There are fraternity houses scattered all over Athens, plunked down on Cloverhurst and Pulaski, looming over Carriage and River Road like rectangular hotels on a Monopoly board, but most are on Milledge—a sidewalk-lined, well-trafficked street less than a mile from the university. Some are grand, white-brick plantation homes with Corinthian columns, wraparound front porches, and rocking chairs. Others are new builds or old Craftsmen repurposed for housing dozens of hotheaded young men with a penchant for drinking, fighting, and sex. And living at the house doesn’t come cheap. If you’re there with a meal plan, you’re looking at an extra five grand a semester—that’s on top of tuition, books, and everything else.

This one’s red brick with Doric columns supporting a triangular roof, like an oversized bank. I recognize it because it’s been in the news twice this year—once in the spring for organizing an Old South parade, in which members traipsed around wearing Confederate uniforms, carrying battle flags, and escorting women in hoop skirts past a historically Black sorority celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, and another two weeks ago for dunking pledges in trash cans full of ice water.

They’re not the only fraternity making headlines, of course. It seems that every day, somewhere in the country, someone falls off a balcony or a sleeping porch at a fraternity party, resulting in everything from sprained ankles to broken pelvises, permanent brain damage, and death. The endless fascination of fraternity boys with shoving things up their asses, from exploding bottle rockets to the near-fatal wine enemas is click-bait fodder—the sheer ridiculousness masking the bigger problem that these young men risk killing themselves for a few laughs. And it’s not just at the big research universities. An Ivy League grad published an article about his experience swimming in fecal matter and semen. There was that charming email guide from a Georgia Tech fraternity called “Luring Your Rapebait.” Cindy saw two Sigma chapter pledges in the ER after they were forced to drink whiskey until they puked into a Little Mermaid kiddie pool. They had bruises everywhere, she told us, on their legs, arms, even buttocks.