96: XX/XY

ME: Welcome to the premiere of XX/XY: Woman/Man. I'm Brian Frost and in my audience tonight are the lovely ladies from Gamma House at Indiana University. Thank you for inviting this guy into your beautiful sorority house tonight, ladies.

I was talking to some of you before the show. Let me tell you, it is a real charge for a guy to hang out all day in a sorority. The question I asked as we sat around was 'What do you want to know?' I think Lynn summed it up best she when tapped my forehead and said, 'We want to know what goes on in a boy's tiny little brain.' Lynn, honey, you were tapping two and a half feet too far north.

So, do you really want to know? You really want to know the dirty little secret inside a boy's head. Or a man's head? Big or little? [Cheers. Yes.] Okay. Don't blame me. You asked for it. Lynn, you struck me as a woman with a sense of humor, so I asked if you'd help out with this little sketch. Please come join me. Ladies, welcome your sorority sister, Lynn. [Cheers as Lynn comes to the stage. We shake hands.]

Hello, Lynn.

LYNN: Hello, Brian.

ME: [Aside.] I wonder if she'll sleep with me. [To Lynn.] I really appreciate you helping out.

LYNN: You're welcome, I think.

ME: [Aside.] She'd look great naked. [To Lynn.] This is really just going to be a normal conversation between two people who have just met. [Aside.] And want to get out of here so they can screw.

LYNN: Is that really going on in your head?!

ME: [Aside.] Are her nipples getting hard? [To Lynn, ignoring her question.] What's your major, Lynn?

LYNN: History and Economics.

ME: [Aside] With a minor in blowjobs. Oh please! [To Lynn.] I was told once that history majors mostly taught high school history so they could coach football. Are you into sports?

LYNN: Not really. I plan to go into politics after I go to law school.

ME: [Aside.] Oh shit! She's going to sue me. I'm really going to get screwed. I hope. [To Lynn.] A friend of mine once interviewed a future President of the United States. I hope I'll be able to say the same.

LYNN: I hope so too.

ME: [Aside.] She is so far out of my league. There's no chance here. I need to sound intelligent. [To Lynn.] What do you actually think of the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Are we supposed to be the policemen of the world? I'm really interested in what you have to say about that.

LYNN: Really? I think we'll send in troops. Or maybe just bomb them. Clinton is facing a huge amount of heat over his inaction in Rwanda and doesn't dare let another genocidal war go unanswered. And besides, at least this time, we'll be defending white people. That makes an intervention hugely easier to sell to the voters.

ME: Thank you, Lynn. Both for your good humor in the sketch and for your genuine insights into the international scene. [She returns to seat amidst applause and several women leaning over to whisper to her.]

Ugly wasn't it? But I've got to tell you, every man you meet from puberty up has this dialog running in his mind constantly. The very first thing he thinks when he meets a woman is whether she is a potential sex partner. It makes no difference if she is young or old, rich or poor, ugly or pretty, thin or fat, stacked or flat. She may have blonde hair, black hair, brown hair, red hair, or purple hair. She could have pimples and crooked teeth or sparkle like an angel. His first thought will be sex.

He might get past that in a blink of an eye. His automated response to a woman might be 'Not in a million years.' Or it could be, 'She's so far out of my league. Give it up.' Or he might carry his fantasy for days or even years. 'There was this one girl in junior high. Wow! My first crush. Every time I saw her I had to hide my erection. I still think about her. If I'd been a little more mature we might have started dating and kissing and having ... Shit! I came in my pants.' [Laughter.] And that's from an eighty-year-old guy who hasn't had an unassisted erection in ten years.

All men are pigs.

Except they aren't. The pigs are those whose first thought is their only thought. That's what it means to be a rational human being. You can't help the little voice in your head. 'What little voice?' you ask yourself. That's the one. But while that little voice might argue with your decisions, good or bad, it isn't what controls you and makes you human.

You are.

My guests today are Doctors Ruth and Ben McCall who are going to dissect me for this opening sketch and discuss with me the bi-cameral mind. We're going to have some fun!

There was some applause and April made a couple announcements to the room about what was happening next. The cameras were running all the time, but the tape was running back at the ranch where Joyce and her assistant were monitoring it, selecting camera angles, and cutting it together. It was unbelievable. I went out into the room and thanked Lynn again for helping me with the sketch. I sat on Amber's lap for a few minutes while I talked to the women about how nervous I was being in a room with so many beautiful women. Then I told them we'd be moving on with the show and asked them to give a big round of applause to Doctors Ruth and Ben McCall.

RUTH: So Brian. Your first thought on meeting me was whether I'd be a good sex partner.

ME: Um ... Yeah?

RUTH: And?

ME: Well, that was seven years ago and I was a high school junior. And let's face it, you were ... are hot. But, it only took a few minutes before I refined my thoughts and you became my good friend George's mother. End of sexual discussion.

RUTH: Well, what you've described is pretty typical of pubescent boys. I just don't think that men hold that as they mature.

ME: Ben, did you think of the young women in this room sexually this evening?

BEN: Boy, you put a guy right on the spot, don't you, Brian? You do realize that's my wife sitting beside you, right?

ME: Yes, but we promised to be honest with each other tonight.

BEN: Honestly? Yes. [Little gasp.] But. It wasn't when I walked on set or even when I was watching your little sketch. I thought it a couple hours ago. Something along the lines of 'if I was thirty years younger... ' Then I put it out of my mind. I'm not thirty years younger. I have a wife I adore. While the notion of an admittedly hot young sorority woman gives a guy my age a quick jolt, I have made my choice and I know where my happiness lies. It's not out there. It's right here.

ME: I think that's exactly what I was trying to get across, but you've made the point more explicitly. The truly human man doesn't let his first thought be his only thought.

RUTH: That I can actually get behind. One of the signs of rationality is the ability to let go of one thought and adjust to a new reality.

I breathed a sigh of relief. I was glad that my friends were my first live broadcast guests. I wasn't going to get chewed up and spit out tonight. And we were going to have a really good discussion. We chatted for quite a while and I opened the floor to questions from the audience. We had a few good ones and a couple I was sure would be cut from the feed before it went live. I had to trust my director and my editors. When it came time to wrap things up, I stood and faced the ladies again.

ME: I want to warn you all that if you ask your boyfriend or any other male you know if his first thought about you was sex, he will deny it. 'No, honey. My first thought was what a smart woman you are. I thought, she sure can carry on a conversation.' Test me. Ask him.

Guys in general don't know how to respond with complete honesty because we've built a system that prevents it. 'If I'm honest, she'll hate me.' And let me tell you, ladies, if you convince him that you are trustworthy, and really want to know what he thought, and that you won't be judgmental, you'd damned well better mean it. If you spring a trap, you will never, ever be forgiven. If you survive the encounter, you will never again be able to know that what he says is the truth. Guys avoid humiliation like the plague. Not only will you ruin your own relationship, you will make it even more difficult for the next woman who attempts a relationship with him.

This is hard truth. You cannot expect honesty unless you are honest.

Tomorrow night, I'm going to be right next door on the Indiana University Campus at Theta House. I'll have comedians Dan Colson and Marta Hamlin with me and we'll be looking at the funny side of relationships. I hope you'll all join us then!

I was done. It was nearly nine-thirty. The live feed had started half an hour ago. I think everyone in the room was exhausted. The ladies had a lovely dessert buffet set out and I was pleased to see some of the lively discussions that were going on. April, Samantha and their crew had to stick around while all the equipment was packed up. Dani and I slipped out with the McCalls.

"We need more variety in each show," Frankie said. "Three people talking for an hour isn't cutting it among our demographic."

"I agree," Donna said. "Post show surveys indicate the audience got tired by the end. They love your opening monologues, and really like the audience interaction. But cerebral discussions were not what we promised them. They liked the comedians. And the musicians. They even liked the author and psychologists, but they went on too long."

"Even Elaine has four segments in her show. She has two separate interviews with a little discussion between the two guests, then a break for Young Cooking with another guest, and finally a last guest that is often the heart-tug," Chuck said. "We don't need to turn XX/XY into a variety show, but it needs more variety."

Each afternoon, Donna ran focus groups showing the previous night's performance. These were followed by a survey and discussion. We were getting good info.

"Well, I'd like to last more than one week," I laughed. "Even Chevy Chase went two. What can we do to improve next week?"

"Samantha has been on the phone non-stop since the first night. She identified the problem from being in the audience at Gamma House. She has more guests for you next week at Champaign/Urbana. The problem is that our first run at getting guests was for people compatible with your overall theme and message. Some of the new guests she has lined up won't be in line with our philosophy nor will they be reserved in their nature. They live to be on camera. They will make the show about them," Donna said.

"We've always known that a show about the agreement wasn't going to be enough. I'd like to encapsulate the parts where that is the focus rather than trying to spread it throughout the hour," Chuck said.

I agreed and then had to get ready for the last show of the week at Delta House.

ME: Tonight as my guests, I have Libby Fallon, author of the new memoir Good Girls Do. We went to great lengths to track down Eric Holmes, the only brother who was willing to talk to us from Alpha Delta at Dartmouth College. Alpha Delta was the fraternity that inspired National Lampoon's Animal House. We will have a panel of members from the Panhellenic Society to talk about the reputation of Greek organizations on campus. And finally, we have former IU basketball star Lamar Trane, now a practicing attorney, to give a counterpoint to Eric's tales from the perspective of Lambda House. We're going to have a good time tonight.

Did we have a good time? Not really! It turned out there was no counterpoint to the position of Alpha Delta. Eric presented the fraternity as a group that had risen above its reputation of the '60s and was a model organization in the Greek Society. The Panhellenic group basically read their position statement and dared anyone to cast sororities in any light other than as pure, charitable, organizations devoted to the growth of their members. It was Libby, a former Delta herself, who slung the mud at the sororities with stories of drunken parties and serving as a fraternity's free mount at parties. The ladies in the audience were getting pretty riled at the way Libby painted their sorority and it took Lamar to actually settle things down.

LAMAR: Brian, Eric has presented a pretty straightforward picture of how Alpha Delta has changed over the years. He didn't deny that the kind of things Chris Miller wrote about in National Lampoon might have happened. Just that it doesn't now. Libby has written about her experiences just fifteen years ago, right here on campus. We have to assume that what she's said is at least as factual as what Miller wrote about. Our Panhellenic panel has painted a rosy picture that denies that anything less than noble has ever happened in a sorority. We know what the official posture of the university, the law, and the Panhellenic League is. Hazing is forbidden.

Yet last year, two freshmen fraternity pledges at a major university died of alcohol poisoning during their initiation. You might think Animal House when you consider that, but statistics show that hazing rituals are performed 64% more in sororities than in fraternities. Based on charges that were brought against members of sororities over the past five years, it is not unlikely that there are pledges on this campus now who have been stripped to have their boobs ranked, have been paddled until they needed medical attention, or have been given a choice between taking an illegal and dangerous drug or performing a public sex act. Last year in the United States, three fraternities and two sororities were put on probation by both their schools and their national organizations for hazing violations.

"But we don't do that!" screamed a member of the audience. "How can you accept the reform of Animal House and not think that we've changed from when she was a student?"

That gave me the opportunity I needed and I thanked Lamar for getting me there.

ME: When we set out tonight, we intended to talk about reputation. It was not to be an attack on Greek life, the Panhellenic League, or Delta House. Someone once said, correctly, it is easier to defend your virtue than to rebuild your reputation. I want you to know that my team did our own investigation and Lamar was a part of it. There has not been a hazing complaint against Delta House in seven years. Were there ever? Yes. Are there now? Not unless you just started something.

LIBBY: May I speak to that, Brian? I apologize to my sisters for making it sound like my experience was the norm for girls today. It was my experience in the 70s. But what gets overlooked is that there is a fairly rapid turnover in sororities and fraternities. Young women usually pledge during their freshman or sophomore years. Most are full members for only three years. Then they are gone. The entire population of the sorority changes every three to four years. It just isn't the same now.