Greek Life Is Great Because It Doesn’t Matter

jtrain11 years ago

When we started my Peabody-Award-Pending Podcast, we had the vague idea to foster a kind of community. We thought there was a space in the world for an outlet that dealt honestly with basic realities: boners, a love of tits, and being able to call “breasts” tits. We did this because, ironically, the current internet culture has managed to make us less free. We’re more bound to the opinions of groups who shout the loudest and have the most clearly defined — and poorly thought out — moral codes. So we wanted to combat that by starting the conversation smack in the middle of the id.

The intention was, and remains, simple: start at the unimpeachable truth (i.e. sometimes girls squirt all over your bed, or, sometimes you get your hardest erections while looking at corpses) and work our way backward out of it. What makes these things happen? Should we apologize for them? Are we okay? By trying — honestly trying — to understand these realities, to work hard to see the other side and make an argument for it, we’re making the world a better place — or at least a more comfortable one. We’re opening the conversation instead of closing it, while Huffington Post and Jezebel keep tossing sanctimony grenades from their ivory towers. “I WANT TO LICK SOME BUTTHOLES,” I shout into the void, daring God to challenge me. That’s the truth: beautiful, raw, poignant. Now let’s talk about it.

If you allow space for personal truths, you also allow space for rationalization — and that’s a precarious position to be in. For example, let’s say, for argument’s sake, you love tits. We talk about your love of tits and agree that loving tits is a completely normal human reality. We agree that your love of tits isn’t something you really need to hide. Great. Yell it from the rooftops. But then, let’s say you take that a few steps further, and start judging the quality of your female companionship solely on the ampleness of her tits. Personality and humor become unfortunate footnotes to the nipple-to-breast ratio. Now, you’ve taken a simple love of tits and turned it into a worldview. Opinions become gospel, and the rest of the world gets shut out in the process.

On the internet, those crazy “tit” people end up becoming your reputation. When I mentioned Jezebel, you thought of their worst fan. You thought of someone you, and probably a rational Jezebel fan, hate. Well, TFM has it’s own crazy “tit” people. When it’s mentioned, I’m sure people think of a group of young guys in blazers with gold buttons screaming “Get a job!” at homeless people on their way to dad’s yacht club. I know that’s a minority of the fans, but I worry we are knee deep in the kind of bullshit where the crazy “tit” people have the potential to ruin a really good thing.

There are two ways to look at this website. You either see a tongue-in-cheek celebration of masculinity, or you see a place attempting to protect a pretty specific worldview (white, fraternity man, Republican). While the truth is likely somewhere in the middle, I think the pendulum has swung toward the latter. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily. This place can be whatever you want it to be. As the social tide continues to move against the Greek world (and it is), these crazy tit people get louder and louder. They begin to protect in ways that don’t align with the greater group. They start to think it’s ok to use words like, “ni**er,” or, “k*ke,” or start “joking” about r*ping feminists to protect an ideal that is legions away from the real concept.

I write for this site for the same reason you probably read it: this place is ridiculous. Hell, that’s the same reason I joined a fraternity. I saw a kid dressed as a butler taking drink orders on a weekday afternoon and thought, “I want to be a part of this non-reality reality.” The more we remember how little this all matters, the more power we hold. Fraternities will always be the easy target. The news will always vilify. The movies will always end with the fraternity losing to a group of nerds. Our message shouldn’t be about the “gentlemanly fraternity scholar” or to lash out with some racist political stance, rather our rally cry should be to fart loudly at the most inappropriate time, because in the land of the disgruntled internet user, the man who only cares about tits is king.

There are other sites to write for, other names to associate with the podcast. I chose this site because the dudes who run it are cool, supportive, and give me space. They’ve been the same way with the community here (except LET’S BRING BACK THE FORUMS WHAT THE FUCK). I can’t write about my butthole-licking predilection anywhere else, at least until the Economist gets back to me. I wrote this article for no other reason than to say I really like it here, and that maybe it’s a good time to reassess what makes this place great and double down on the freedom and honesty this place allows. .