As the idealism of the earliest frats was subsumed, in the twentieth century, by a changing idea of masculinity that increasingly allowed high-class status and low-class behavior to coexist in a single individual, fraternity members “used their status as self-proclaimed gentlemen to justify their less-savory antics….In performing gentlemanliness in public, they justified their existence. What they did behind closed doors was then supposed to be their business alone.”
