Forbes Fires MIT Alumnus for Writing About How Drunk Girls Ruin All the Fun

Drunk females are the "gravest threat to fraternities," Bill Frezza wrote in his Forbes column.

MIT

Photo by Margaret Burdge

It’s probably not a great day to be Bill Frezza.

The writer and the Alumni President of the Chi Phi chapter at MIT published a column at Forbes on Tuesday titled “Drunk Female Guests Are the Gravest Threat to Fraternities.” While Forbes pulled the column off its site, the cached version remained accessible for quite some time. Later, the NY Daily News reported that Frezza was sacked from Forbes.

If the title of the column itself isn’t provocative enough, just see what the column itself entailed. Here are some brief excerpts:

As recriminations against fraternities mount and panicked college administrators search for an easy out, one factor doesn’t seem to be getting sufficient analysis: drunk female guests.

Aside from Frezza’s (former) columnist job, he seemingly spends much of time deeply involved in his frat. So much so that he addresses fraternity matters in a very inclusive way:

Before feminist web vigilantes call for my defenestration, I single out female guests for one simple reason…We have very little control over women who walk in the door carrying enough pre-gaming booze in their bellies to render them unconscious before the night is through.

Here, Frezza says drunk ladies can potentially be the demise of an entire frat:

In our age of sexual equality, why drunk female students are almost never characterized as irresponsible jerks is a question I leave to the feminists. But it is precisely those irresponsible women that the brothers must be trained to identify and protect against, because all it takes is one to bring an entire fraternity system down.

A full version of Frezza’s column can be found at Jezebel, where, unsurprisingly, the site had a field day with the topic as one of the apparent “feminist web vigilantes” Frezza mentions.

The writer is no longer a contributor at Forbes, but he said in an e-mail to the Daily News that he stands by every word he wrote. Frezza says he is glad the piece “kicked off a conversation about the subject.”

He added, “Unless and until we begin holding individuals accountable for their own behavior, and not institutions, my headline says it all.”

So, it’s #noregrets for Bill Frezza, apparently.