Alpha Sigma Xenia

This whole post originated from a really bad joke I made a few weeks ago about frat boys. You see, I was reading a book in The Odyssey where Poseidon rapes a woman and a few pages later Zeus rapes a woman. With all the talk lately about frat boys raping people, it made me think of a connection between the culture of the Greek gods and frat boys: essentially just that they both rape people. There's not much else to the joke, and the in between steps to show how frats are related to Greek gods are pretty much nonexistent, but you get the point.

This terrible joke persisted with me throughout the rest of our discussions about The Odyssey until I noticed that the suitors are kind of like frat boys (or at least the cultural stereotypes about them). It's a bit of a weird connection, but on a certain level there's definitely some parallels.

For starters, it's been well established that there's a certain rape culture of entitlement to women in frats. To be fair, the suitors aren't going after Penelope for sex -- they're more interested in her wealth and her status as queen. But that's part of the way entitled frat boys go about getting what they feel they deserve. Now that Odysseus is almost surely dead and Penelope could remarry if she chose to, the suitors believe they have a right to marry her (after all, who would stay in someone else's house attempting to court them if they didn't believe they had an undeniable right to that person?), no matter what she wants. It doesn't matter that Penelope wants to stay loyal to Odysseus and not remarry. Because the suitors want it, she has to do it, which is a mentality that strongly echoes frat boys' entitlement to women they want to have sex with.

Of course, the way we get to frat boys raping people is often through heavy drinking. The stereotype following frat boys more now is their sexual harassment/assault, but more generally, the joke of frat boys is their drinking. Just look at our own dress up days at Uni -- whenever there's a frat boy day, everyone shows up with a red solo cup. Needless to say, the suitors (and really the ancient Greeks in general) are very into drinking. It's implied that they're drinking pretty much all the time, and they don't necessarily make the best choices or are the nicest people after drinking, either. In book 21, when Penelope brings out Odysseus's bow, nearly all of them have an attempt at it. Antinous noticeably mocks and teases the other suitors (a typically masculine action associated with frat boys' stupidity) for being unable to string the bow, but when his turn is coming around, he cancels the whole thing with a dumb excuse in order to protect his ego. 

Because frat boys have quite a bit of an ego when it comes to sports. It's a classic part of masculinity, and the suitors are no different. The better example of men in sports is the Phaeacians in book 8, who mock Odysseus for not competing in sports and then have a competition with him. However, there's still the underlying current of expected sports proficiency from the suitors. This is due in part to Greek culture, but the fact that they are all willing to place their stakes in marrying Penelope completely in their ability to do a sports thing speaks to the importance they place in athleticism. Not one of them suggests a different activity to prove their worth in addition to the archery contest. Of course, this is partially because Penelope is the one who suggests the contest and they're all eager to marry her, but at the very least it's safe to glean that they do still place a high importance in athleticism. And all of them are quite full of themselves with their athleticism. In general, they're all full of themselves, but we see it with their sports abilities in book 21. Overall, they've got quite an ego when it comes to themselves. 

With a large ego comes a foolish attitude, and the suitors certainly have that going for them. I don't think I even need to really explain how boisterous and foolish the suitors act throughout The Odyssey. They don't care about consequences of what they do, and their overconfidence (such as Antinous casually drinking wine as Odysseus announces he's going to kill him) often transforms completely into foolishness. This foolishness in turn becomes destructive as they wreak havoc in Odysseus's house, which also speaks to their disrespectful nature -- another common feature of frat boys. Overall, frat boys do not have a lot of respect for other people and their property, mostly due to them thinking they're the top of the world and therefore not needing to respect people below them. The suitors definitely do not respect Odysseus's property.

In fact, they completely take advantage of it in his absence. It's quite similar to the entitlement that they regard Penelope with. They take advantage of xenia to benefit themselves in a way a frat boy would because they think everything is for them. Frat boys don't really care about anything besides what they do with each other (i.e. they don't care about their grades), and they're barely surviving otherwise. The suitors only care about marrying Penelope, given by the fact that they spend all their time at her house, and are only really surviving because of what she provides.

Of course, there's plenty of comparisons I could make with frat boys and the suitors -- I'm not going to even get into hazing. But suffice to say, I think that the suitors have a rather odd amount of similarities with your stereotypical frat boy. It brings into question why. My first instinct is to say that both the suitors and frat boys try to embody the most masculinity they can, which comes out in a damaging way, but I'm sure there's other reasons. In the end though, at least it leaves us with a new frat name.