This is Part I of our series "The Price of Sex at USC."
At the University of Southern California, sex has a price. In economic terms, it is much too low. In consequential terms, it can be much too high.
Just north of campus is 28th Street, home to most of USC's Greek System. It contains 4,611 individuals, organized into 21 fraternities and 12 sororities. The Greek system offers many benefits: lifelong friendships, a vast network of future professionals and millions of dollars raised each year for charities like St. Jude and the Red Cross. But, like most organizations, it is not without problems. In recent years, the sororities and fraternities who call the Row home have attracted controversy for alarmingly high rates of alcohol poisoning and sexual assault. In just under three years, the university administration or national chapters have removed three fraternities from USC, and sanctioned many more for various infractions.
It is a serious mistake to think that a Greek system on any campus is the only place where students drink too much or are sexually assaulted, but three things make the Greek system, particularly at USC, a fitting case for examining problems and solutions to sexual assault. First, it is a well-defined and contained microcosm of broader social life (nearly one in four undergraduates at USC are Greek). Second, it organizes social events that are, at least partially, open to hundreds of non-Greek students to attend. Third, intoxication and sex are likely outcomes of those events.
For a soon-to-be economist, the questions and answers began late one Friday night on the balcony of a frat house as he watched students stumble drunkenly home down 28th Street's cracked sidewalks.
His name is Sean Hernandez, and he is a former frat boy who graduated from USC in May with bachelor's and master's degrees in economics through the Progressive Degree Program. He is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
"There is a particular moment when I remember the idea went from zero to something," Sean told me. "I was sitting on my balcony, and I took a moment to stand up and noticed the individuals walking on the sidewalks were all women."
He wondered why the genders were not equally distributed, and whether it was significant for understanding sexual interaction in the Greek system.
"It gives an experimental window into the idea that women are the resource of the sexual economy," he said.
A year after his own late-night observation, Sean started brainstorming ideas for his master's thesis. He decided to answer the balcony question.
Over 800 campuses across America host Greek letter organizations. Hernandez hypothesized their institutional status and funding from national organizations create sexual economies with a lower price of sex than at other social scenes or campuses without a Greek system. In other words, it is easier to have sex if you are in a system where fraternities pay for parties and where sex is expected. The price of sex includes the cost of booze, DJs and security; the women who come to fraternity parties are expected to return on the investment. Hernandez's study suggests several insidious consequences of this system that, if unaddressed, can cause the entire structure to come crashing down.
Hernandez surveyed 477 members of USC's Greek System about house rank and sexual habits, plugged their responses into an econometric model and produced a first-of-its-kind insight into the workings of the Greek system's sexual economy. Though the field of sexual economics is not new, Hernandez's 90-page thesis is the first comprehensive investigation of a University Greek system from the perspective of the price of sex.
While Hernandez did not examine sexual assault specifically, he did examine the institutions that make consensual sex more likely to occur, and noted that those institutions also reduce the effectiveness of measures taken to prevent nonconsensual sex (rape).
"It seems like those low sex price norms or those institutions are associated with relatively high probabilities of assaults," he said.
Two assumptions in Hernandez's study explain the dangerous potential of consensual hookups at Greek system parties to give way to an increased risk of sexual assault.
First, the absence of "sorority-operated gatherings" (except for a small amount of sorority invites at off-campus locations, that usually end up returning to fraternities anyway) makes fraternities the sole source of social events. This results in what Hernandez calls an "oligopolistic model of sexual competition," and creates a "home turf advantage where men compete all the more vigorously to have sex with women in their fraternity houses."
Kelly was the president of a sorority at USC from 2013–14, who requested that her name be changed because of her leadership position and the sensitivity of the issue. Over coffee, she tells me she is not surprised by Hernandez's conclusion that the Greek system works to funnel women into fraternity houses and create a home turf advantage.
"We're not allowed to have alcohol on our property and we're not allowed to have boys upstairs in our rooms. So the only place that you can go drink if you live in a sorority house is outside of your house," Kelly explains. "So where do you go? You go to a fraternity. If you can't sleep with a boy in your own house, that makes you seek that out somewhere else."
Sociological research corroborates the connection between male-dominated spaces and sexual assault, including an investigation published by The Harvard Crimson, discussing sexual assault within the infamous Harvard final clubs.
"This environment, in which men undoubtedly control social space, causes a power discrepancy that often plays out in sexual encounters," wrote Kathleen Goodwin, a Harvard alum who now works as a global financial analyst. "Women, particularly lowerclassmen, recognize that being able to attend these parties and to access alcohol once within them is dependent on the favor of male members."
Kelly said the same pressure exists at fraternity parties, where admission is controlled to allow more females to enter the party than males.
"When you know there is less guys than there are girls, you feel more like a target because the supply is being controlled," she said. "You know that they are trying to get as many girls there as possible so they have the choice over who they can get, and not so you get the choice of who you want."
Hernandez's study suggests what other research reveals: that when compared to the non-Greek population, women in sororities are more likely to be sexually assaulted, and fraternity members are more likely to commit assault. In fact, a 2008 study of USC students found that a higher percentage of Greek students experienced sexual touching, attempted penetration and penetration against their will in greater percentages than non-Greek students who lived in University Housing.
These findings were corroborated by a more comprehensive study at the University of Oregon in September 2014, which found that 48.1 percent of Greek females experienced nonconsensual sexual contact, compared to 33.1 percent of non-Greek females. Even more shocking was the study's finding that Greek females (38 percent) were two times more likely than non-Greek females (15.3 percent) to experience rape or attempted rape.
Lauren is another former USC sorority president, also from 2013–14, who requested anonymity for the same reason as Kelly, and whose name has been changed as a result. As we talked outside her sorority, she told me that behind closed doors, some University officials view the Greek system as a small part of the problem.
"From speaking with administration officials, the Greek system in general is a small minority of the problem of sexual assaults that happen on campus," she said. "They're just more publicized because the Row is one big rumor mill."
When I asked her to elaborate on where she or the administration officials she mentioned perceived the majority of non-row sexual assaults to occur, Lauren demurred.
"The administration didn't specify where, and I definitely don't want to speculate what communities it is more prevalent in," she said.
When it comes to Row policies, Lauren also said the power of fraternities to control how many men enter their parties is so ingrained in Greek culture that some, like her, aren't bothered by it.
"It's just really part of it. I've never felt uncomfortable because of that reason," she said.
But the sexual culture of fraternity parties goes beyond the number of men and women who walk through the doors each night. Hernandez's second assumption in the study is that men want sex more than women, a theory backed up by a wealth of research on "social exchange theory," the science of examining expectations in human relationships.
In the sexual economy, Hernandez postulated, men demand sex, and females supply it (called "female resource theory"). In other words, because women expect a man to provide something besides just sex (like companionship, or some other desirable trait), and men often don't, men are more likely to want to get laid. This isn't necessarily institutional — but speaks to a host of economic, sociological and biological reasons. For example, women are more likely to bear the costs of unplanned pregnancy, increasing the risk of sex and decreasing its appeal. A significant indicator of female resource theory, according to Hernandez, is the Greek system, where fraternities bear most of the cost of social events, which are non-sexual benefits that they expect women to accept in exchange for sex.
Lauren suggested that this conclusion is overly male-centric, and floated the idea that females may be more to blame for the hook-up culture than males.
"If a girl wants to shack than a girl wants to shack, and that is completely her decision and doesn't have to do with the ratio," she said. "I really think that it's definitely taking a male-centric focus, and leaving out the fact that maybe there's a strong hookup culture because the girls want to hook up a lot."
But in a male-centric Greek culture, a male-centric focus is warranted. When Hernandez's study answered the balcony question — why is everyone walking home female? — that is exactly what he found.
According to the study, certain unintentionally created male structures allow sexual assault to happen, not because all members of the structure commit sexual assault, but because the structure makes it comparatively easier for a small number of bad people to succeed in doing bad things. Research suggests that 9 in 10 college rapists are serial in nature, and each offender in college commits six rapes on average. To be clear, these people don't exist only in the Greek system — and they are certainly a small minority of fraternity populations, but the Greek system in its present state allows them an especially predatory environment to victimize fellow students.
To understand why, consider the three conclusions of Hernandez's study:
1. The sexual economy is "aristocratic."
In other words, Hernandez expected higher ranked fraternities to have more frequent sexual interactions with higher ranked sororities. He was right.
2. Fraternities, as leading demanders of sex, maximize sex and minimize expenditure.
This included purchasing parties and avoiding relationship commitments, which fraternities perceive to be negative. By contrast, sororities, as the sole suppliers of sex, seek to minimize sex and maximize fraternity expenditure on gifts, parties and relationships, which they perceive to be positive.
3. The sexual economy is unlike any other economy we are used to.
Hernandez theorized women in top houses should be able to have less sex for a higher price, but he was wrong. The study showed that a sorority's social status is positively correlated with sexual activity: the better a house is peer-rated, the more "hookups" its members experience.
In plainer terms, it nullifies high-status women's advantage. According to economic theory, this shouldn't be the case, but the Greek System even defies conventional wisdom by creating a system of incentives where what should happen does not happen. Think back to the fundamental difference between men (who want sex) and women (who desire resource benefits like relationships).
"If there are many men in queue for a Greek woman's attention, she should select the one with the highest willingness to pay. In equilibrium, this bidder offers resource like affection and commitment, which is exclusive with the hooking up."
Hernandez says this presents an interesting question: given that status does not increase sex prices for women (women in top sororities hook up even more and get the same amount of welfare), why do women tolerate this?
In economic terms, the answer is nefariously simple: the market power of the demanding fraternities outweighs the market power of the supplying sororities. Not only is an economic system where price does not increase with demand a total anomaly, but a social system where men have more power over sexual decisions than women is discriminatory and reprehensible.
Given the current state of affairs, if the Greek system were an economy, it would be a totally warped one, a problem for several reasons. First, the supplier (a woman) and the good supplied (a woman's body) are one and the same. The Greek system then becomes an issue more fundamental to sexual violence and women's autonomy over their bodies than anyone understands. Two, the supply doesn't "run out." In the sexual economy, some men use sexual violence to obtain the product by force, a practice that has historically been condoned by society and continues to be condoned tacitly by our institutional failure to address the issue.
In essence, it is a problem we can't afford to leave unsolved.
Nathaniel Haas is a law student at the USC Gould School of Law, and received his undergraduate degree from USC in 2015 with a double major in political science and economics. His work as a journalist covering sexual assault and national politics has been featured in POLITICO and The Huffington Post. Follow him on Twitter here, and send him an e-mail here.
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