Who’s really to blame for outrageous fraternity hazing?

In difficult situations, some people take personal responsibility. But Lohse, like so many disaffected young people today, is quick to blame the “culture” for his own problems. This means that instead of proactively making decisions to change the way he lives his life, he idly stands by for administrators to form committees and task forces that, in the end, do nothing. He writes, “I, my fellow pledges, and all pledges since, have been trained to treat Dartmouth women with about the same respect with which we treated ourselves: none.” Trained? Really? If you’re treating yourself and the women in your life with no respect, then that sounds like a personal problem to me.

Here I have to agree with Gawker’s John Cook, who writes:

If you join a frat and volunteer to let people vomit on you and bathe in semen because you believe that if you do, people will eventually think you’re “cool,” you totally deserve to get vomited on and bathed in semen. Enjoy your college years, kids.

Fraternity brothers like Lohse need to find the moral courage to stand up for themselves and not allow themselves to be degraded by these sick and twisted, sadomasochistic pledging rituals. If that means de-pledging the frat the instant your conscience sends up a red flag, if it means giving up being “cool,” then that’s the price a young person has to pay for doing the right thing.

Emily Esfahani Smith is the managing editor of the Hoover journal Defining Ideas and associate editor of The New Criterion. She writes about pop culture at acculturated.com. She graduated from Dartmouth in 2009 and was editor of The Dartmouth Review and VP-administration of the sorority Tri Delta.