RJ Gross
Professor Zanger
SOCI 113-02
March 2, 2014
Topic 4 Reaction/Response Paper
William J. Chambliss writes about his study of two troubled groups of teenagers in high school known as The Saints and The Roughnecks and how their economic and societal standing affected the groups differently. The results showed that The Saints with middle and upper class standing who were seen as “respectable young boys” received better treatment than The Roughnecks that come from lower-class families and barely passed their classes from their teachers and the local police. This reading immediately reminded me of the movie “The Breakfast Club.” Where the characters of Andrew and Claire were treated with more respect in detention from Principal Richard Vernon than John Bender because Andrew was a star athlete and Claire was extremely rich while Bender was a burn-out and was fairly poor. I can’t relate to either being a Saint or a Roughneck because I never got in trouble in high school, but I would say my graduating class was more Saint than Roughneck. A major reason for that is because I went to a Catholic school so most of the kids who weren’t “well-off” went to public school.
In the reading of “Fraternities and Rape on Campus,” Patricia Yancey Martin and Robert A. Hummer explore the process of joining a fraternity and how the brotherhood can be taken to extremes such as gang rape. Those who survive the process of pledging are influenced by masculinist values that clouds their judgment of acceptable behavior and practices. The “brotherhood” is more or less like a gang where it is expected that everyone is loyal and doesn’t rat out their friends. This leads to problems where a situation such as rape can occur and it is considered to be a fun game to play to show how manly someone is. I personally am against fraternities because of the cruel hazing that most frats put their pledges through, as if surviving acts of embarrassment defines a person to be your “brother” or...