after week crushed my already fragile self-confidence.
By the time it was our final year, my friends and I had mostly given up on the frats. We were already over 21 by that time, which meant that we could just go to bars and drink there. Frat parties were a thing of the past. So much so that when a friend of mine came to visit me at the beginning of that year with high expectations of seeing live what I had told him about before, I didn’t take him to a frat party.
And he has been complaining about it to this day.
Until next time!
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/advice/studying-us-fraternities-and-sororities-explained
Hey Doga, you had me giggle through the essay, and I don't mean it in a mean way. I giggled at the innocence of youth that you brought out in your recollections in a homorous manner. I very much enjoyed reading your experience. It helped me understand what frat life is about. My university is known as a party college, and there were tons of frat and sorority parties every weekend. But I never stepped into one because I wasn't into drinking at all. So now I feel that I finally have gotten a good picture of how these parties are like. I laughed at your friend's grudge for you even to this day!