Undercover with Weird Campus Women
The Sunday Times, UK
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-525-1069690,00.html
April 11, 2004
Sarah Baxter: Undercover with those weird campus women
Alexandra Robbins had all the right qualities: her hair is long and
blonde, her tops are suitably tight-fitting and her heels are high and
spiked. Just what was needed for a piece of undercover work that has
shone a flashlight onto a private and exclusive world that has been
home to "punishment beatings", outrageous *** acts and has, on
occasion, even led to death.
Robbins is a 27-year-old American author. But for a year she managed
to pass herself off as a 19-year-old university student and inveigled
her way into a leading sorority — one of the female secret societies
that thrive in American colleges.
With no equivalent in Britain, it can be difficult to grasp the
central role that sororities — and their better-known male
equivalents, the fraternities — play in American society. They take
their improbably weird names from the Greek alphabet — Kappa Kappa
Gamma, Chi Omega, Theta, Alpha Rho, Pi Beta Phi — and can be found on
every campus. There is fierce competition to join. In reward, you get
to live in a "house" with like-minded sisters.
Once you leave university, member****p can make your career. Sororities
combine the secret fellow****p of the Freemasons with the
ladder-climbing advantages of the old school tie. You may recall the
movie Legally Blonde 2, in which Reese Witherspoon plays a ditsy
animal rights campaigner whose success turns on the fact that she
finds herself sitting next to a member of her old sorority at the
hairdresser.
"When was the last time you wore the yellow tea roses?" she asks her
in code. In delighted recognition, the two women ceremonially clap
hands and grind bottoms.
The indomitable sorority sister turns out to be a congresswoman who is
only too pleased to sponsor her giddy new friend's bill. The plot is
meant to be ridiculous but with an increasing number of career women
in positions of influence, an old girls' network is beginning to take
off in real life.
However, there is an added, unsavoury aspect of the sorority that says
more about you than any ceremonial apron or subscription to the Old
Roedeanian magazine will ever do. If you gained member****p, it means
you managed to survive the initiation ceremony.
It is those ceremonies — known as "hazing" — that Robbins sought to
expose. Women are recruited during a "rush" period on arrival at
university. "Bids" are made for potential members, who then "pledge"
to join and take part in an initiation ceremony.
These can be brutal: women have been killed. Eighteen months ago two
students at the California State University at Los Angeles drowned
while performing a pledging ritual for the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
They had been taken to the beach, blindfolded and forced to run into a
violent sea. At the "gentler" end of things, hazing can involve being
beaten with a wooden paddle or being forced to drink urine.
Robbins found that some women had to watch **** movies as a condition
of joining, or simulate oral *** with a banana. Others were told to
engage in boob-ranking, where they would be given five minutes to rank
their breasts and those of other would-be sisters by size. The
initiate is given a name, such as "Mirth", and might be judged the
girl "most likely to have a ***ual position named after her".
Once in, there are ****d parties in which girls get drunk, run around
without clothes and sometimes "hook up with each other", says Robbins,
although the sororities are ostensibly proudly hetero***ual and attach
great im****tance to attracting the right fraternity boys to their
parties and "slave auctions", where girls are paired off — not
necessarily with the chap they want.
"Sororities are single *** groups, but almost everything they do
revolves around men," Robbins says. The rule regarding Sapphism is
"Don't ask, don't tell".
Robbins also found that one sorority house had to call in a plumber
once a month to unblock the toilets, such was the girls' addiction to
vomiting and bulimia. There would be puking contests after dinner and
special marathon weekend eating binges which would end the same way.
Robbins believes that some initiation rites are absurdly dangerous.
"Why," she asks, "would sorority member****p still mean so much that
girls throw themselves fully clothed and blindfolded into fatally
dangerous riptides merely for the privilege?" Perhaps the tide is
turning. There is a growing movement to clamp down on hazing, defined
as "any activity expected of joining a group that humiliates, degrades
or risks emotional and/or physical harm, regardless of the person's
willingness to participate".
However, it does not appear that the sororities are keen to clean up
their acts. Still undercover, Robbins went to a conference run by a
national sorority organisation on how to handle the media. She was
shocked to hear one lecturer advise: "One death takes 10,000 hours of
community service to make up for the public relations disaster."
|
