Pledged

by Alexandra Robbins

  Sometimes during the Saturday night sleepovers, Vicki and Olivia would stride into the pledge room, their long hair flowing, to say hello to pledges. During one of these visits, a pledge asked Vicki for advice.

  “Vicki,” she whispered, “I can’t stand one of the other pledges. What do I do?”

  “Just give it time,” Vicki said. “Going through pledging together will really help you learn to appreciate her.”

  “It’s so weird,” the pledge said. “You and I are the same age, but I look at you like you’re so much older.” Like most of the other pledges, as she spoke to Vicki, her voice became higher pitched and more unsure.

  That night, the pledgemaster had the pledges name the fraternity brothers they had hooked up with so that the older sisters could tell them whom they were and weren’t “allowed to touch.”

  “I hooked up with Dan in Theta Theta after the last pre-game,” said one pledge.

  “Wait a minute,” said a sister, “Vicki’s Dan?!”

  The pledge looked mortified. “Oh my God, I didn’t know,” she said, her tone rising. “Oh my God oh my God oh my God!” The room hushed.

  Vicki, who liked this pledge, hadn’t seen much of Dan this semester. She saw William regularly, and (unbeknownst to William) had also gotten together once with a friendly Epsilon Chi brother. Vicki and Olivia, who was now dating one of William’s fraternity brothers, had gone to the Epsilon Chi house, made out with their dates there, then moved on to Iota together to be with their supposed boyfriends.

  With all of this other action, Vicki was surprised to find that she cared that Dan had recently hooked up with, of all people, one of her pledges. Nevertheless, she reassured the now-hyperventilating pledge that she wasn’t currently involved with him.

  One night soon thereafter, Vicki flirted with Dan at Louie’s, not noticing that William was staring at them from his seat on the other side of the bar. Olivia walked in, saw William first, and asked him where Vicki was.

  He gestured with his chin, his goatee neatly pointing to Vicki, who was flicking her bangs out of her eyes. “Over there,” he said, “all over that sketchy guy in the baseball cap.”

  When Vicki spotted William and came over to talk to him, she noticed Dan pacing back and forth, watching her from a distance.

  A FEW NIGHTS LATER, MORGAN, WHO WAS DATING ONE of Dan’s Theta Theta brothers, told Vicki that Dan had found out about William. Dan had admitted to his brothers how much he liked Vicki, and how hurt he was that she had a boyfriend. Vicki immediately called him and arranged to meet him at Louie’s.

  “Okay, so I’ve been seeing William on and off now for a couple months,” said Vicki, shaving the time period.

  “I heard he was your boyfriend,” Dan said.

  “No. I don’t want a boyfriend,” Vicki said. “I’ve been seeing him but I don’t feel that way about him.”

  “Were you seeing him when we went to my Formal?” Dan asked.

  “I had so much fun with you at Formal,” Vicki dodged. “I thought William was playing me—that’s when I started talking to you. You’re the best Formal date ever. William’s not my boyfriend. I’m just hooking up with him.” Vicki left the bar after promising to see Dan again soon.

  When she got back to the Beta Pi house, Vicki changed into a pair of capris. “Ugh,” she remarked aloud to herself. “I look fat.”

  As if on cue, Morgan suddenly popped into Vicki’s room. “Really?” she said, standing on her toes to inspect Vicki’s body. “Let me see!”

  Vicki rolled her green eyes and distracted Morgan by telling her about her discussion with Dan. “I don’t like how weird he and I are,” Vicki said. “I don’t know how long it’s going to be before we talk again.”

  “Come on,” said Morgan, who was planning to see her boyfriend anyway. “We’re going to the Theta Theta house.”

  Dan was overjoyed to see Vicki. The foursome were lounging in his room when Ashleigh repeatedly called Vicki’s cell, crying hysterically and hanging up. When Vicki called Ashleigh back, Ashleigh didn’t pick up her phone. Morgan returned home to Beta Pi, leaving Vicki and Dan kissing on the couch.

  Ten minutes later, Morgan called Vicki. “Ashleigh’s going crazy. The guy she asked to Date Party said no,” Morgan said.

  Five minutes later, Olivia called. “Oh my God, you have to come back to the house,” she said. “She’s drunk and talking about killing herself.”

  Vicki hurried to Ashleigh’s room, where Olivia and Morgan were trying to console her. Ashleigh’s drunken panic had passed, and now she was curled in her hot pink comforter muttering, “I just want to go to sleep. I want to wake up in the morning and not be here.” As Ashleigh drifted off to sleep, Vicki, Olivia, and Morgan sang “I Will Survive” to her and told Ashleigh how much they loved her.

  Vicki and Olivia went downstairs to the dining room to recap the night’s events. As Vicki was updating her on the latest developments with Dan, Olivia sneaked to a sink and mischievously poured a tiny cup of water over Vicki’s head.

  Vicki sat still for a moment, dripping. “Oh no, you did not just do that,” she said, then made a beeline for the nearest water pitcher and dumped it over Olivia. As the girls dashed around the room collecting all the liquid ammunition they could find, a thought struck Vicki. This spontaneous fun was exactly the kind of thing she wanted to remember about college—not the obligation to call William, not her tendency to stay over at his house instead of cavorting around hers, and not even William himself.

  The next night, Vicki and Olivia returned to the boys in Epsilon Chi. Again, they fooled around with their dates, then went to the Iota house to be with their supposed boyfriends. But Vicki couldn’t muster up enthusiasm for William. Too tired to stay up with him, she immediately fell asleep in his bed.

  When Vicki woke up the next morning, William was looking at her strangely. “What’s with you? You can’t tell me something’s not wrong,” he said.

  Vicki inhaled deeply before she spoke. “I realized that you and I have been hooking up for several months now,” she said. “The reason I wanted to break up with my boyfriend at the beginning of the year was to be single, and I’m not. I want my freedom. I don’t want the obligation to call you after the bars. I want to do what I want and then go home with my girls. We have to break up.”

  Tears welled in William’s eyes.

  From Pricking Fingers to Hard-Core Porn

  IN MAY 2003, TELEVISION VIEWERS INTERNATIONALLY WERE transfixed by a video taken of Chicago high school seniors—most of them girls—punching and kicking juniors and covering them in urine, feces, pig intestines, fish guts, coffee grounds, and mud. The incident, a hazing rite that was part of an annual Powder Puff Football tradition, sent five girls to the hospital, one with a broken ankle and one with a head wound needing ten stitches. Seniors shot juniors with paintballs and forced meat down a vegetarian’s throat. The school district expelled more than thirty seniors, and prosecutors pressed charges against sixteen students and two parents. While this case is extreme, similar types of hazing are par for the course in Greek life.

  As the producers of Girls Gone Wild and MTV can attest, there are many things college girls will do for attention or money. There are few organizations, however, that can persuade this demographic to masturbate with salt shakers and drop trousers or fake orgasms while humping doorknobs and ski poles in front of a room of cheering fraternity brothers—merely so that they can belong. But sororities can.

  The pledge period, which lasts about five to nine weeks, occurs in between the time a rushee has accepted a bid and the time she is initiated. Traditionally the pledge period serves as a proving ground; the new members are supposed to show their devotion to the sisterhood and to their fellow pledges as they deprioritize the individual in favor of the collective group. In the chapters across the country that still haze (some chapters have stopped the practice entirely), pledges often have to wear their sorority’s colors. Some sororities also force their pledges to wear simi
lar hairstyles so they look as much alike as possible.

  Every week, there might be a different greeting that a pledge must use whenever she sees a sister: “Hi sister so-and-so, I’m a happy pledge of Alpha Alpha Alpha, Zeta chapter, Zeta class!” If a pledge messes up the greeting, she must stand there repeating it over and over again until the sister is satisfied. Pledges are often expected to know the name of every sister, which in some cases can entail committing two hundred names to memory. (Other sororities expect the pledges to know specific details about sisters’ lives and test them on this obscure knowledge.) Pledge books like Beta Pi’s are another widely used pledge tool.

  Throughout the pledge period, many houses hold pledge exams on the sorority’s history, the Greek alphabet, names of sisters and alumnae, and details about the exec board officers. In Brooke’s house, these tests were given nightly during the week leading up to initiation. When girls did not take these tests seriously, there were measures in place to bring them into line. If all of the girls did not pass a test, then all of them had to take it again—at increasingly inconvenient hours. After the first test, Brooke’s pledgemaster awakened each pledge at 4 a.m. the next day to drag them to the house to take the test again. After the second test, the pledgemaster graded the exams, came back into the room, and said, “Girls, three of you did not pass. All of you will be at the house at two-thirty tomorrow morning to take the test again.” The pledges had to make sure that their fellow pledges were present. When one night a pledge failed to show, Brooke and her group had to find her. Eventually, they located her in her boyfriend’s bedroom in one of the fraternity houses, which the group had to break into at 3 a.m. to seize their future sister. These sorority exams sometimes occur during midterms, but there are no excuses allowed. If a girl has an 8 a.m. midterm and is trying to study or get a decent rest the night before, she still must attend her 2:30 a.m. sorority test. The practice isn’t unusual. At her school, Laney, the Alpha Sigma Alpha, said, “We were always quizzing them. We put X’s on their arms with a marker when they got answers wrong. It was very stupid when I look back, but at the time it seemed really important.”

  In some houses, pledges can also generally be “on call” nearly every night of the pledge period. This means sitting by their phone in case a sorority sister wants something—for example, a Slurpee at 3 a.m., a ride, her dishes washed, or her room cleaned—or a spontaneous activity is about to start: “Find a dress and a date and be at the house in thirty minutes.” As one recent Phi Mu said, “We were essentially slaves to the sisters.” Other activities are intended to promote team-building and pledge loyalty, though they often consist of useless, time-wasting arts and crafts as pledges must stay up late into the night decorating posters, writing songs, and drawing pictures. In 2001, Northeastern University suspended its Alpha Epsilon Phi chapter after two pledges quit the sorority and complained of abuse. They said they were forced to mark their stomachs to prove they hadn’t showered for a week, and to stay awake throughout the night completing jigsaw puzzles or separating candy with their noses.

  Many sororities also put pledges in lineups during which the sisters scream insults at them, sometimes even individually critiquing pledges’ weight or the size of their nose, breasts, or dress. “You’re nothing!” “You’re a bunch of sluts!” Usually a few girls cry. Some drop out. “They tear you down,” I was told, “so they can build you back up again.” But those who attempt to drop out are met with resistance in the form of sudden kindness from the sisters. One girl who tried on three occasions to quit her pledge class told me why she ultimately stuck with the process. When she told the sisters she wanted to leave, they immediately acted as if they were her best friends. “When a sorority claims you as a pledge, it has to report that to its national organization. If I quit, my dues go with me, but the money they have to pay the national organization remains the same, so everyone else’s dues would go up,” she explained.

  For this reason, many houses, such as Brooke’s Eta Gammas, have as one of their elected positions the role of sorority “chaplain.” One of the chaplain’s duties is to make sure the hazing doesn’t make the pledges so uncomfortable that they drop out. During Brooke’s junior year, for example, a pledge became distraught and angry during an activity that forced the pledges to watch hard-core pornography while the sisters watched them. As the sisters determined that the pledges, who were not allowed to crack a smile, were focused solely on the television screen, the sisters made comments and laughed at them. When the distraught pledge shouted, “This is awful! I don’t want to do this!” it was the chaplain’s job to calm her down.

  Pledging mostly involves mental games, as sisters from houses across the country told me over and over again. But, although fraternities are better known for their physical hazing rites, a surprising number of sororities also make bodily demands on their girls. One sorority made its pledges call fraternity brothers and read pornographic material (You make me so hot! I want to suck on your . . . ) before telling the brothers they were coming over. A Phi Mu at Widener University has said that sisters stuck coasters down the back of pledges’ pants. “We were told to squeeze our butt cheeks together to keep them up.” The same chapter also regularly commanded pledges to stand against a wall with the words, “Nose, tits, and toes!”

  Brooke described a custom in her sorority known officially as “Boob Ranking.” When Brooke was a pledge, her group was taken to an upstairs room in the house and told to take off their shirts and bras. Shivering, the pledges nervously glanced at each other as they wondered what new activity would follow. Then the sisters informed the girls that they were going to line them up in order of breast size. As the sisters told the pledges where to go in the line, the pledges were unaware that they were actually being lined up according to attitude. If a pledge, for instance, thought she had large breasts and tried to insert herself at the large end of the lineup, the sisters would loudly tell her that she should go to the opposite end. Eventually, the sisters marched the pledges downstairs to the dining room, told them they were not lined up correctly, and then, as they laughed and heckled, demanded that the pledges put themselves in the correct order.

  Often, sisters who were treated badly as pledges were more likely to continue the cycle by treating the next class of pledges even worse. “We were just mean,” Brooke said. Why, I asked Brooke—a kind and reasonable person—would she not only subject herself to this embarrassment but also inflict it on others? “It was disgusting,” she admitted. “But it was like a ceremonial ritual. Everyone before you did it, so you have to do it, too.”

  This sentiment—the bedrock of organizations that rule by tradition—can motivate girls to participate in dangerous activities. Esther Wright, a pledge in the late 1980s, has written about how her pledge class was told to prick their fingers with the same needle and let their blood commingle in a shot glass. “You must be willing to put your sisters first and sacrifice for us, bonding with us in every way,” the sorority president intoned. The pledges were then ordered to put some of the mixed blood on the sorority’s flower and rub the bloody petal onto their cut fingers (as they prayed the blood wasn’t contaminated).

  In 1997, in accordance with a tradition that had been in place at the house for four years, pledges of Kappa Kappa Gamma at DePauw University (a campus that is more than three-quarters Greek) were strongly encouraged to drink alcohol at a fraternity party and then taken to a room full of sorority sisters who held them down despite their screams, pulled their jeans down to expose their hips, and branded them with a lit cigarette. (Other sororities have used hot metal stamps of the sorority letters.) They were seventeen and eighteen years old. “That night, they took it from me—my bubbliness, my personality, my trust. They took everything from me that night,” one of the pledges said to the media. “When you leave home for the first time and you’re naïve and you’re eighteen and you think you know and you don’t, when you’re put in a room like that with people that you trust and you look up to
and you follow—and to be put in a situation like that, you don’t know what you’re going to do.” Other pledges in the class were made to kiss a skull adorned with two racquetballs and material simulating pubic hair and to pretend to castrate a sister wearing a fake penis.

  Other sororities practice a branding of a different nature. Before I began investigating sororities, I had been under the impression that pledging practices such as “circle the fat” and “bikini weigh” were the stuff of urban legend. I was wrong. During circle the fat, pledges undress and, one by one, stand in front of the entire sorority membership. The sisters (or, in some chapters, fraternity brothers) then use thick black markers to circle the fat or cellulite on a pledge’s body. The purpose is to help the pledge learn what parts of her body she needs to improve. For many sororities, thinness, as the pledges discover, is a priority. During bikini weigh, or “weigh-in,” pledges are weighed in front of either the sisterhood or a fraternity; the audience yells the number displayed on the scale.

  A version of circle the fat was described in a 1999 article written under a pseudonym by a sorority sister who feared dire consequences if her sorority discovered that she had written the piece. A few days after the writer and her fellow pledges were forced to sing and dance on tables “while fraternity guys let their eyes and hands crawl up our skirts,” sisters told them to come downstairs in single file, wearing only their underwear. Sisters in white robes stood in the living room, in which the furniture and windows were covered with white sheets, and handed out strips of white sheets. The sisters told the pledges to blindfold themselves with the sheets and to lie facedown on the cold hardwood floor. “And that’s when the men entered the room, whistling and howling,” she wrote. “The men circled us . . . I was becoming disoriented and felt nauseated. Something smelled toxic. Then something cold came into contact with my thigh. I gasped. ‘It’s okay, baby,’ said one of the men. ‘I’m just helping to make you look good.’ The cold moved to my inner thigh.”