Prove Your Manhood, Lose Your Life
Ariel Chesler was proud of the good works his fraternity did, but he believes any “test of manhood” is a bad one.
I was saddened to learn of the death of Chun Hsien Deng, a 19 year-old student at Baruch college in Manhattan who died because of a fraternity hazing ritual. As reported by the New York Times, Deng and three other pledges of the Pi Delta Psi fraternity stayed in a rental house in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania with a larger group of fraternity members. During a hazing ritual known as the Gauntlet, the pledges were blindfolded, made to wear backpacks weighted down with sand, and were tasked with making their way across a frozen yard while trying to avoid tacklers. Deng lost consciousness after being knocked down into the frozen ground. The fraternity members then waited nearly an hour and a half without calling 911 and before they decided to bring Deng to a hospital. The next morning he was pronounced dead from severe trauma to the head.
This is but the latest example of a hazing ritual gone wrong. But I must ask whether such rituals ever go right? Even when all the participants survive their tests, there will always be more. That is the nature of masculinity, of any social construct.
