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Nicholas L. Syrett. The Company He Keeps. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 432 pp. Cloth: $30.00. ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-3253-0.
In The Company He Keeps, Nicholas Syrett focused on fraternity men and their role on American college campuses since the first social fraternity was founded almost 200 years ago. More specifically, this book is about the history of gender and about how men in fraternities promote their masculinity and behave accordingly. It is also a book about power and prestige where fraternity men must rely upon their Whiteness, socio-economic status, masculinity, and heterosexuality to prove themselves to one another and to women.
Syrett's research information came from archival analyses conducted at 12 different colleges and universities across the United States and from more than 20 national fraternities. He chose to focus on fraternity men in this study of gender because of their significance in higher education and society.
Syrett wrote that men who join fraternities have been a force over the years primarily due to their views on masculinity. He traced the archetypes of masculinity throughout the history of the college fraternity and advanced three opinions. First, Syrett argued that fraternity men gain prestige and respect from other men by displaying excessive traits and behaviors portraying their masculinity. Second, he determined that American higher education culture promulgates a culture in which men who get the most respect on campuses are those perceived as the most masculine by their referent peer groups. And third, Syrett wrote that some men have struggled with understanding or accepting the standards which were determined to define a masculine man on college campuses.
In addition, this book is about how fraternity men influence other men, how these men behave on a daily basis, and how fraternities structure men's college lives. Syrett asserts a connection between fraternity members' current flagrant misbehaviors and the exclusive, secretive,...