“Welcome to the club. You’re, like, one of the few pretty girls at McGill. Use it wisely.” No, that’s not a quote from a Mean Girls production at McGill. That’s a genuine thought expressed to me by a sorority girl at my first—and only—frat party. Following that linguistic beauty and feminist wonder of a statement, she asked me who I found cute so she could introduce me to them. No less than 15 minutes later, the guy I had pointed out had his tongue down her throat. That’s when I was forced to confront a notion that I always knew but somehow allowed myself to be blinded from in the pursuit of free beer and a party: I fucking hate Greek life.
I can’t say that my experience got much better throughout the evening. We’ve all seen the movies. We all know the stereotypes. I definitely wasn’t walking into this party expecting McGill’s best and brightest, but I thought “hey, it’s Canada. It can’t be that bad.” I was wrong. This party was riddled with flags so red, even the most colour-blind of bulls would have gone ballistic.
I was invited to the party by a friend who was rushing the frat. The theme: CEOs and office hoes —a classic. As an outsider, I can only describe the rush party as a souped-up peacocking of upper frat and sorority members trying to show off for their rushees. It was like a networking event for drunken first graders trying to seem like the coolest kids on the playground—the people they knew, the connections they had, the people who wanted them or wanted to be them. I beat a guy in beer pong twice, and, let me tell you, it was clear that I had committed sacrilege.
After that guy “let me win” (yes, he said that), I went looking for the free beer I was promised. Brothers kept steering me towards the jungle juice which, in all honesty, felt a little weird. I’m not implying there were roofies in there, I just know how easy it is to make a velvet hammer of a jungle juice: 90 per cent alcohol that tastes like 100 per cent juice but produces 150 times the bad decisions. No thanks, I’ll opt for drinking warm PBRs in the basement packed with sweaty, jumping 20-year-olds.
If those prior impressions of Greek life hadn’t already turned me off from frat houses, this next one definitely did. For whatever reason, my friends were going upstairs, so I went with them. That’s where I saw it—bedroom doors that could be padlocked from the outside. Although it wasn’t clear exactly what purpose they served, I knew it wasn’t for anything above board.
So, I never went to another frat party again. I didn’t really think too much about it until the Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) Roofie story began to spread by word of mouth and surfaced on the McGill subreddit. For those unfamiliar, three girls were allegedly slipped the date-rape drug Rohypnol at a DKE frat house party last October. No statements were made, but other frats like Sigma Chi closed off their own Halloween parties to outsiders, making it clear they only wanted people in attendance who would protect their own. Say what you will about frats and sororities, but their ability to bury skeletons and pawn off accountability is unmatched.
A week after the story was posted, I witnessed their cult-like attempts at vindication firsthand. I asked a sorority girl about the incident, and she immediately went on the defensive for DKE. Later, to probe a little further, I asked her about a frat guy I saw for a short period of time. She told me she had “heard things” about him, but it wasn’t her information to share. The secrecy and insular nature had struck again.
Like I said, I fucking hate Greek life.
