Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2004/05/11/sorority_girls_do_not_have_sex.php
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Author Alexandra Robbins, borrowing a few pages from Nancy Drew, recently went undercover as a sorority girl at "State U" (still unidentified) in an attempt to determine whether all those 'stereotypes' are true—topless pillow fights, hazing pledges with sexual perversions, rampant bulimia, and so on. And guys, guess what? They are!
Well, kind of. Only the most credulous reader would take Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities as an accurate portrayal of what the average sorority experience is like. Perhaps in the South, where Greek life has most successfully held its grip on social dominance, Ms. Robbins' indictments of sorority life may ring a bit more true. Or maybe I just don't know the right sorority girls. Suffice to say, Dean of Student Life Marty Redman would derecognize us all if the sort of sordid, salacious stories Ms. Robbins puts forward surfaced at Dartmouth.
The content of Pledged alternates between anecdotes about four anonymous girls whom Ms. Robbins trailed for a year and editorial commentary about the ills of the national sorority system. (Interestingly enough, while here at Dartmouth the fraternities are more frequently set upon by the administration, Ms. Robbins views them as hapless and generally harmless, save for the purported prevalence of sexual assault. It is the sororities, instead, that are the sinister masterminds of the Greek system.)
In a sense it is rather unfortunate that Ms. Robbins possesses a gift for narrative and description; had she not made her subjects' intolerable behavior so immediate and accessible to the reader, the book would be a much smoother read. Instead, I routinely had to put it down and go clear my mind, as if I were excusing myself early from a bad lunch date. Her girls are wretched people. Sabrina (not coincidentally the one who is least enthusiastic about sorority life) is a slightly more reasonable person, but the rest are either victims of crippling psychological disorders—one invites a boy who had previously date-raped her over to her room for sex—or simply altogether vacuous. The reader watches mournfully as older sorority sisters transform Vicki, once a quiet, kind girl, into a self-absorbed socialite who viciously ridicules the new pledges, who only are as awkward as she herself used to be. Besides, most of the girls in the two sororities in question are flamboyantly and obnoxiously rich. A common practice is for girls with expensive cars to park conspicuously in front of their houses—a phenomenon, to be sure, not always uncommon once spring hits Webster Avenue.
When not detailing the excruciating tedium of her subjects' daily tragedies, Ms. Robbins offers wide-ranging criticism of national sororities, covering topics from racism to alcohol abuse to promiscuity to hazing. One of her principal concerns is the ineptitude and dishonesty of the sororities' national governing bodies, which attempt to promote a lily-white image of their organizations while ignoring and even covering-up serious scandals and moral failures. For instance, Ms. Robbins recounts a case in which a girl who was raped was convinced by the national to keep quiet for fear of tarnishing the sorority's reputation. In another part of the book, she lists various rules mandated in a national sorority's moral guidebook, then contrasts them with brief vignettes of impropriety. The directly-quoted decree "Sorority girls do not have sex" headlines an anecdote about a formal at which a third of the girls in attendance disappear to hotel rooms—prohibited by sorority policy—to consume club drugs and sleep with their dates.
Many of Ms. Robbins' criticisms, in fact, mainly concern the restrictions and disadvantages of belonging to a national sorority as opposed to a local chapter. This only hits home for some at Dartmouth, where half of our "historically white" sororities are nationals—Kappa Kappa Gamma, Tri-Delt, and Alpha Xi Delta. The other two nationals, Delta Sigma Theta and Alpha Kappa Alpha, neither of them "historically white" sororities, are the subject of Ms. Robbins' effusive praise along with their other historically-black counterparts for their devotion to public service and loyal sisterhood.
Ms. Robbins devotes a significant portion of the book to a discussion of race relations in the sorority world. Sabrina, one of the only two black girls in her sorority, must deal on a regular basis with her obliviously offensive sisters, one of whom cheerfully describes a black-face performance she and her friends put on during high school ("It was so hilarious!"). In a sobering account of contemporary racism, Ms. Robbins describes the University of Alabama's policy of strict segregation governing its Greek life. When a professor questioned a trustee about the case of an African-American who tried twice (in 2000 and 2001) to rush with Caucasians and was denied a bid each time, he replied, "We're not going to turn our fraternities and sororities into places where just any n——r could get in."
However, in her portrayal of race as a factor in Greek life, Ms. Robbins fails in the same way she does in her treatment of most other topics in the book—she portrays a few individual cases as symptoms of systematic problems. While it is true that self-segregation is a common phenomenon at even the most enlightened campuses, such overt racism as the University of Alabama's is hardly a universal ill, and even the most tacit implication towards that end smacks of sensationalism. It does sell, though.
But of course, even accusations of racism do not sell as well as good old-fashioned sex, and Ms. Robbins is no fool—the cover, which sports a bosom-level photograph of three young women in tight white tank tops, lets the consumer know immediately what the hot topic will be. Vicki carries on various sexual relations at any one time; Amy has a regrettable penchant for one-night stands; Caitlin hopes casual sex will win back her wayward boyfriend's heart; Sabrina has a short-lived but passionate fling with a dreamboat professor. Boys, and boys alone, motivate and occupy the vast majority of a sorority girl's mental and physical activity, according to Ms. Robbins. What a sorority girl eats, how she dresses, how she acts, and what she thinks are all laser-focused towards receiving approval from the most popular fraternity brothers at hand.
There are, of course, those few sororities which tend to go to the extremes, which make for far more entertaining reading. Two sororities in particular at "one large Virginia school" hold annual Naked Parties, where public displays of lesbian activity draw hordes of drooling frat boys. And lest we neglect Spring Break, Ms. Robbins travels to Jamaica to confirm what any male adolescent with cable television already guessed—those blurry regions in the "Girls Gone Wild" commercials belong to your friendly neighborhood sorority girl. Exhibitionism, it seems, is an integral part of being in a sorority.
This frequent nudity, along with the general skimpiness of clothing the sorority girl wears, naturally leads to a preoccupation with all things superficial. One particularly horrific pledge activity, dismissed as urban legend by some, is called "Circle the Fat." If a sorority desires that its would-be sisters correct their "problem areas," it requires them to lie naked and blindfolded on the floor, and allows fraternity brothers to come in and mark any offending bulges or unfortunate patches of cellulite with permanent marker. "It's just going to make you a better person," snaps one sister to a sobbing pledge in one case described. They're only trying to help, really. Ms. Robbins insists that such degradation is not uncommon in the sorority system. In some instances, unsurprisingly, the girls take it to heart—a hopelessly self-conscious Amy declares at one point in the book, "I'm only eating protein bars this week because I ate so much last week."
After a tasteless disclosure of various sororities' secret rituals and handshakes, Ms. Robbins closes the book with a series of generally disagreeable recommendations for improving the sorority system (drastically reducing or simply eliminating pledge period, for instance). In the light of her disturbing accusations, I suspect many readers would doubt, as I do, her methods as well as her inferences. If the four young women she chose to follow do in fact represent, as she claims, a fairly typical sampling of today's sorority girls, something is going wrong well before girls get to college. But in these swiftly generalized tales of lust and cattiness lie the true appeal of Robbins' book—the awed young College man can still climb his ladder and peer through the window panes, in the hopes that he just might witness a miracle.