You're An Idiot If You Think There's A Law That Classifies Six Women Living Together As A Brothel

During Storm Chasers we stopped at a fraternity on the Miami (OH) campus to park our van before the basketball game that night. As they gave us the lay of the land, one of the dudes in the frat mentioned that there were no sorority houses on campus because of a local law. The law, he explained, stated that if six or more women lived in a house, it was classified as a brothel and was thus illegal. He proudly told me this was an old law that only pertained to Oxford, Ohio, a funny wrinkle of yore.

I didn’t dunk on that kid right there in front of his frat bros because my least favorite genus of human is the “Well, actually…” guy, but I silently and smugly judged him. Because that is not a law. It has never been a law. Not in Oxford, Ohio, and probably not anywhere this century.

Yet somehow this rumor persists from college town to college town. From Conway, South Carolina to Champaign, Illinois, students believe that there are no sorority houses on campus because of some antiquated law. Some people might even try to “Well, actually…” me right now, saying that this really is a law in their town. But it’s not. And we need to stop believing this idiocy.

Some further proof.

“This mistaken belief has been recorded since the 1960s and is probably a great deal older than that. Its possible origin might lie in a mental confluence of half-remembered tidbits about old time “blue laws“ mixed with a healthy dollop of badly-parsed newer input about zoning laws adopted by various communities in more contemporary times. Short and sweet, if any so-called “brothel laws” anywhere tie a building’s classification as a bordello to the number of occupants, we’ve yet to find documentation that proves this.

Some municipalities do indeed have zoning laws prohibiting more than a specified number of non-family members (male or female) from living together, but not even in those cases would a household in violation of those codes be labeled a brothel. Brothels earn such designations solely on the basis of what goes on in them, not upon how many women inhabit particular buildings.

Even in communities that carry such housing restrictions on their books, sororities and fraternities are exempted from them. The thrust of such laws is to set limits on how many people may reasonably inhabit what were meant to be single-family dwellings, not to enjoin those who are living in more communal settings in buildings meant for such purposes.”

I researched this and researched this and researched this. That means going to the second and even third page of Google searches, clicking on article after article. There was nothing that suggested anything about classifying a group of women as a brothel on college campuses. The closest instance was in North Carolina, a law that prevented four unrelated people from living together for zoning purposes, but nothing about sororities and nothing about brothels.

Read about it for yourself if you don’t believe me.

This is the “me too” era. Do you think that this could stand as a law? Or be acted upon? Imagine a police officer walking into a house full of 6 women doing their homework in pajamas and walking them out on a prostitution charge while a frat party rages on across the street. The public outrage would cause a wormhole in the universe and the world would eat itself.

That is not ever going to happen and we, as a society, need to be better than believing such silly things simply because we are told them. We’re not idiots, but sometimes we need to be reminded so.