Saturday, May 8, 2010
Reader Mail: Will's "Frat Warrior" Theory
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DB1,
I am a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. After getting out of the Army, I moved to a college town and have observed an increased amount of douchebaggery since having left my home to enlist in the military. I kept thinking to myself, “What are they doing? What the hell are they thinking?”
After some contemplation I devised a hypothesis based on frat bags attempting to copy warrior cultures of past and present. See what you think…
Sincerely,
Will (Vuil)
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Good work, Will. You are correct to focus on how tribal rites of passage for young men reemerge in the proving grounds of the frat age.
Head on over to Facebook to check out the rest of Will’s important academic critique.
mmmm, a couple of poles. Also, the idiot behind on the right is very punchable.
Alright you lot, I’m off to the beach. Enjoy what’s left of your weekend. Another great week @ HCWDB.
I’d also like to see more of the dark haired ones boobage.
Yea, that looks good but is waaaay too long, but I scanned it and it makes some sense. From my civilian perspective, the more impotent and wussified these young guys get, the more they try to make up for it by pretending to be tough. Since they have no idea what tough really is – like our military heroes – they come up with fashion trends and sensibilities like douchebag-isms.
At ease….
instant hall of hott on the right. not joking.
Agreed. The girl on the right is HoH for sure.
All these “tough guys” are fake wanna-be MMA fighter dick heads. Matching “tough guy” outfits when they go out. Young men today have no fucking clue.
this strikes a nerve with me as i have many times, because i’m past the college years and frats are no longer in existence in my world*, referred to some of these DB’s as “Club-land Warriors” or as DB1 put it in that radio interview with Arsenio “Heros.”
The ONLY part of this essay that may be coming from the wrong place, because other-wise it’s very well stated on many levels, is that maybe beause he has that military service he’s projecting that aspect of it; I’d argue on a deeper level it’s always been about breeeding rights and the warrior culture came ouit of that. So, i’d say maybe it’s less “Frats are wannabe soliders without a war” and more “frats are imitations of ancient society sans warrior class.”
and then there’s also something to be said of the notion of violence between groups in frats or college-aged people…deaths? not as many, but i’ve seen group fights between frats…same shit within on local culture and still back to notions of pride and territory that lend back to breeding rights.
and then to get personal, now see i noticed on his facebook he’s clearly showing his stripes with the pics captioned “AKA real man” now i don’t in any way whatsoever question that a military man is a “real man” but i’d argue any day that all non-soliders are non-real men, or that the cost of entrance to being a man is to be a solider/warrior…and this is because i’d also argue that in modern society war is arbitrary and occurs on a far larger scale than the tribal one. me personally, i’m not at war with iraq nor agfhanistan and never agreed with especially the war in Iraq to begin with. now if we had a WWII type war going on, sure i would/woulda joined and served my country, but i’ve never bought the legitimacy of Iraq or most of US military operations since I came of age to do so.
but that doesnt mean I cant be relied on by my fellow man or handle my shit in a scuffle over legitimate cause. And then what if I’m on the NYFD with over 50 saves and never served in the military?
*and my memory of them is vague, though I’ve always been a Travis Bickle types, albeit a loud, vocal, and social one, i dont necessarily “roll with a crew”
but i’d argue any day that all non-soliders are NOT non-real men, or that the cost of entrance to being a man ISNT to be a solider/warrior
that
ll make the NYFD illustration make more sense
Bravo to the poster on an extremely eloquent essay. Couldn’t agree more with your statements. Now I look forward to looking at some the empirical research regarding this topic. I’m sure you could make a career out of investigating this warped social structure.
Oh, and yeah, girl on the right is DYNOMITE! Great rack!
So I ignorantly wrote my response before completely finishing the essay, right about the part with the rhinos and elephants, and now that i’ve completely finished, i’m going to say I further think that there’s a flaw in this in that the conclusion area is far too related to male female than warrior vs warrior as the premise was…
and this is a problem because while the warrior culture of men has long existed and there were codes of honour and conduct, a lot of warrior cultures were equally as awful to women as frats supposedly are.
I’m not finding the conclusion of all of this to be vague…he could take this essay and turn it into one of a few things but currently it doesn’t fully work.
The global war on terror has gone on long enough. It’s time we start fighting terrorism with terrorism.
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I think our military leaders should consider forming a battalion of douchebags to do battle in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Just imagine what the terrorists will think when they see the likes of Smoot, E-blo and Jed the Creepy Wankscrote, be-decked in giant watches, dogtags, tatoos and faux hawks, come charging over the hill.
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They’ll then know that this time, The Great Satan has really arrived. The poor bastards will have no choice but to throw down their weapons and run for their lives.
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The enemy will retreat to their huts and small villages trembling in fear. They’ll try to hide among the civilians and may think that they’re safe, but the worst is yet to come.
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A-10 Warthogs will swoop down from the sky and unleash gallons of napalm, laced with Axe body spray and hair gel, hammering them for hours at a time. When the enemy has been sufficiently softened up, the real terror begins.
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Blackhawk helicopters will fly overhead with Stackhouse’ disjointed musings blaring out of loudspeakers night and day . Not even the most battle- hardened Jihadists can hope to withstand such horrific psychological warfare.
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Unconditional surrender will follow quickly. The promise of seventy-two virgins will seem small consolation.
They will return to their huts and families, and live out their lives as Allah had intended, as 7-11 clerks and telemarketers.
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Will, thank you for your service.
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SP4 Scrotum Pole
Former US Army
193rd Infantry Brigade, CZ
BUT I do want to state its a wonderfully written essay about how frat guys are pud-wanks!
sorry, I don’t social network… unless by social network you mean play patty cake with brunette’s boobies… then yes, yes I do… she can Facebookend me with those badboys!
WOW, douche may be shallow, but purple is really deep.
And by deep purple, I mean these HOTCHICKS in really, really, interesting dresses in really, really lesby poses being horn-signalled by doubledouche.
Looks good. But I’d use stronger language. It isn’t an imcomplete warrior culture. It’s a fraud. Samurai culture would behead anybody who impersonated a samurai. Those were the markings of people who held the reins of life and death, and they didn’t take fakers lightly.
If there are no societal initiation rituals, those at the proper stages of life’s various initiations will devise their own ceremonies and rituals.
It’s a part of our collective unconscious and surface structure consciousnes to bring forth these rituals. They are as necessary as the relief of a good piss and a thoroughly relaxing poop.
And they can be as painful to bear as a sword’s joust or a childbirth. Or an eye-gouging glance at an ultra-douchebag and Bleethed-out skank.
Matt Stone and Trey Parker perfect their RealDoll über-marionnette skills for: “Team America 2: World Poon-Lease”
Brilliant! Absolutely love it. Almost as much as I love Ms Purple Dress.
I found the essay interesting. I think he has some excellent points. Like Army of Doucheness, I think his own political points are overstated in the photographs, and his argument can be deconstructed from there.
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The photos display his assumption, his Axiom, that Warrior > Douchebag, without considering Warrior = Douchebag. How? Like so:
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As much as the right wing likes to go on with watered down interpretations of Darwin as a way to naturalise and hypostatise (and thus remove from critique) their artificial program of violence and war, the fact of human existence is actually quite opposite – people co-operate much more than they compete. The proof is society. If it were the opposite, society would never have been able to exist – people would have hunted each other down, preventing socialisation. There has to be a preference for co-operation in order to accumulate enough trust in order to survive.
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When there is a “weed” of douchebaggery / militarism, it may rule for some time, even at a large scale, but it eventually collapses due to its own violence and internal contradictions that lead to a catabolic failure of its means to secure resources. History is often a record of just such failures. The invasion of Iraq is a classic example of this kind of imperialism. What sets it apart as a war of hyper-imperialism is that it was clearly done for the sake of oil companies that don’t necessarily have a defensible geography or an actual human polity – the coporation only exists to profit. If they can sell oil to someone for more than what the USA can pay, they will, leaving the USA with thousands of dead “warriors” and trillions of dollars of debt – a very douchie thing to do.
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Hence, the “warriors” and the douchebags form a team of sorts. The douchebags USE the warriors and their misguided and misdirected sensibilities of honour and kinship ( which is abstracted into nationalism) in order to make their lives easier with more resources and give them access to hott females.
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The douchebags don’t go to war or serve as mercenaries for their nation – they go to university and get degrees in business, then stumble up the corporate ladder. Fratbaggery is how they form networks for later promotion in the corporate ecosystem. The Warriors are just dupes of the system sent off to die for the sake of the douchebags.
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Grunt Marine gets his ass shot off for the sake of the Neocon Imperialists who are simply the political tools of the corporate state. The corporations, since they are not really people but merely collections thereof, naturally display the lowest and simplest denominators of human behaviour, and therefore act as psychotic, paranoid, sociopathic murderous lunatics.
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The corporation, as a creature of co-operation and hegemony, take advantage of co-operation, and naturally tend towards monopoly, which is the ultimate in co-operation.
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See? All tied up with a bow. Warriors are Douchebags with weapons. Both are dupes of the corporate state.
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Fuck. It’s 8.34 on a sunday morning and already I feel like I need a drink…
The proletariat must rise against their bourgeoisie masters and seize the means of production.
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And by “proletariat” I mean my ding-ding.
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And by “their bourgeoisie masters” I mean the taut fabric of my 80’s vintage denim ball-hugger shorts.
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And by “Means of Production” I mean Purple Hott’s left teat.
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That was the problem with Marx; the Bolsheviks read it too literally. Brother was just typin’ to score some strange slot, f’sho.
I couldnt read the essay, because I refuse to join facebook or any other social network bs. But from what I see, I think you are 110% right. I got out last year, went back to college. Half the people I see around me are a complete disgrace. This country’s youth is a degenerate, narcissitic, materialistic wanna be tough guy impersonation of the old Anglo-Saxon/Germanic warrior culture. Pathetic cowards who live their lives posturing. I wonder where were these “heroes” when guys I knew were getting stop-lossed in ’05 and doin a 3rd deployment cuz there weren’t enough new grunts coming into the Infantry battalions. How did we go from the Greatest Generation to this???!! I’m seriously considering leaving school and re-enlisting. For all the bs I dealt with in the Army, I was never as disgusted as I am now.
Sgt. Dxxxx Gxxxxxxxx
11B
173rd Abn
don’t talk to douchebags about warrior culture. they’ll just call you a hater and say that good people will work hard to improve their warrior lifestyle. because warrior culture is for haters.
if they can spell “lifestyle” correctly they can probably spell “hater” correctly too.
only the most erudite douchebags can do that though. so i’m making a great leap of faith here.
Very good essay on the warrior culture. Not only do most fraternity guys never fought for anything their motivation is only one thing: getting laid. The fact that frat scrotes are getting action (with or without herpes) is why we congregate here in the first place.
Warriors at least have more important motivations, love of country, being there for each other, financial incentives for a better future, rock-and rolling with a SAW, etc.
I’ve known members of our armed forces, fraternities, and everything in between. Some of whom were douchebags, and some of whom weren’t; on both sides of the fence. The one big problem with Will’s theory is that it reduces the definition of manhood to the male’s collecting of resources (mating opportunities included as a resource) through “honorable” means. There is a contradiction here of values based on survival needs and arbitrary societal constructs. What makes a successful male is easy: the ability to pass on one’s genetic information. What makes a “man” has no absolute set of components.
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Here’s where I take issue with Will’s hypothesis. He equates being a warrior with the ideal form of masculenity. Warriors being “honorable” and “strong” whereas Frats are imitations of the above, however both are able to accomplish similar goals through different means. The problem is, sexual selection on the part of the female is removed from his equation, yet sexual conquest is defined as a universal standard for manhood. If manhood is to be measured in such a way, it can only be accomplished by looking to the quality of the WOMAN first. Basically, it’s not whether a man is a warrior or not, but what he’s fighting for. The bleeth defines the douchebag.
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The true worth of a race must be measured by the character of its womanhood –Mary McLeod Bethune
Jacques wrote:
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“There is a contradiction here of values based on survival needs and arbitrary societal constructs. What makes a successful male is easy: the ability to pass on one’s genetic information. What makes a “man” has no absolute set of components.”
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Exactly. Your post is also a fine counterpoint to Will’s essay.
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And is there some point in history where we can expect to have paragraph breaks like normal, and not have to insert hyphens?
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@ Troy
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As to when we shall have paragraph breaks, like the question of manhood: There are no easy answers; only operational definitions.
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And I almost forgot to comment on the brunette in the pic above. Shame on me for not sharing my pithy observations and intellectual commentary.
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Woof, woof! Sausage time!
Thanks for the comments and the critiques. There are holes/fallacies in the logic of my argument to be sure. That’s because it was inspired by ambien. Warriors aren’t the only hard ass pterodactyls as well. For example there are lumberjacks, firefighters and construction workers.
Also, the brunette reminds me of an ancient siren calling men to their doom with her boobs. Maybe that’s why she’s wearing tit curtains so as to hide her powers until the right moment.
Damn, this site is awesome.
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HotchickswithD-bags 201 should be a college course and Troy Tempest should teach it.
I’ve dated a Fratbag and a Soldier. They were both pretty douchey. Sure my two experiences don’t make a stastically significant argument, but for me I’ve sworn to not date either a frattie or a slodier again. This is why lately I’ve been sticking to dating sweet nerdy guys, now that’s a real man. A good guy who can keep a good woman and pass on their good genes. Hooray natural selection!
Dicy.. I have seen plenty of doucheness in the military and it seemed to be increasing closer to the end of my term. I think douches used to get put in their place and minimized, now they’re seeping into every circle of society.
Go to a military town these days and Affliction shirts abound.
I know a couple nerd-core boys in the Army and Corps. One of them’s a Ranger, but he loves his NES and Devo. Fear not ladies, real men still exist.
I know what you mean, Will, I grew up right next to Ft Stewart. A lot of my class mates married those Affliction shirt guys!
I am extremely tempted to hit friend request on Dicy’s facebook except then she’d be able to provide valuable insight to the fact that i am, in fact, a mole from the International Association for Douchebag Supremacy should she accept said friend request, take a look at my profile, and connect the moniker here to my real identity.
AoD
@AoD Go ahead, make my day.
See what I did there?
@ Will
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You should read Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. It’s a fabulous comparative analysis of the soldier’s psyche as revealed in Homer’s Iliad and interviews with young men returning from modern combat. It addresses PTSD, wartime comaraderie and relationships amongst soldiers, war crimes and atrocities, justifications for dehumanization, communalization of grief, all in the context of both ancient and modern warfare.
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Awesome read. One truly understands why, in Vietnam, we won every battle but lost the war. A warning to any nation when they decide to go gallivanting off to armed conflict without realizing that wars are won and lost solely in the minds of the soldiers that fight them.
Nerds boys and weird scientists excite me more than any frat fag,also massive macho does not move me one bit. Also neither does a fancy red car in place of brains. Kids,you need a brain to live in this world,not flashy fuck wits. These douches have a shelf life of 2 minutes,and also about the same time they shoot their load. Sorry I had to whittle this site all down to simple terms. There are still women who search for people with substance.
Jacques,
I’ll look into it. I am also a nerd-core periodic table of elements t shirt sporting type.
Dicy… Sad for your friends. All who serve are not warriors, but all warriors serve. The abyss of doucheness has a brittle ledge. Is that a koan? I think I’ll not think on it.
I’m too tired to read smart stuff. I say whoever fucks me the most and annoys me the least is A-OK. And if he puts the seat down when he’s done peeing, bonus points.
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Sure, it goes much deeper than that. But I’m operating on a primordial level today, so that’s all I got. Sorry.
Yay Medusa is here!
@ Dicy-
Done. btw, if you ever make it to Atlanta and need a good laugh go to Relapse Theatre on 14th st in mid-town. I used to perform in the improv troupe back when i lived down there. some really funny people hanging around there
Putting the seat down goes without saying. I go one further by not flushing after pinching a loaf. I mean, relationships are about sharing, and I want to share my accomplishments. Even if that accomplishment is the biggest, smelliest, spatteriest shit you’ve ever seen in your life. That’s what true love is all about.
That, and sandwiches.
The reductionist framework of the essay makes the analysis weaker than it could have been. Staying within the boundaries of the warrior metaphor, a frat is engaged in a war, where winning means the advancement of members current standing, future business networks and careers and failure would imply social ostracism and significantly weakened chances of amassing and keeping resources such as wealth and access to women.
Within an expanded framework, it would indeed be of value for a frat to have a defined and shared set of symbols, and it would indeed make sense for those symbols to be based on warrior culture as warrior culture is focused on the survival of the ‘tribe’ in the broader context of a ‘war for resources’.
Using death as the key analytical turning point is overly simplistic.
Now those are two worthy of the hall of hot…much better than any of the choices you gave us in the last vote.
I always got confused about the toilet seat; before I ever wound up living with a woman I’d heard that the toilet seat was a big deal. I assumed ladies always wanted it kept UP so the seat wouldn’t get spattered pee and feedback and what-not all over it.
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When my girlfriend first moved in, officially (tampons, toothbrush) and got up late one night to pee I heard a cry, a splash and much cursing. As I lay there in the dark, covers pulled up to my nose, I had an epiphany….they want it DOWN. So their butts don’t go spelunking in the dark because they thought the seat was there to catch it.
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C’mon, girls, be specific. We’re not mind readers. With the exception of Crucial, men do not sit down to pee. Only to poo. Except for Mr. White, who poos standing up, on plastic sheeting. And Goolo, who drops guano whilst airborne.
cant get onto facebook at our work. But the girls in this pick are doing it for me. ANd by doing it I mean I wish they were doing it with me.
Hott on right is SMOKIN’!
I did share this essay myself, but it was more because Will touched upon some evolutionary and ecological concepts. The issue is that applying these concepts tend to result in a common pitfall in evolutionary analysis: To create “just-so” stories. Since I am late to this, Jacques and Tory pretty much said most of what I was going to say in that they provided a little more context and reviews the assumptions upon which Will derived his conclusions.
Indeed, one can reduce sexual selection and reciprocal altruism in terms of appropriation of resources. The difficulty that lies in such lines of reasoning is that defining or explaining such phenomena become rather one dimensional.
As troy alluded, reciprocal altruism actually undermines individual competition because reciprocal altruism is more a case of selection beyond the individual (or ‘selfish gene’ as Dawkins would put in) level. Trivers, who coined this term, certainly had the idea of investment and individual reproductive success, but in actuality, the expectation is that other organisms would increase their reproductive output much at the cost of its own. This is different from the common usage of “alruism” in every day use as the intention would involved. That is not to say this is some individual gain, but is important to note that inclusive fitness and the rise of altruism, especially in human behaviour, do not necessitate self-interest exclusively. This is a common misconception. Altruism can arise as a result of a high correlation between donors and recipients ie. altruists seek out other altruists.
As to Jacques point, he touched upon the fact that extrapolating sexual selection or anything derived by Trivers to the human population is wrought with inconsistencies and contradictions. Yes, woman are choosy, but given human behaviour, it cannot be informed solely by parental investment, the ‘sexy son’ hypothesis let alone any other predictions made by those instances. My colleagues in evolutionary psychology get away with these slights of hand from time to time, but thankfully, biologists are now speaking up about defining these evolutionary phenomena in the human realm much less in terms of Dawkins’ famed ‘selfish gene’ metaphor.
As an example of just how precarious these ‘just so’ stories are: A popular neuroscientist known as Vilayanur Ramachandran was teasing a group of evolutionary psychologists about their nebulous methodology, and as joking bet, he claimed that he could publish in one of their journals, making up an evolutionary reason why gentlemen prefer blondes. His joke article got accepted:http://www.biomedexperts.com/Abstract.bme/9049984/Why_do_gentlemen_prefer_blondes
With such difficulties as I outlined above, you can see how making the leap for that into arbitrary sets of traits that define a ‘man’ can be hazardous, which weaken the thrust of Will’s main thesis.
Okay, I am done, Sorry for the length.
*troy