Pledged

by Alexandra Robbins

  Fiona, Whitney, and Elaine were the bossiest sisters. Fiona, a junior with a superiority complex, wielded influence—or thought she did. Before a recent chapter meeting, Sabrina was in the Penthouse jotting down some homework assignments in her day planner before she headed downstairs to join the rest of the sisterhood. The other Pents had left just a minute before. Fiona came upstairs.

  “Is someone up here?” she said.

  “Me, I’ll be down in a second.”

  “Are you going to Meeting?”

  “Yes,” Sabrina said.

  “It’s really important that you go down there right now,” Fiona said.

  On another night, when Sabrina was out, Fiona was spotted going through Sabrina’s things and strewing them across the Penthouse, supposedly looking for something she had lost. When Sabrina returned, her bed had been moved, her sheets were loose, her furniture rearranged, and the pictures that she had been sorting for her sorority scrapbook were scattered on the floor. It took two days for Sabrina to put her area back together.

  A few days before the Alpha Rho Date Party, Sabrina discovered that the bag of chocolates that Caitlin had given her for her birthday was empty. Watching her gasp in dismay, a nearby Pent confided to Sabrina that Fiona had eaten them. This time, Sabrina approached Fiona in the dining room.

  “What happened to my chocolates?” Sabrina asked.

  “Whitney ate them all,” Fiona said without hesitation. Another Pent later related to Sabrina the conversation that ensued as soon as Sabrina had left the room. Guffawing, Fiona had plopped onto a chair next to Whitney.

  “I just told Sabrina you ate all her chocolate,” Fiona said to Whitney.

  “You bitch, I did not,” the senior responded, laughing. “Now she’s going to be mad at me.”

  But Sabrina never said anything to Fiona, just as she never spoke up to Charlotte. She was stuck living in the house all year; better not to make waves by confronting people, she thought.

  Whitney wasn’t much better. Whitney, whose life seemed to revolve around Alpha Rho, rarely talked to a girl, even a sister, unless she decided that she needed to be friends with her for some reason. To everyone else, Sabrina pointed out to her friends, Whitney shot dirty looks.

  “Well, people think Caitlin is giving them dirty looks,” Amy cautioned, “but you just have to get to know her first.”

  “Whitney’s different,” Sabrina insisted. That week, a group of Alpha Rhos had been downstairs watching Sex and the City in the TV room. One of the youngest sisters in the house came downstairs, stood behind the couch, and timidly asked Whitney a question.

  “Are you actually talking to me? While I’m watching Sex and the City?” Whitney scolded her in front of everyone and turned back to the television. Clearly upset, the young sister had run upstairs.

  AFTER THEY FINISHED GETTING READY, THE GIRLS MET up at a satellite house to pre-game with a few other sisters and their dates. Amy went into a side room, where she whispered with Jake. Occasionally, sisters would duck in and quietly ask why Chris was there with Caitlin when they thought he had broken up with her. “I don’t know,” she told one. “Look asshole up in the dictionary and his picture’s there.”

  At the bar, the bouncers gave all of the sisters over-21 bracelets and let them in but took most of their dates’ IDs for the evening. Amy was thoroughly enjoying dancing with Jake, especially when he started to point out the dates he found attractive.

  Then he thought better of it. “Uh-oh, someone will hear me.” A guy jumped on top of a table in the corner of the room and yodeled like Tarzan as he beat his chest. The bouncers rushed over and threatened to throw him out.

  “No one will care.” Amy turned back to Jake. “This isn’t your fraternity.”

  “Oh, true.”

  Amy gravitated across the bar to Fiona’s date, a cute fraternity brother whom Fiona had seemingly abandoned. The brother, chatting affably, started dancing with Amy. As soon as Fiona spotted them, she hurriedly oozed over to her date. “Come dance with me!” she cooed.

  Cliques and Hierarchies

  JUST AS IMPORTANT AS THE BONDS AND ATTITUDES THAT form during the monitored house activities are the cliques and tensions that develop between the lines. Looks, wealth, bloodlines, connections, dates, friends—all of these can be major factors when sororities are deciding on which new members to accept. But even once these girls have been chosen, many told me, they continue to walk on eggshells. For some girls, the sorority experience involves a constant struggle to keep up with the trends and attitudes dictated by particular cliques within the sorority. Belonging to a house offers a sister a permanent affiliation, but it doesn’t signify unconditional acceptance. As Vicki discovered, the “us versus them” shifts from sorority versus sorority outside the house to clique versus clique within the house. Inevitably, hierarchies develop between these cliques of sisters, the kinds of power plays that caused Vicki to be intimidated by the older girls, and Amy, Caitlin, and Sabrina to feel slighted by bossier sisters. These intrasorority subgroups can divide by factors including looks, pledge class, and general attitude toward the sorority. Jordan, the midwestern Pi Phi, explained to me that there are, to generalize, two types of groups that can be found in sororities: “One is the die-hard, ‘I’ll-take-every-secret-to-the-death’ type. The other is the ‘This-is-ridiculous-but-I-guess-I’ll-do-it-anyway’ group.” It is inevitable that these two factions routinely clash.

  No sorority is without its subsorority divisions, often provoked by the die-hard group of girls that Jordan described—the kind that eschews anything that doesn’t sustain the sorority’s image and follow sorority policies to the letter. In many houses, if a sorority sister drastically changes her look, or dates or befriends the wrong person—or, worse, a person in the wrong fraternity or sorority—she could be ostracized by the rest of the group.

  In Brooke’s pledge class, the tight clique of ten girls rapidly became the popular group that determined who or what was “cool” and dismissed anyone who didn’t fit the criteria. The bulk of Brooke’s pledge class was, she said, an especially spoiled group. The sisters came from wealthy, cultured backgrounds; they were “trust fund babies” who were always driving the newest, slickest cars available. “My pledge class,” Brooke said, “would tear down anything or anyone that wasn’t ‘cool.’”

  The Ten, as the sisters eventually called these materialistic members, were a clique within a clique. They were girls who were so blindly into the sorority that all other activities and aspects of college life paled by comparison. They had the attitude, Brooke explained, that “If you’re an EtaGam, you’re an EtaGam through and through. You bleed blue and cream.” These were the girls who unofficially controlled the Eta Gammas by deciding the homogeneous characteristics to impose on the group. The Ten had the power to “make your life hell,” Brooke told me. “If you weren’t hanging out with the Delts, they made fun of you. They planned parties and wouldn’t include you. They made you feel unimportant, like something was wrong with you. They had a ‘You’re not cool enough’ attitude and would blow you off.”

  Most of the Ten were die-hard EtaGams, but one in particular led the group’s push to institute “proper” Eta Gamma policy. An Eta Gamma legacy whose mother was intensely involved with the sorority’s regional organization, this sister was constantly correcting the Eta Gammas: “Well, the EtaGams at my mom’s school do it a better way,” and “This is not the way the EtaGams do it.” When she returned from the Eta Gamma national convention she attended with her mother, the scope of her criticism grew—she wanted to alter voting policies and raise the minimum GPA, among other changes—and the sisters voted for her proposals. They didn’t doubt that she had Eta Gamma’s best interests at heart; her room was like an Eta Gamma shrine, with an Eta Gamma bedspread, a large Eta Gamma mascot dangling from the ceiling, Eta Gamma poems tacked on the walls, and Eta Gamma pillows in every corner.

  I asked Brooke why, in a sorority of seventy-nine girls, the sisters le
t a group of ten rule the chapter, mowing down other girls in the process. “They were the coalition. You wanted to be liked by them because there were so many of them, because it was easier to be in their inner circle than out of it,” Brooke said. “Especially because they lived in the house: ten people in a house that accommodated thirty-five is a huge chunk of the house, so they had the influence over the rest of us.”

  That this kind of exclusivity is collegiately condoned makes the situation all the more intriguing: sororities themselves are cliques. Envision taking the groups of girls in high school who bond and exclude and formally recognizing their belonging to one group and not to another by assigning them letters, colors, and mascots. The blondes, the super-thin, the rich, the promiscuous, and the girls who smoke marijuana are separated and recognized as being distinctive, nonoverlapping groups. Once a girl is accepted into one of the groups, she can never affiliate with another. Each group is allotted certain areas of the high school building—a perch of lockers and a cafeteria table (decorated in their colors) from which they can observe the other groups. They are given secret rituals and an oath swearing allegiance to one another. The girls are encouraged to create and wear T-shirts and other clothing items that bear their letters and slogans about their group’s superiority. They have their own rules that dictate what to wear, how to act, which groups are acceptable, and which to avoid. The high school sanctions a formal recruitment process by which the cliques can screen and reject potential additions to the group. But even if a candidate fits the external mold perfectly, if she doesn’t make a noticeable effort to impress the group with the right outfit or attitude, she will be shunned, doomed to an invisible existence with the other, nonaffiliated high school castoffs.

  In reality, high schools don’t grant cliques letters and mascots or run a formal recruitment process. But the rest of the characterizations in the preceding paragraph constitute the kind of teenage-girl behavior that recently spawned a spate of poignant books and workshops aimed at teaching girls that these divisions can be dangerous and geared toward eliminating that behavior. This movement toward bridging the barriers between groups, whether they are Queen Bees and Wannabes or Alphas and Betas, has focused on girls in elementary through high schools. But I would argue that the cliquishness doesn’t stop there. The foregoing descriptions, those same characterizations that have caused such an uproar among teens, parents, psychologists, and school administrators—including the letters, mascots, and formal recruitment—also accurately describe life in a sorority.

  As noted in the first chapter, there are popular sororities, “loser” sororities, and sororities known for their promiscuity, drug use, body type, and hair color. These groups are extensions of the kinds of cliques formed in secondary schools, but with an added element of officialdom: with the blessing of the school and the cliques’ national organizations, the groups’ process of exclusion is both formal and final. It should come as no surprise that girls who are sometimes only four months out of high school continue the social behavior developed in their prior academic settings. A difference in the Greek system, however, is that this exclusivity is perpetuated even by college seniors—girls twenty-one and older—as well as condoned and even encouraged by the older women who run the sororities at the local, regional, and national levels. Critics may argue that group exclusivity is a fact of life: varsity athletic teams cut players, orchestras choose first and second chairs, drama directors cast leads. But sororities, like high school cliques, aren’t groups formed according to a specific talent, such as how well a girl can debate an issue, speak Italian, or bake canapés.

  It seems inevitable that girls who are encouraged to form cliques as sororities, to accept or reject people based on predetermined (and often shallow) criteria, will perpetuate that exclusive behavior even once inside the sorority. Sororities stereotypically seem to personify collectively certain “types” of girls. But there is, of course, the question of whether the girls create the sorority or the sorority creates the girls. As Rosalind Wiseman cautions in her book about cliques of young girls, cliques are “natural. Girls tend to have a group of girlfriends with whom they feel close, and often these friendships are great . . . But something in the way girls group together also sows the seeds for the cruel competition for popularity and social status.” One can’t help but wonder how distinctly college girls would segregate themselves into cliquish groups anyway, but the point is that universities formally recognize their exclusivity by slapping on Greek letters and a motto.

  In a sense, sorority girls are in a clique for life. A sorority is more than an affiliation; it’s a label that a girl can’t simply unstick after school ends. A few years after graduation, Brooke attended the wedding of a Texas friend who was a member of another sorority. A thousand people circulated in the ballroom, starting their conversations with guests like Brooke not by asking what they did for a living but by inquiring which sorority they were in. “Oh, were you a Sigma with the bride, darlin’?” a genteel woman in southern finery drawled when she approached Brooke.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Reeeally.” The speaker raised an eyebrow. “Well then, what sorority were you in?”

  “I was an EtaGam, ma’am.”

  The woman smiled in approval and fanned herself as if in relief, because Eta Gamma was considered one of the top sororities and therefore an acceptable association.

  In another part of the room, older women were aloof and patronizing to Brooke until she managed to slip into the conversation that she was an Eta Gamma. Suddenly, the women included her in their circle. “Oh, my cousin was an EtaGam!” one exclaimed.

  “It’s unreal in Texas and the South,” Brooke mused now. “Even decades after you graduate, you’re only accepted or not by what sorority you were in.”

  Clinging and Clashing

  NOVEMBER 9

  VICKI’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

  i don’t think i can take this anymore

  VICKI WAS CHATTING WITH A GUY IN HER LITERATURE class before their midterm when he asked her where she lived.

  “Oh, um, off campus.”

  “Where?” he pressed.

  “Beta Pi?”

  “I knew you were in a sorority,” he said. Vicki was shocked. Even now, more than halfway into the semester, she didn’t consider herself much of a sorority girl. Beta Pi wasn’t intertwined with her identity; it was just a group she had happened to join to make the campus seem a little smaller. Vicki asked her classmate what it was about her that made him think she was Greek.

  “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “I can’t figure it out.”

  After the exam, he approached her again. “I know what it is now.”

  “What?”

  “Your hair.” Vicki had straightened her wavy shag that day so it was long and sleek. “Sorority girls know how to do their hair right.”

  Vicki didn’t feel like a sorority girl. She was gradually growing more comfortable in the house, although she still spent much of her time on the phone with her friends back home. While Vicki could say hello to anyone in the house, she wouldn’t approach most of the sisters or have an in-depth one-on-one conversation. She had come a long way, however, since she pledged in the spring, when she had circulated with the wrong people.

  Nicole, who initially seemed friendly and open, was one of the first pledges Vicki had met. In a group full of strangers, it was comforting to have someone who so eagerly wanted to be Vicki’s new friend. Vicki and Nicole were together constantly as they suffered through the pledge process. When Nicole asked Vicki to room with her in the Beta Pi house for the fall semester, Vicki readily agreed. But after a few more weeks, Vicki regretted being so quick to form the friendship because Nicole wouldn’t leave her alone. She told Vicki intensely personal stories about herself, disturbing things that Vicki thought girls shouldn’t tell each other when they had just met. “Vicki, I’m sad,” she would say, and then expect Vicki to listen attentively as she complained about her life. As Nicole gre
w increasingly clingy, Vicki began to notice that none of the other pledges were friendly with Nicole. So she tried to distance herself.

  During the pledges’ weekly Saturday night sleepovers in the house, Nicole regularly maneuvered her sleeping bag next to Vicki’s and followed Vicki around the room as she tried to meet other pledges. But the more Vicki heard the other girls talking about Nicole—“Oh my God, what a weird girl,” they said, “I can’t believe she’s in our house”—the more Vicki avoided her. At the last sleepover before Spring Break, when Vicki was chatting with Olivia, who was then another new friend, Nicole tramped across the room to whine, “Vicki, aren’t you going to hang out with me tonight?” Olivia and some of the other pledges gave Vicki a strange look that seemed to say, “What are you doing with her?”

  By the time Vicki returned from Spring Break, she had made up her mind that she was going to room with Olivia instead. Vicki waited until she was alone with Nicole to tell her. “I don’t think it would be a good idea to live with each other,” Vicki said as gently as she could. “I want to keep being your friend, and as friends we really wouldn’t be able to live with each other, you know?”