In 1975, I pledged the Alpha Rho chapter of Phi Kappa Sigma.  I can still recite the Greek alphabet five times on a match, and having been elected to the exalted position of Delta (bartender), I held the secret recipe of our fraternity beverage, The Blue Meanie.

It’s not that I was big on the whole brotherhood thing, but that I needed a place to live sophomore year and PKS had a pretty nice chapter house, Greentrees.

It is now the home of Pi Kappa Phi, as my fraternity was banned from campus in 1991 following an unfortunate incident.  But when I was there, we had some damn good parties and some great times.  Nobody realized at the time that this was horribly wrong.

With campus sexual assault a major topic of national concern and conversation, universities are experimenting with ways to reduce sexual violence. One popular strategy is to crack down on fraternities.

Fraternities, it’s argued, are the source of terrible campus evil, the mother lode of debauchery, where naïve, unaware women are lured by free drinks and the promise of wholesome fun, only to be plied with grain alcohol and drugs of dubious merit until young men from good families with top grades can violate their purity and innocence.  This, we’re told, is where rape is rampant.

The decision to strike at frats makes sense: They’re hubs for binge drinking and hooking up, sometimes consensual and sometimes not. But instead of only regulating fraternities, administrators might want to consider a more free-market approach to changing the campus party scene. Specifically, they could rattle the virtual monopoly that frats often have on large parties by encouraging other, possibly more responsible groups to throw parties that are less dangerous for women.

The problem is the Panhellenic Council, the sorority governing body, which has long prohibited alcohol from their chapters’ functions.  Sure, sororities are allowed to hold cookie baking parties, and the occasional poetry reading, but they aren’t nearly as well attended as one might suspect.

Like many policies aimed at stamping out bad behavior by banning it, however, the alcohol prohibition doesn’t actually appear to be keeping sorority women safe.

Much to the dismay of weepy prohibitionists, it turns out that sorority women, like most women, like most people, like to have fun.  This makes the weepy prohibitionists very angry. Fun will not be tolerated!  If it’s fun, it’s prohibited, because fun is the devil’s playground.  There will be no fun!

Yet sorority women, who can’t throw a decent party in their own houses, go to fraternity houses because that’s where the parties are.  And some, one or two at least, know in advance that alcohol is going to be served. Yet they go anyway.  How can that be?  Don’t they know what could happen?

The result: The parties only happen in the frat houses, where the men control the substances being served; choose the themes of their parties, which determines what women wear; man the entrances and exits to decide who gets in, who gets out, who gets kicked out, and for what; and lord over parties’ private spaces, like bedrooms and bathrooms. So far, three studies have demonstrated that fraternity members are three times more likely to commit sexual assaults than other guys on campus. “I would definitely feel safer at a sorority party,” one female student at the George Washington University told the Times as she passed a row of frat houses on Saturday night. “It’s the home-court advantage.”

Guess what?  The guys are good with that too.  Parties are expensive to throw, and there are a lot of fraternity guys in college who would be more than happy to pay less in dues and not have to wipe the beer off the floor the next day.  And despite my foggy recollection, I recall that the bedrooms in sororities smelled a whole lot better than the bedrooms in fraternities. I have no idea why.

So now, some young women on campus are fighting for their right to party. It seems obvious that sorority members (and the other women on campus) would be safer in their own homes than at frat parties.

Finally, a fight we can all get behind. You go, girls women.  But there is a reason why things that seem “obvious” to Amanda Hess at Slate XX Factor may elude thinking people everywhere.  Being totally behind gender equality, what may come of this is that college females, like males, want to have a good time. They want to party. They drink, sometimes to excess. And they have sex.

That a sorority can throw out an obnoxious or inappropriate guy is perfectly fine. Toss out anyone you want.  And that a sorority sister can choose to bring a guy upstairs or not, having the “home field advantage,” is similarly perfectly fine.  There is no sound reason why women shouldn’t have as much opportunity to get their sheets dirty as guys.

But the fantasy that women, if only allowed to have alcohol at their knitting bees, will throw chaste and educational affairs may not come to pass as easily as neo-feminists may wish.  If their parties suck, no one will come.  But why would anyone surmise that sorority parties will be any less raucous than their fraternity counterparts?

This is where the dream of women being some different species than men meets bubblewrap, as if caution and sound judgment will somehow infiltrate college students’ minds and they will stop getting drunk, hooking up and behaving like, well, college students.  Contrary to the fantasy, it’s not just the guys who do this. Like guys, girls just want to have fun too.

And as rites of passage go, this is very much a part of the college experience.  Or, there is always the possibility that temperance will prevail, women can don their corsets and chastity belts and be certain that no demon liquor ever touches their lips.  That way, no one would ever have an unpleasant experience and nothing bad could possibly happen. Wouldn’t that really make everyone happy? Oh wait. No, it won’t.