While in the mall this past weekend (not Black Friday, but Gray Saturday) I detoured into Abercrombie & Fitch to ask a salesgirl whether she could confirm my intuition that the shade du jour in frat boy jeans was light blue.
"I don’t know," she said, once again puncturing my fantasy that our nation’s retail stores are staffed by perceptive observers of the eddies and swirls of American material culture.
On the general question of the significance of frat boys in American culture, it’s interesting how much hostility there is, for instance, in the Urban Dictionary definitions of "frat boy," and also how well-understood is the profound homoerotic texture to frat boy culture.
Definition 1, for instance, explains that "Fratboys can be identified by their steroid-induced bulk, backwards preworn hats with their Fraternity designations on them, and wardrobe exclusively bought from either Structure, American Eagle, or Abercrombie and Fitch. Fratboys and those women who associate with them should be gassed."
Definition 2 combines a rather appealing tone of anti-misogyny with a not-so-appealing dollop of homophobia:
2. fratboy
1. A synonym for "rapist"
2. A closet homosexual who feels the need to impress other closet homosexuals by being a faggot and raping drunk girls
3. One who lacks the ability to think and/or act without following a crowd.Hey, don’t be a fratboy, stop raping my sister.
Hey is that an Abercrombie shirt? And hair gel? What are you, a fratboy?
Hey let’s go be fratboys and sodomize each other
My favorite, though, has to be def. 3, with its novel verb-i-fying of the phrase :
3. fratboy
n. one who participates in a circle jerk with his frat brothers.
v. to take a drunk lady by force
Help! Someone call the cops, Biff* is trying to fratboy me!!
*I also like that the author of def. 3 used the name "Biff," which hasn’t really been in style, I’m pretty sure, since The Hardy Boys was an accurate portrayal of youth culture in America.
