Sorority Row: solipsism, cognitive dissonance, and phony “Bid Night” outrage at the University of Virginia

(AUTHORS NOTE: This first appeared on A Voice For Men.com on February 15, 2015. In light of the events currently unfolding at Morehouse and Spelman, it serves as a cautionary reminder of the blowback effects and unintended consequences of fomenting moral panics based on flimsy evidence or, more starkly, outright fabrications. #RapedByMorehouse #RapedAtSpelman has all the earmarks of being the HBCU "Jackie," and further proof that gender grievance politics supercedes race when it comes to shaming black men with collective guilt.)


The mascot of the University Of Virginia is the Cavalier. And the sorority women of Jefferson’s venerable institution believe that’s how their right to freely associate and look after themselves was dismissed by matriarchs of their organizations. So says, Ms Story Hinckley, a sorority active and senior.

At first blush, Hinckley’s entreaty not only tugs at the heartstrings, it threatens to yank the entire interior vena cava from its moorings. She has created an online petition to revoke the edict from a coalition of national sorority directors that their UVa actives not attend fraternity parties, starting with “bid night,” festivities, where chapters accept new member pledges, and, like most fraternity functions, good libations are rumored to flow, and, the matriarchs fear, bloomers are rumored to fall, forcibly or otherwise, as the women are trapped into spontaneous bacchanals by Rape Lycans.





Not so, says Hinckley.

This is gender discrimination.

"Instead of addressing rape and sexual assault at UVa, this mandate perpetuates the idea that women are inferior, sexual objects. It is degrading to Greek women, as it appears that the NPC views us as defenseless and UVa’s new fraternal policies as invalid. Allowing the NPC to prevent us from celebrating (what used to be) a tight-knit community, sends the message that we are weak.
Please sign this petition to support women’s rights at the University of Virginia."

In another letter to the sorority dictators, quoted by the Washington Post’s Susan Svrluga, signatories take issue with the presumed “diminished capacity for agency” implicit within the edict.

Sounds like a cause one can get behind. After all, who wants to see adult women essentially grounded for having done nothing wrong? These women signed up for college Greek life, not a convent. How dare the National Panhellenic and various Sorority National Directors take these “strong women” back to the 1950s, treating them like “children,” they demur.

“This is not an issue of we’re angry because we can’t go out and drink,” says Sara Surface to NPR affiliate WVTF.  “It’s an issue over whether or not we have the choice.”

Seems the only choice was to sign the petition, in the name of The Father, The Son and The Holy Booger from “Revenge Of The Nerds.” But not before a visit to the medicine cabinet, for two red pill caplets to blend into my fruit smoothie. Doing such is always a Huxley-esque and clarifying experience, and this time was no different.  Indeed, the varied squalls and squawks of displeasure synthesized into their real meaning, as only the words “solipsism” and “cognitive dissonance” were visible on the page.

What complicates sympathy for the plight of these women is that they only sought to advocate for their “adult agency” when faced with prior restraint on their movements and activities.  However, a search for a similar outflow of activist remonstration after  fraternities were extorted into being conscripted to the role of “Sober Monitors” for these “adults,” under threat of revocation of recognition on campus comes up curiously empty. Funny, that.

As our colleague Pierce Harlan at Community of the Wrongly Accused eloquently lays out, the campus rape hysteria template is modeled after how the law protects child victims. Not surprisingly, the new Fraternal Operating Agreement addenda, announced by University President Theresa Sullivan, follows this template. Its provisions require, inter alia, that a minimum of three brothers be lucid at all events. Only these “sober brothers” would have access to upstairs rooms, and would monitor who can enter and exit rooms. It also includes “Bystander Intervention Training,” ostensibly to spirit away the innocents in the nick of time. The “agreement” also includes such feminist code words as “addressing. . .unhealthy power structures” and “eliminating chaos and discomfort.”

In other words, all risk for the women (children) is outsourced to the men (grown-ups). Can’t have the coeds being groomed for spontaneous, tipsy carnal knowledge. It’s the same principle at play with the new “affirmative consent” laws; Sexual contact with women is a presumptive crime, as it is with minors.

This hissy fit isn’t about freedom. It’s about privilege. Specifically, conferring upon these women the privilege to constrain male sexuality whilst holding in reserve the right to invoke post hoc plausible deniability for their own, something Title IX coordinators endorse, especially at Virginia colleges.

Moreover, how many opportunities to take a stand did the Good Greek Women of UVa. let fly by? In light of Ms. Hinckley’s stated frustration of the Greek men being stereotyped as  “stupid rapist fraternity brother.  ‘No women can come to your house on this night because they will all be sexually assaulted,”a review is in order.

When their fellow Greeks carried the cross of a fantastical horror story equal parts Animal House, Silence Of The Lambs and McMartin Pre-School/Kern County as a part of “ritual pledge initiation”. . .what did they do?

When the story led to these young men being driven from their homes, in fear for their lives after naked acts of terrorism and threats. . .what did they do?

When a student coalition suggested “secret trials” for their “friends,” as well as other campus men  . . .what did they do?

And yet, when the toga-clad chickens come home to roost, spiking the punch not with date-rape sedatives but with an acrid, caustic load of The Law Of Unintended Consequences expelled from their bowels, they demand the world take notice of their campus-wide bitter beer faces?

How convenient. . .and “cavalier.”

How “sexting epidemic” exposes our hypocrisy

(AUTHOR'S NOTE: An abridged version of this piece first appeared in The Tucson Weekly July of 2009. This version first appeared in A Voice For Men in 2013)

How “sexting epidemic” exposes our hypocrisy

August 26, 2013 By Ty Henry 48 Comments

WRITER’S NOTE: a heavily edited version of the following piece was published in the Tucson Weekly in 2009. In the wake of the events in Nova Scotia, and others, I decided to update the full text and publish it here.–TH

In March of 2009, Pennsylvania Federal Judge James Munley took the near unprecedented step of preventing local prosecutors from bringing state child porn charges against six teenage girls who took and sent pictures of themselves and each other in states of undress. The girls are just the latest example of the sexting epidemic, which has been addressed kind of like termites in the house – you’ve heard the creaking for years, but have turned away until the bottom falls out of your kitchen floor.

Too bad there was no Judge Munley for Keimond Brown, and the millions of boys like him

Mr. Brown was charged with Aggravated Molestation of a 13-year-old girl, and now has to register as a sex offender. Before your chorus of “They should have shot him” reaches critical mass, consider that he was 15. Oh, she also consented. The same applies to Ben Wood, the Middletown, Ohio 7th grader arrested and charged with felony child porn, and the thousands of other teen boys whose lives are ruined after being ensnared in this web, such as Phil Alpert. Some, like William Elliot and Gary Blanton, are murdered.

Nothing in our current zeitgeist illustrates the dichotomy of how differently we treat boys and girls when it comes to punishment. Sex Crime jurisprudence is the A-Bomb in The War Against Male Sexuality; indiscriminate, unmerciful, inexorable, and oblivious to the Law of Unintended Consequences. Only now that the cloud threatens to envelop and swallow whole the population these laws were drafted to protect–white girls—are we looking to the underground shelters. The Chickens have indeed Come Home to Roost, in 8 megapixel resolution, brought to you by Olympus and Kodak.

Radical feminism and social conservatism long ago saw their one mutuality – The Deadly Penis – and happily wed. For the better part of 30 years, we’ve seen their progeny wreak havoc, from the false Satanist molestation scares of the 80s, to the White Girl Memorialization fad of the last 15 years, from Meghan to Dru to Jessica. Whether boys with raging hormones, or men obeying 10,000 years of evolutionary biology, we’ve put them in the soup with Ted Bundy and Joseph Duncan. In the meantime, our girls are taught they’re allowed to play House with House Money. If you enjoy it, have fun. If you have regrets or the boy/man pisses you off, run to the cops.

It has been the catalyst for the lack of any police modesty, as cops no longer know their place, and now actively lobby for more laws to enforce. Is it any wonder schools are hemorrhaging staff while at every Job Fair, who’s hiring? The State and Federal prisons. Just have a look at law, which says about 95% of boys and men are sex offenders. Don’t believe me? Any of you men who touched a 14yo breast, regardless of whether you yourself were 13, is a guilty of sexual abuse.

Of course, irony never takes a holiday. In 2007, 18-year-old Joshua Lunsford, older brother of Jessica of “Jessica’s Law” was charged with a sexual felony after being seen at a mall groping a 14-year-old girl – his girlfriend. The hue and cry from Mark Lunsford eventually led to reduced counts and no registration. Attribute that not to enlightenment but utility. Can’t have the martyr’s brother sacrificed at the same altar as his fellow boys

The Sexual Hysteria Industrial Complex (SHIC) is a dissonance-free zone. I hear mothers like my aunt comment all the time about how “the girls are worse than the boys these days.” And yet, the angle the mainstream press almost invariably takes is The Boy (predator) coercing the Innocent Girl (victim). We don’t call Miley Cyrus a victim, nor Brad Pitt and Wilmer Valderrama predators, even though both dated teens when they were in their mid-20s.

America is now compelled to come to grips with some Inconvenient Truths. We now have a sex crime whose primary perpetrators are 11-18-year-old women. The production of minor porn is being driven by Chelsea and Heather, not balding white Physics professors. Yes, Mrs. Robinson, your daughter and her naughty bits are on 40 Thumbnail Gallery Posts in Europe, and she put them there.

The upside of this is that we have an opportunity to re-evaluate our sex-crime laws, and hopefully shutter the SHIC. First, we must rethink how leisurely we throw around words such as “dangerous,” “predator,” and “victim.” The flasher is not dangerous; he is a creep, to be laughed at and shunned. Jessica Lunsford was a victim. The 16-year-olds who go to adult Spring Break and flash for Joe Francis are not. Michael Devlin, 40-something who befriended and abducted Shawn Hornbeck, is a predator, regardless of what Bill O’Reilly says. The guys in Adult chat rooms lured by geeks and actors pretending to be kids are not; they’re often just losers, and often just typical men. If you want to catch real predators, make the fake child nine, not 15. Next, we must acknowledge that for most Sex Offenders, treatment is the magic bullet. They have the lowest recidivism rate. Finally, understand that puberty makes one a sexual being. If John Walsh can date his future wife when he was 21 and she 16 1, then why can’t anyone else?

Any of these laws that don’t target molesters of actual children (read: 12 and under), rapists, and sex traffickers should be scaled back, changed to misdemeanors, or expunged. Keep the felonies for all in positions of power like teachers and coaches, and stop letting female teachers like Traci Tapp, Sarah Jones and Pamela Rogers off easy if the male teachers get 25 years, like Charles Robson, whom I served time with. Believe it or not girls are better equipped to handle relationships with older men than boys are with women. See Vili Fulau and Jason Eickmeyer.

All boys who had sexual contact with girls that was not rape should have their convictions expunged. Stop rousing the sheep with Pavlovian “public notification” regimes and goofy residency restrictions that rupture families and make someone more desperate and thus likely to offend. Keep offender data with police, and notify school teachers and administrators of what local molesters, and only molesters, look like. Accept that 14 is not 9, that most relationships that cross age boundaries are welcome, that for teen girls an older boyfriend has often been a trophy (tell the truth, we ALL knew girls with older guys when we were in school), and that age of consent laws were enacted to keep girls out of prostitution. Give parents veto power via restraining order, put in more community service, and implement more sensible penalties, like lifetime computer monitoring for those convicted of looking at child porn but not trafficking, and felony charges for molesters who apply at day care centers and schools. Eliminate prison time for victimless crimes like failure to register.

Look around us. The prison and jail system has been playing hot potato with inmate populations for about 20 years, and based on edicts like those of the Supreme Court to California, many have reached a dead end. In the meantime, school systems are collapsing (my local, Tucson Unified School District, laid off a staggering 622 people in a single day back in 2009), and the Universities are dying. I wonder if they saw the disconnect before their ox was gored.

These laws are eating the young in myriad ways, and irony is merciless. How many more Keimonds, Bens, Phils and Garys do there need to be before we heed its warning?



1. “The Dark World Of John Walsh,” Men’s Journal, June 2002