Liturgy of the Frat Party

What Party Culture Reveals about our Innermost Desires

This article is part of the Claritas spring 2022 issue, Flourishing. Read the full print release here.

BY JACK KUBINEC

My roommate and I exchanged a look of confidence as we edged past the doorman in a Cornell hockey sweater and prepared to descend the creaky basement steps. Clad in a banana costume and a unicorn onesie, we were locked in and ready to go. Due to a combination of boring weekend routines and a deadly virus, my roommate and I had reached our junior year at Cornell without ever attending a fraternity party, but here we were—on Halloween weekend, the biggest party weekend of the year, fully prepared to take in the pinnacle of the college experience. We had finally arrived.

After dancing to a few songs and receiving several compliments on my banana costume, my roommate and I climbed atop an old wooden chest at the corner of the crowded dance floor and took in the revelry before us in silence. As I surveyed the partiers around me, the ritual unfolding struck me not as particularly fun or dangerous, but simply odd. I watched one particular couple across the room go through the motions of a potential hook-up: they danced and swayed together, he whispered something in her ear, she blushed. But, as I studied the couple’s faces, neither appeared to be particularly interested in what they were doing. The couple was following the steps of the ritual, doing what everyone around them insists is fun, but both looked tired. 

For the average upperclassman at Cornell, it might sound like I’m merely stating the obvious: partying, and the party scene, really isn’t as fun as it’s made out to be in the movies and on TikTok. But, given how few people actually love making awkward conversation in a mass of sweaty strangers, the persistence and ubiquity of Cornell’s weekend party scene bear closer examination. 

After a few more moments of silence, my roommate, standing next to me on top of that old chest, turned to me and said, “It’s interesting how similar this is to church. It’s somewhere you go on the weekends to experience transcendence.” I think my roommate was onto something—when we pack into dingy basements and drink watery beer in hopes of finding a love interest, we’re searching for something deeper, something more meaningful than pouring ourselves into prelim studying to prove we belong among America’s elite. Ultimately, we go to parties with the hope of feeling desired—in a sexual sense at the surface, but at a deeper level, we hope for others to see us and desire our presence. The trouble is, this need to be desired has all kinds of negative social consequences. We would do well to pursue our desire to be desired in spaces where it can actually be fulfilled.

Months after my first party experience, I had just woken up from a blissful afternoon nap when my phone buzzed with a text from a friend containing a digital quarter card. I was invited to his fraternity’s annual Valentine’s Day party. “Find love at [some jumbling of Greek letters],” the invitation read. I was tired and didn’t particularly want to go, but I knew I would be bummed if I missed out on a fun time, so I put on my coolest baseball cap—backward—and showed up at the fraternity annex.

The house was packed wall to wall with people. Partygoers who were in relationships were given white wristbands, and people looking to hook up wore red wristbands. An impressively large amount of beer cans were arranged in a heart shape in the kitchen. As I made my way around the party and tried to make conversation over speakers blaring Taylor Swift’s “Love Story,” it occurred to me that even though it was no longer Halloween, everyone at the party was still in costume. Guys wore basketball jerseys and flannel shirts; women wore tight clothing and makeup. As the partiers slowly consumed the beer heart, they became more comfortable in their costumes as attractive and sexually desirable Ivy Leaguers. 

Looks are a central—and troubling—tenet of party culture, and the burden of looking attractive at parties falls disproportionately on women. I sipped my Temple of Zeus coffee as Sam*, a Cornell junior and fellow Temple of Zeus regular, described her experience with the gender dynamics at Cornell fraternity parties. She explained that only fraternities host parties at Cornell, meaning that the conditions for attending parties are set by men. 

“The men have to let you in,” she told me. “Your group of girls walks in and they're like, pull your shirt down. Take off your jacket. You want to look cute so you pass the door.” And to even get as far as the door, a group’s ratio of men to women must be one-to-one or female-dominant. At a university that publicly espouses egalitarian gender ideals, [1] women are commodified and traded like currency on Friday and Saturday nights. 

Once inside the party, women still participate in the party’s emphasis on looks, though in a different way. In a segment for NPR on hookup culture, the sociologist Lisa Wade describes a part of the hookup ritual where mid-dance with a potential hookup partner, a woman will “look across the circle to one of her girlfriends and try to get some indication as to whether or not she should continue.” [2] The way a male partier looks matters, partially for potential hookup partners but especially for the opinions of those watching the hookup go down. 

Sam described this process to me in even plainer terms. “In certain forms of friendships, the person who has had the most recent or the wildest sexual encounter gets the most airtime during conversations” after the party. The often-animated Sam slowed down at this point in the interview, choosing her words carefully and speaking in a more somber tone than usual. Since the men in the fraternity control the invite list, sleeping with a brother also means “you might get invited back” to another party. Early on in her time at Cornell, Sam thought that one of her casual hookups might “turn into something emotional.” So far, none of them have.

It might seem like I’m attacking party culture because I’ve predetermined that it’s wrong, but that isn’t my goal. Partying is a very Christian concept. Scripture is littered with stories of banquets and parties—most containing alcohol. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a wedding feast (22:2). My real interest is in examining the significance of the rituals attached to parties at Cornell and what they say about us as a community. 

Religious rituals create a helpful anchor for analyzing party rituals. Rituals center around images and ideals with the hope of causing participants to become more like them. In the Christian tradition, that means placing the death and resurrection of Jesus at the center of our services. James K.A. Smith writes that Christian liturgy, or worship, tells a “Story about who we are and what we’re for.” [3] I see this story clearly in the Anglican services I attend on Sundays.

Over the course of an hour, the congregation at my church speaks in unison to acknowledge its wrongdoings, turn to God for forgiveness, give thanks to God, and ask God for mercy while facing a small purple cloth on a table at the front of the room. Under the cloth is bread and wine, the two elements of the Christian sacrament of communion that is meant to remind Christians of the broken body and spilled blood of Jesus. 

This ritual never changes; Anglican services are essentially the same every week. It might seem monotonous, but Smith argues that the repetition is the point: the goal of the service is to “bend the needle of our hearts.” By placing the ultimate Christian image and ideal at the center of the Sunday ritual—the innocent Jesus sacrificing his own life to bring life to all people—Christians hope to act a little more like Jesus, bit by bit, week by week. 

So, what is the image and ideal at the center of Cornell parties? In doing research for this article, the answer that came up repeatedly was the feeling of being wanted or desired. At parties, we place not God but ourselves at the center of our rituals—a disinhibited, attractive, desirable, Project X version of ourselves. We hope that other people will see this idealized version of us and will show that they want us—maybe by inviting us to hook up or maybe by inviting us back to next weekend’s party. But there is no end to this pursuit of feeling wanted, and many Cornellians are left running on hamster wheels, repeating the same motions weekend after weekend to keep making sure that their friends still want them around.

Brady* was hoping to be desired when he showed up in front of a fraternity annex on his first night of orientation week in the fall of 2019. Brady had partied in high school and was looking forward to the even-more-fun college party scene. He is good-looking and possesses a confidence and charisma that makes him the kind of guy people liked having around at parties—or at least they did in high school. On this first night of college, a group of fraternity brothers stood in front of the house, making it clear that Brady—being male, and worse, a freshman—was not wanted at the party. When Brady finally made it into a party, he describes walking around feeling let down. No one knew him, and no one wanted him at that particular party. He was just taking up space.

But still, Brady partied. What else could he do? His friends were all friends he had made specifically to party with. They would wake up and cure their hangovers with RPCC brunch while swapping stories from the previous night’s party. Brady found the whole ritual to be rather dull. “I just felt tired of it, and I felt like there’s gotta be more to life,” Brady told me. Still, he hoped to find the same validation that he found at high school parties in college.

As the semester got underway, Brady began attending Cru, a Christian ministry at Cornell. It was during a sermon about Jesus’ death and resurrection that Brady suddenly felt the feeling of being desired he had seen bits and pieces of at parties, only this time it was at a “scale that I didn't really quite know that a human being was capable of feeling.” Brady wept, realizing he had finally found what he was searching for, and he quit partying cold turkey for the rest of freshman year. 

Brady finally felt like he was worth something—not because he’d boosted his self-image, but because of how God feels about him. We’ll never be as fun or attractive or as charismatic as we’ll want to be; trying to be convinced of our worth at parties will endlessly frustrate us. But God sees us at our worst and still wants us to know him personally. After meeting God, Brady told me, “I didn't have any desire to chase any other feeling, because I really was finding that feeling in full.” 

This is not to say that finding ultimate belonging and going to parties are a zero-sum game. Brady has since resumed partying with his friends, albeit without drinking, and he has started to genuinely enjoy partying for the sake of making connections with other people. Sam, too, has found her own party scene, one that she finds less captive to whiteness and the sexual desires of men. The party scene allows Cornellians to find community and provides a needed outlet for stress relief—and a campus with a party scene is certainly better than one where students do homework on Friday nights. The question becomes what that party scene should look like.

Cornellians should make their parties reflect the ideals they profess. If we truly care about equality for women, then it is time to stop basing entrance into parties solely on men’s chances of scoring a hook-up. If we want to take seriously the well-being of our peers, then the tragic death of Antonio Tsialas should remind us that for teenagers to binge drink in a strange place is always dangerous. 

Ultimately, Cornell partiers aren’t happy with the status quo. “[The problems with Cornell parties] are not new problems,” Sam told me. “They're not a secret either. And yet, we keep revisiting these scenes. And I do wonder why.” There is something profoundly sad about this thought, but there is a hope that still lingers underneath, because parties are not the whole story. 

The thing we search for in fraternity basements does exist. There is a God who sees the real us—the version we don’t let show at parties—and wants to trade his righteousness for our sin for all of eternity. And when we accept God’s invitation, the angels in heaven cry out in joy when they learn that we will be with them (Luke 15:10). There aren’t any sophomores guarding the doors of houses in heaven.

This article appeared in Claritas’ Spring 2022 Flourishing Issue.

*Sam asked for her name to be kept confidential.

**Brady asked for his name to be kept confidential.

SOURCES

[1] “Our Commitments,” Cornell University, accessed April 30, 2022, https://diversity.cornell.edu/our-commitments

[2] Shankar Vedantam, “Hookup Culture: The Unspoken Rules Of Sex On College Campuses,” September 25, 2017, in Hidden Brain, podcast, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/552582404

[3] James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Ada, MI: Brazos Press, 2016).