Wednesday, April 12, 2006

The Phantom Prof hates sorority girls...

...and I'm right there behind her.

It's not just the cookie-cutter outfits, phones, language, inflections, or priorities. It's the cookie-cutter minds.

And it's not like these girls are actually that mindless and conformist. Mostly, they're not stupid: they're good kids, often with very small horizons, whose minds have been conditioned and limited by a mass-media, dumbed-down, mass-consumption culture.

Rather, like their over-testosteroned backwards-baseball-capped pickup-driving shower-clog-wearing "dude"-spouting light-beer-chugging "whooping-at-every-available-opportunity" red-necked pack-mentalitied group-cramming-at-the-last-minute exam-stealing mass-cheating date-drugging male counterparts, they're afraid they won't fit in.

So they go for the nearest, safest, most predictable, most-frequently-ratified-by-peer-group models, and act much dumber than they are. These kids are this way because they've been programmed to be this way.

That's why I don't like fraternities and sororities.

1 comment:

Dharmonia said...

Coyotebanjo, you are correct that a great many of these young people are basically good kids. To paraphrase Shakespeare, does not a frat boy bleed? As HH the DL points out regularly, all sentient beings desire happiness - and the fact is, our culture is absolutely desperate for community, and that's why sororities and fraternities thrive. As educators, one of our many opportunities is to foster alternate forms of community, something which you do regularly with your music, making the world a better place in the process. I suspect that despite the John Cleese-style condemnation, what you really "hate" (since the word hate is in your subject line) is what fraternities and sororities stand for, and not the individuals taken singly. if Todd with the backwards baseball cap showed up for a music lesson ("Hey dude, can I learn some tunes?") I feel confident that you would be just as kind and supportive to him as you are to everyone else, to your great credit (and he would have an alternative.)