I must have dozed off between working out and reading my Abercrombie & Fitch catalog! When did it become good journalism to separate, label, and attack a segment of American society? Is the next article going to expose the evils of those "sneaky gays," "whiny career women" or "sorority snobs?"

However, since you've expressed an interest in printing this kind of thing, I'm attaching an article I wrote titled "Beta male blamethrowers: B-grade journalists who never quite got over the fact that they didn't get into a fraternity and always got picked last in sports."

-- N. Root

Having spent the last three and a half years editing my fraternity's quarterly magazine, and the last six months producing a comprehensive feature on the topic of frat guy images in the media, I share Andy Dehnart's fascination with how pop culture has adopted the frat guy as both its prince and its jester; as I read his essay, however, I felt like I was reading yesterday's news. Yes, lots of people assume frat guys are rich and snobby and smirky (and I've met some that are), and yes, lots of media creatives depend on the "frat guy" moniker to sound disapprovingly in touch with the current culture. But that's not really a revelation.

Had Dehnart completed the essay's most interesting thought -- "It doesn't really matter whether a frat boy has ever pledged a fraternity or even considered it" -- the piece would have been incredibly refreshing (no matter what it found). But Dehnart bails out, opting predictably for the condescension of those who have written before him.

-- Stephen Schenkenberg
Editor, The Magazine of Sigma Chi

The frat boy obsession is nothing new at all. I think it is ancient, and a phenomenon we share with many other species. Certainly wolf packs do not have frat boys, but the term "alpha male," borrowed from animal behaviorism, invokes ideas of instinctual and primitive attraction to a leader that is common to most social, mammalian species. This leadership position is a social role that is evolutionarily selected for.

We select our alpha males using many instinctual cues -- good looks, height and physical well being are all key characteristics. In other words, we are instinctually attracted to those members of the species that are strong, in good health and have the genetic health that good looks imply.

Frat boys are a self-selected group that just so happens to have membership criteria that are almost identical to society's selection criteria for our alpha males.

-- Josh VanderBerg

Frat boys represent to me much of what is wrong with politics and this country in general.

These are the people we went to college to get away from, and there they are, cruising through school. We think they'll go away after college, but lo and behold -- there they are as schmoozing account managers, playing golf with their customers, goofing around at work, ogling the secretaries and droning on and on about the latest sports event.

These are the politicians who invented the non-apology and the non-answer. Why should they apologize for anything? They never have before. And for that matter, why should they have to answer questions from the nerds in the press -- everyone hates nerds, right?

I hope that the American people can see this arrogant sense of entitlement for what it is.

-- David Isbister

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