Pledged

by Alexandra Robbins

  “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” Bitsy said, her head held high and heroic.

  From across the room, Fiona, whose bed was next to Sabrina’s, huffed. She was sitting at her desk with her boyfriend, an Omega Phi brother who was peering in Bitsy’s direction but couldn’t see through the mass of sisters. “Bitsy’s gonna get a little more attention at our party tonight because of that ring,” he told Fiona.

  This upset Fiona, who thought highly of herself despite what Sabrina considered a lack of intelligence and unremarkable looks. “That’s gay,” Fiona fumed. “Forget it. I don’t want to go to the party if Bitsy’ll be there.”

  Just another typical day in the Penthouse, Sabrina thought, wondering how long it would be before Fiona went out and got something pierced, too. As she exchanged you-know-how-she-is looks with the other Pents nearby, Sabrina felt a sense of camaraderie despite her lack of pierced unmentionables.

  The feeling didn’t last long. Later that night, Fiona, who had positioned herself among the juniors as something of a Penthouse gang leader, held a group of Pents’ rapt attention as she expounded on what she saw as the recent trends in Alpha Rho. “You know,” she said, eyeing Sabrina, who wasn’t a part of the conversation but who was studying close enough to the group that she could hear every word, “it’s getting so that every pledge class in the house has a black girl. The sophomores have C.C. and the juniors have Sabrina.” The other girls glanced sideways at Sabrina, then hurriedly focused their attention back on Fiona.

  Sabrina only chuckled and said lightly, “Yes, that’s me.” But inwardly she cringed. To many of the girls in Alpha Rho, she would always be the “token black”; to some of them, apparently, that would be her only role.

  Peer Pressure

  THE BEGINNING OF THE ACADEMIC YEAR CAN BE AN UNCERTAIN time for any student, but for girls in sororities—which exist mostly in the United States and Canada—the stakes are often higher. Especially for sisters who move into the house, the first few weeks of school are a crucial period as the girls jockey for social position among old and new members and struggle to gain acceptance and approval at the same time as they must quickly learn the attitudes and attributes the sorority prioritizes. Does the group eschew steady boyfriends, as did Beta Pi? Are Gucci sunglasses—or pierced privates—the statement of the season?

  Urban legend dictates certain stereotypical characteristics that many people apply to all sorority girls; I would spend several months attempting to sort out the accuracy of this and other supposedly tall tales. As Vicki confided to me, “Generally, I thought sorority girls were bitchy, princessy, slutty girls who cared only about themselves and went out with frat boys,” which contributed to her insecurity. But what I learned fairly quickly was that within the sorority system lies a broad subset of stereotypes to which the sisters themselves are sharply attuned. Sorority houses tend to have different reputations on different campuses, with nearly every house exhibiting a strong stereotype—and members of each house often feel pressured to conform to that stereotype to keep with the sorority’s image.

  Sorority “types” are inevitable; in many mainstream sororities, the women all look and act the same. At one Texas school, the Chi Omegas are the “grounded hippie chicks,” the Delta Gammas are the fast girls who wear the tightest tank tops, the Alpha Chi Omegas are the sweet girls, and the Tri-Delts are “the marrying kind.” The Thetas at an Arizona school are the promiscuous girls, and Pi Phis at a Missouri school are “the marrying kind.” An Indiana university’s Tri-Delts are fun and crazy partyers. At a Pennsylvania school, the Tri-Delts are the prettiest—and also the cattiest. The Chi Omegas there, too, are the hippies who smoke a lot of pot and many of them have unusual names, like Summer or India. (“One girl was really unattractive,” an alumna said, “but she had a weird name so she got in.”) Within the Greek system at these sorts of schools, the stereotypes lead to unflattering nicknames, such as Alpha Delta Pi’s “Eighty-Pound Thighs” or “I ate a pie,” Gamma Phi Beta’s “Gamma Vibrator,” Alpha Phi’s “All for Free,” Phi Sigma Sigma’s “Phi Piggy Piggy,” Zeta Tau Alpha’s “Zits, Tits, and Armpits,” or Kappa Delta’s “Klan’s Daughters.”

  At each school, certain sororities are deemed the “prettiest” or the “coolest”; every girl I asked could tick off the “top five” or “top three” sororities at her school, ranked in order of prettiness and coolness. When I asked girls about the criteria for determining the coolest houses, they said they change with every pledge class, but generally, the best looking and most extroverted sororities cement the top spots. Connections to prominent alumni help, as does background. In Texas schools, if many members of a sorority are from the same area in Texas, they are perceived to be cooler than less Texas-oriented houses. It is as if sororities are collective extensions of high school yearbook superlatives—as if some girls just couldn’t let go.

  Ready for Rush: The Must-Have Manual for Sorority Rushees!, published in 1999, delineates the many “types” of sororities. According to the authors, both sorority alums, each school has a “Wealthy Wanda,” the old-money house containing the kinds of girls who park “BMWs up close to the front door [so] when rushees approach the house, they are either impressed or intimidated.” There’s “Beautiful Barbie,” a house at which the sisters “don’t meet up with friends on a Saturday night. If they don’t have a date, they don’t go out. They may stay at home with their other dateless Cinderella sisters, work out with their recently purchased exercise equipment, order in low-fat takeout (never pizza), and relax to music while trading pedicures and facials.” There’s “Fit Frannie,” for athletes; “Perky Pamela,” the only house the manual specifically says “participates in endless charities throughout the year”; “Natural Nancy,” the hippies; the “Partying Patty” house, which “could be just the place for you”; “Academic Annie” (“Armed with ambition and brains, these no-nonsense intellectuals have little time for television”); and “Mixture Molly,” “the sorority that thrives on diversity.” Interestingly enough, the only two “types” the authors caution against are (a) the smart girls: “If words are used that you don’t understand and political conversations float around your head leaving you dizzy and speechless, get out”; and (b) the diverse girls: “With so many personality types under one roof, it can be a hotbed for controversy.”

  Brooke, a native Texan sorority alumna who graduated a few years ago, always knew she was going to join a sorority like her mother and her two older sisters. A sincere girl from an old-money family that nonetheless taught her to appreciate the value of a dollar, Brooke, a debutante, was well aware that sororities in the South were an inevitable and often necessary part of college life. When she was accepted at a Texas school in the late 1990s, sorority membership was a foregone conclusion. Texas sororities, in particular, are like the Extreme Sport of the Greek world: astonishing, death-defying, and while not entirely in tune with the rest of the crowd, one heck of an interesting ride.

  “Sorority life in Texas is like live or die. You know that if you’re born from a sorority, you’re going to be in a sorority,” Brooke said. “And in the South, you don’t know anything different, so you automatically think you’re going to be a Greek. I mean, socially, at my school, you had to go Greek.” In the South, Brooke explained, sororities are a major identifier, even for women half a century out of college. “Women who went to schools like Ole Miss, the University of Georgia, Auburn, and Clemson associate themselves with their sororities. You will never hear a southern lady say, ‘She was a communications major at the University of Mississippi.’ You’ll hear, ‘Oh, honey, she was a Delta Gamma at the University of Georgia, so she’d be a great Junior Leaguer.’”

  As soon as she arrived on campus, Brooke realized that the girls in her class had known since high school which sorority they wanted to join and already knew many of the girls in that sorority. For advice, she called a male friend who had recently graduated from her college. “He told me that one group was the
school leaders, another had brunette, athletic wild-children, and a third sorority was cute and southern but they were all blondes,” Brooke said. “I mean, isn’t that pathetic? That you know a house by their hair color?”

  Actually, it’s common. Within individual sororities, the tendency to adapt to and perpetuate a house standard is typical. The Tri-Delts at one large mid-Atlantic university, for example, are known to be extremely beautiful. “They’d take new girls and within a month, they all looked the same, with really straight hair and the same makeup,” said a girl from a rival sorority. As a result, there is often a relentless pressure at these houses to fit in—a pressure that can be particularly dangerous in such groups because they focus so intently on looks. Several girls at the house I originally had hoped to follow were anorexic and/or took Xenadrine, laxatives, and diet pills. “My house,” Brooke reflected, “was the king of eating disorders.” True to another popular urban legend, plumbers had to come to Brooke’s sorority house at least once a month to clean out the pipes, which would be clogged with vomit. (An alarming number of girls from other sororities and other schools told me that the plumber was a frequent visitor to their houses for the same reason.) Because the house’s five cooks didn’t work on the weekends, on Fridays Brooke’s chapter House Mom collected from the sisters lists of their top ten favorite foods and did a massive two-hour grocery shopping trip. Weekends became “comfort eating days.” The House Mom loaded up the kitchen with enough food to last through the weekend, but the girls gorged themselves as soon as she left. Then, after dinner, they disappeared into the bathrooms—a regular weekend binge trend.

  The trend, it appears, is national. At a State U Panhellenic Council meeting (most campuses with sororities have a central sorority governing body, usually called Panhellenic Council or Panhellenic Association), representatives from all eighteen sororities said their houses had a problem with eating disorders. A recent midwestern Gamma Phi Beta alumna said her sisters “used to have puking contests after dinner.” A Delta Zeta from a large East Coast school told me she blames her sorority for her own eating disorder. Having never been exposed to eating disorders before college, she didn’t even know what bulimia was until she pledged her sorority. The Delta Zeta estimated that out of the 120 people in her sorority, about a third of them had eating disorders. During her first year in the sorority, five out of forty of the sophomore sisters left the university permanently because of eating disorders. “I would never have thought about starving myself to get thin. Then I saw other people doing it and they got kind of crazy, but it was catchy,” the Delta Zeta said. “Everyone had done it, and since sororities revolve around looks, starvation became an acceptable thing to do.”

  In the spring of 1996, a sorority president at a northeastern university noticed that hundreds of plastic sandwich bags were disappearing from the sorority’s kitchen. When she looked into the matter, she discovered the bags filled with vomit in one of the house’s bathrooms. Their pipes, too, would be replaced because of erosion due to gallons of stomach acid. “It made sense” because her sisters were vocal about their extreme weight concerns, she told People in 1999 for an article about eating disorders. “It was like a competition to see who could eat the least. At dinner they would say, ‘All I had today was an apple,’ or ‘I haven’t had anything.’ It was surreal.” A 1990s study reported that a whopping 80 percent of college women who frequently self-induced vomiting were sorority sisters. Other sorority girls have said that the pressure to look good in their group was so intense that they turned to plastic surgery to better fit in.

  Somebody to Lean On

  AUGUST 24

  CAITLIN’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

  Sleeping . . . (alone)

  BETWEEN HER DEVOTION TO THE STATE U WOMEN’S CLUB lacrosse team and her position as Alpha Rho vice president, Caitlin didn’t have the energy to deal with the usual melodrama of her sorority sisters, which was why she was so surprised when she managed to churn up some of her own. Caitlin’s yearlong relationship with Chris, “the love of her life” since she had met him during Freshman Orientation, had been defined by explosive fights and passionate reconciliations, but the argument they had one night in late August left her devastated.

  During a screaming bout, she accused him of treating her badly. “You ignore me when it’s convenient for you and you fucking disrespect me in front of my friends. And I’m not the only one who thinks that!” she yelled, her low, husky voice cracking.

  “Oh, oh, your sisters think that?” he sneered. “The ones that would”—he made quotation-mark gestures—“‘support you through anything’? That’s why you pay them, right? So they’ll support you while you get jealous or nag me?”

  Caitlin, who rarely cried, struggled not to as her freckled face grew hot. “Look, I thought you were the kind of boyfriend I’d been waiting for,” she said quietly. “The kind of guy who wants to do everything possible to make the other person happy. I thought that’s who you were.”

  “Well,” he said, “you have too many problems and they don’t concern me, so I’m not dealing with them anymore. It’s over.”

  Caitlin wasn’t quick to ask for help or support; she was usually hesitant to open up, choosing instead to socialize from behind a sarcastic veneer that she thought made her seem tougher than she was. As a sophomore from New York, she didn’t yet know any of the mostly southern Alpha Rho sisters besides Sabrina and Amy well enough to turn to them for consolation. The semester before, the only reason she had even so much as considered a sorority was because her spoiled roommate had begged Caitlin to rush with her. The roommate had planned out the girls’ rush strategy so that they would concentrate on only the three sororities with the best reputations. At the open house rush events, the roommate was in her element while Caitlin hung back, disgusted by the sisters’ phony airs and stuck-up attitudes. Caitlin thought the girls were telling her exactly what they thought she wanted to hear, even as they squinted haughtily at the inch of midriff between Caitlin’s sporty top and shorts. It was common knowledge that certain sororities were trained to convince each rushee they loved her.

  Caitlin perked up when they reached the Alpha Rho house, where she already knew Sabrina and Amy. Because her roommate clearly didn’t want to be seen in a sorority that was considered just below the top tier, Caitlin, more confident than at the other houses, did most of the talking. She was surprised to find that the sisters she spoke with were mellow and able to have “real” conversations—and that a few of them were athletes with six-packs as chiseled as hers.

  When invitations to the next round of rush events were delivered, Caitlin received a letter from Alpha Rho. Her roommate didn’t get asked back to any of the houses. Regardless, Caitlin didn’t see anything wrong with continuing the rush process; at the least she might meet a new friend. Before long she had accepted Alpha Rho’s bid, and suddenly she was a sorority pledge, then a sister, and now the chapter’s vice president.

  A few days after the breakup, Caitlin was sitting alone late at night, fingering her cell phone in the Alpha Rho study when her “Big Sister,” or sorority mentor, walked in. Caitlin’s Big Sister sat down next to her and soothingly stroked her chestnut ponytail.

  “I heard about you and Chris,” she said.

  “Whoa, it’s gotten around the house that fast?” asked Caitlin. “I only told Sabrina and Amy.”

  “I overheard Chris’s friends talking about it,” said her Big Sister, a junior. “I’m really sorry. I know how hard this must be on you.” Caitlin appreciated that her Big Sister didn’t say what she was sure the rest of the sisterhood was thinking: good riddance. The sisters, sensing that Chris was intensely anti-Greek and hearing stories about how he treated Caitlin, had never approved of him the way her mother did. It didn’t seem to make a difference to them, as it did to Caitlin, that Chris had been such a rock of support for her the year before. Or that her mother considered him Caitlin’s best achievement to date.

  Caitlin’s Big Sister gla
nced at the name highlighted on Caitlin’s cell phone display. “You’re thinking of calling him, huh,” she said.

  Caitlin’s pale blue eyes looked down. “I told him I wouldn’t be able to talk to him, even as a friend, for a month so I could get over him, but I don’t know if I can.”

  “You can,” her Big Sister said gently, and took the phone. “I’ll keep this for tonight.”

  Balancing

  AUGUST 30

  AMY’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

  o no, not another one! i think i’m about to cry

  AT THE START, THE NIGHT LOOKED PROMISING. AMY LEFT an Alpha Rho “Summer in the City” mixer with Spencer, a Mu Zeta Nu brother. Because she had been friends with Spencer for so long, she hoped this hookup would turn into something slightly more substantial than a random rendezvous. She was tired of those; for every sorority function over the last year and a half, she had brought a fling, never a boyfriend, as a date, which made her feel less attractive than her boyfriend-toting sisters.

  After fooling around in Spencer’s bed in the Mu Zeta Nu house for a while, Amy paused, her kind violet eyes twinkling.

  “I never thought you’d be lying in my bed,” Spencer mused.

  “I never thought I’d be lying in your bed, either, honey,” she said in her Mississippi drawl.

  “I like you in my bed.”

  Amy’s dimples deepened. “I have to get back to my place.”

  “No, stay. I’m too drunk to drive you anyway.”

  “I’ll call Caitlin to pick me up,” she said, popping a breath mint. “Do you want to come over?”

  “I want you to stay.”

  Amy had a trump card. “My bed’s bigger, sweetie.”

  “True.”

  “And I can make you breakfast in the morning.”