I grew up in a permanent state of confused awe at the US education system, thanks to portrayals in films and on TV. Students were always played by adults and, since none wore uniforms, it was hard to tell them apart from the teachers. At my bog-standard comp, we were allowed to wear “our own clothes” on the last day of term, a thrill denied the kids at Jefferson High in Happy Days, where every day was a mufti day. The 70s frat-com National Lampoon’s Animal House further muddied my understanding: more grown men dressed in the varsity jackets of Yankademia, who threw toga parties in unisex boarding houses branded with Greek letters, doused each other with Bud and spied on girls.
I’ve grown up since then, but US college life hasn’t, according to fly-on-the-keg documentary Frat Boys: Inside America’s Fraternities (Thursday, 9pm, BBC2). Among the brayingly entitled half-jock, half-future-Congressman hybrids featured, baseball caps are still worn backwards and Miller Lite is drunk from a training shoe for a dare. Everybody is loudly heterosexual and one frat house features a fish tank built into its bar (as if in tribute to the one in Animal House) and a shelf of empty vodka bottles to “showcase what we drink”.
Ben, a third-year University of Central Florida stude-dude describes a fraternity as “a brotherhood of like-minded people who are just kinda together to meet a common goal”, that goal being to get wasted, have a good time and keep bras as trophies. (He adds, helpfully, “a sorority is the same thing but with women,” though we don’t get to see those.)
It’s an easy spectator sport to watch these masturbators of the universe list their career ambitions like Apprentice candidates on a three-year holiday (“Dentist… sports agent… financial adviser”); one cuts to the chase with “drive a fast car, live in a big house”. He already lives in a big house – frats supply $3bn-worth of property across America’s campuses, costing students up to $2,500 a term in rent.
The producers know they’ve struck gold when one alpha male we’ll assume isn’t majoring in women’s studies declares without irony: “I’m not the type of guy who’s going to bring home 10 different girls a month; I’ll do two or three girls, cos that’s the kinda guy I am.” But this leads to the doc’s more serious thrust: ritualistic abuse of “pledges” during induction, and sexual assault on female students, the sort that has yet again come to light during the case of Stanford student Brock Turner, convicted of intent to rape another student. Meanwhile, this doc shows phone footage of male students stripped to their pants, being humiliated and actually branded. Eight years ago, Harrison Kowiak, 19, died of a head injury during an off-campus rite. Because most US colleges are private and donor-reliant, these crimes rarely get fully investigated, an inevitable consequence, says one victim from Syracuse, of what she calls frat life’s “patriarchy of power”.
The US education system is a foreign country – and they largely get away with doing things differently there, as this film hammers home. Mind you, the pitiful sight of a frat-house initiate effectively “fagging” for Florida’s equivalent of Flashman may ring bells to products of our own public-school system. This future President Trump adviser tells us his motto is: “They say money can’t buy happiness but I’ll take my fuckin’ chances”, while his willing slave sprays his sweat tops with “wrinkle-release”. If only this were a national lampoon.
