It’s April. The sun is finally out again, spring semester is soon coming to an end, and the frat formal season is officially here! Girls are booking spray tans, getting their nails done, and ordering dresses for weekends in places like Myrtle Beach, Tennessee, or New Orleans. If you’ve been on TikTok or Greek Row lately, you’ve probably seen girls hard at work on their coolers.
For those unfamiliar, a frat cooler is a decorated cooler that girls make for their formal dates. They are painted and personalized to their date with his hobbies, favorite sports teams and frat letters, which is then filled and brought on the trip. What seems quite simple is actually a huge process: designing, sanding, plastering, priming, tracing, painting, and making an uncountable number of trips to Michaels Craft Store.
On the surface, it seems creative, thoughtful and fun. But this tradition is rooted in something a lot less aesthetic: gender roles.
Being in a sorority, making one before, and overall experiencing this environment is exactly what made me start questioning the dynamics around me. When I was making a cooler last year, I decided to log how long it would take me (see image below).
Yes. 58 hours.
The process is exhausting ,stressful, your body is sore, time consuming (missing events to work on it) and you will be frustrated to the point of tears.
For me, that’s when it started to feel less like something fun and more like something expected of you to “earn” your spot there.
When you step back, it looks pretty familiar. The entire concept of men being providers and women being expected to give time, effort and care directly mimics traditional gender roles.
The worst part is how the coolers are treated, before and after formal.
After hours of work, effort and time on creating something so personalized, the coolers are treated like they are disposable. The men sit on them, dent them, chip them, play games on them. They get used for one weekend (sometimes not at all), and then forgotten. They get left outside, rained on, and thrown away.
It says a lot that the work that is expected of the women is normalized and treated as disposable. It shows that it is not valued in the first place.
I’m not here to say that nobody enjoys making coolers or that every guy destroys them. I’m also not saying that paying for the trip isn’t a generous thing to do.
Something that can be fun can also reflect a bigger pattern.
It shows a system where woman are expected to give more time, energy, and effort because it is part of the “experience.” One that we just accept.