“You missed a spot!” the pledge heard a fraternity brother say.
Another responded, “Yeah, that’s a pretty nasty one.”
After the men finished, sisters led the blindfolded pledges upstairs to the “education room.” When the blindfolds were removed, each pledge was standing in front of a mirror. “There was a moment of confusion as each of us noticed that circles and ‘X’s’ had been drawn on our bodies in permanent marker,” the sister wrote. “These were areas that ‘needed some work,’ the pledgemaster said. Some of the girls began to sob . . . ‘Don’t be a ninny,’ one of the members scolded. ‘It’s just going to make you a better person.’”
Another dangerous but relatively common pledge activity involves survival of abandonment: sisters abandon pledges in a remote place and expect them to find their way back to the house. In 1970, Alpha Gamma Deltas from Eastern Illinois University dropped Donna Bedinger on a back road three miles from school. As the sisters drove away, Bedinger tried to launch herself onto the car’s bumper—and died of injuries sustained to her head. In 1993, Sarah Dronek pledged a local sorority at Minnesota’s Concordia College. The sisters drove Sarah and her fellow pledges, blindfolded, across the river into Fargo, North Dakota, left them in the woods in knee-deep snow, and drove away. When the pledges returned to campus the next morning, Sarah’s foot was so frostbitten that it was too swollen to fit inside her shoe. At the sorority house, the sisters stood her up in front of the entire sorority, screamed at her about being a wimp, and, mocking her monstrously puffed blue foot, made her cry “moo.” When Sarah objected to the hazing, the sisters told her, “This is tradition. This is what we do.” After initiation, Sarah finally saw a doctor, who told her that she needed an emergency amputation. Instead, Sarah endured months of painful procedures and was able to save her toes.
If pledges think that the first few weeks are tough, they are in for great disappointment when they learn that the last week of pledging—the week before initiation—is usually known as “Hell Week,” in which the humiliation, subordination, and sleeplessness of the previous weeks are magnified. (In the 1990s, some sororities officially started referring to Hell Week with the euphemism “Inspiration Week,” but the hazing occurred nevertheless.) As Paige, a recent Phi Sigma Sigma, remembered, “They don’t tell you ‘Welcome to Hell Week,’ but you basically figure it out. We weren’t allowed to bathe or wear makeup, hair products, or contact lenses. They wanted us to look ugly, to ‘purify’ ourselves, to get rid of all of the extra fluff in our lives and concentrate on getting into the sorority. But did I sneak hair spray? Of course I did. You can look disgusting only for so long.”
Generally, missing one pledge activity can invite screaming and humiliation in front of the entire sorority but won’t necessarily prohibit a candidate from becoming a member. If she misses several activities, however, she is out. “Then they would say you didn’t have what it takes to be a sister, that you’re not giving enough of yourself to the sorority,” Paige said. “They’d say you’re going to be a ‘deadweight,’ and they didn’t want any deadweights. So you pretty much had to do all the activities and just trust that they wouldn’t make you do something you’d die from.”
These power games, these exaggerated Greek versions of Simon Says, inevitably grant the sisters more perceived influence over their new members. “When you’re pledging, you really think the older girls have so much power over you,” said Laney of Alpha Sigma Alpha. “At my school, all pledges had to participate in a campus-wide lip-sync contest. We’d see the sisters standing on chairs cheering for us and think, ‘They really do like us!’”—one reason girls continue to endure the strange and sometimes cruel treatment of pledging. After initiation, the pledges are suddenly expected to cozy up to the girls who have been tormenting them for two months. As Laney said, “They treated me like shit for nine weeks, and then at nine weeks and one day I was their sister. But you think, ‘I’m doing what everybody else had to do.’”
Pledging is one of the most controversial aspects of sorority life because of the ways girls compromise themselves to earn membership into the group. Why do so many girls willingly undergo the pledge experience? I asked this of most of the women I interviewed. “I questioned that all the time. It’s true, you look back and say, ‘Why did I have to do all that stupid crap to be able to sit in these stupid meetings every week and pay several hundred dollars a year for a few extra parties?’” Paige mused. “But it gave me a sense of belonging. Everyone needs someplace where they can mesh with people. And I wasn’t an athlete or an artist, or active in the student association. I’d feel comfortable walking up to every girl out of a hundred in that room and striking up a conversation. You had people to study with in the library. Odds were there were sisters who had taken your classes and could guide you. So the benefits outweighed the steps that it took to get in.”
“Close Contact and Deep Friendship”
MARCH 3
AMY’S IM AWAY MESSAGE
i know people change . . . it’s just mighty hard when people we care so much about drift so far away
ON BADGE DAY, SABRINA AND CAITLIN WERE NOWHERE TO be seen. The National Panhellenic Conference had declared March 3 “Badge Day,” a day during which all sorority sisters across the country were expected to wear badge attire and proudly display their pins (manufactured by one of two national sorority–approved “official jewelers”). At night, the Panhellenic Councils at college campuses nationwide were supposed to run a mandatory Badge Day Ceremony. As Amy stood with her arm around her Big Sister in the cramped room in the student center among sisters from all of State U’s sororities, she craned her neck, searching for Caitlin and Sabrina. Hundreds of sisters in sundresses and heeled sandals, clustered with their respective houses, listened quietly as a few Panhellenic Council officers stood at the front of the room reading the “Panhellenic Creed,” the mission statement of the National Panhellenic Conference:
We, as undergraduate members of women’s fraternities, stand for good scholarship, for guarding of good health, for maintenance of fine standards, and for serving, to the best of our ability, our college community. Cooperation for furthering fraternity life, in harmony with its best possibilities, is the ideal that shall guide our fraternity activities.
We, as fraternity women, stand for service through the development of character inspired by the close contact and deep friendship of individual fraternity and Panhellenic life. The opportunity for wide and wise human service, through mutual respect and helpfulness, is the tenet by which we strive to live.
After the ten-minute ceremony, the sisters dispersed.
Amy wondered if Caitlin and Sabrina were off smoking again. The two had become much closer to each other, particularly since Sabrina had broken up with the professor. But as they became increasingly inseparable, distancing themselves from other sisters and from Alpha Rho, they were also drifting away from Amy. Part of the rift, Amy knew, could be attributed to the fact that Caitlin and Sabrina regularly smoked marijuana with non-Greek friends and she did not—and it frustrated her that something like pot could drive the friends apart. But there was more to it than that. On several occasions, Amy saw Caitlin and Sabrina leaving the house to go shopping or to the movies without inviting her. Amy wondered how much her friction with Chris had contributed to the way the Alpha Rho trio had shrunk to a duo.
Amy had been used to hearing daily updates, and now she didn’t know what was going on in her friends’ lives anymore. She didn’t even know their plans for the following week’s Spring Break. But though she missed her sisters terribly, Amy didn’t raise the issue. As hurt as she was that Caitlin and Sabrina were excluding her, Amy still didn’t want to cause conflict. She wanted to tell them that they had been right about her high school sweetheart, who had been a fantasy after all: he had called her at three o’clock one morning to tell her that he couldn’t handle a long-distance relationship. She wanted to tell them that she had gone back on her intense-exercise-and-
cabbage-soup routine and had lost four pounds already. And she wanted to tell them that Hunter, a cute baseball player, had not only kissed her but also practically invited himself to escort her to Alpha Rho’s upcoming Date Party.
Instead, she confided in Traci, the new pledge who was René’s roommate. René was another friend who had disappeared—but Amy suspected her snubs were more deliberate than Caitlin’s and Sabrina’s. René had been furious when Alpha Rho offered a bid to her roommate. For several days, she was aloof whenever Amy or Sabrina tried to talk to her. Traci relayed conversations back to the girls.
“Not another Alpha Rho,” René groaned when she heard about Traci. “Why does everyone we know go to Alpha Rho?”
This year’s rush had dredged up René’s own bitter feelings about her experience with the process. “If all my friends could get in, why couldn’t I?” she said. Amy could understand why René was angry back when she had rushed. She remembered the bitter fight they had when Amy got into Alpha Rho and René didn’t get in anywhere. “All of you are the same,” René had accused then, including Amy in the same group of girls that had just rejected her as a friend. René got over her rejection much more quickly than she seemed to be getting over her roommate’s acceptance.
“She’s having a really hard time,” Traci confided to Amy. “All of her friends got in and she didn’t. She feels like she isn’t good enough.”
Even several weeks into the pledge period, René still wouldn’t accept Amy’s frequent invitations to go out. René finally called Amy the afternoon of Date Party.
“Do you like the Alpha Rho pledgemaster?” she blurted when Amy answered the phone.
“I get along with her but she’s not one of my best friends. Why?”
“Do you think she’s being very fair?” René pressed.
“What are you getting at?”
“Traci doesn’t think she likes her. She told the pledgemaster, ‘I don’t drink. Is that going to be a problem?’ and the pledgemaster acted like it was.”
“Oh honey, the pledgemaster is a party animal,” Amy said. “She has a problem understanding why everyone doesn’t want to party. And now she’s on a power trip.”
“Traci has tried to engage her in conversation but the pledgemaster doesn’t care. You know Traci needs validation from people—but the pledgemaster won’t give her the time of day,” said René.
Amy promised to say something to Charlotte about making sure the pledgemaster wasn’t forcing the pledges to do things they didn’t want to do.
Actually, this year the Alpha Rhos were being extra careful to have as uneventful a pledge period as possible. Many national offices had cracked down hard on hazing, warning that any chapter caught hazing could lose its charter. Traditionally on Bid Day, the sisters would take the pledges out to the theater or a fancy dinner. Throughout the pledge period, the sisters would send the pledges on scavenger hunts, set up various games during which the pledges received presents, and assign rotating “Swan Pals,” or temporary Big Sisters, to help them through the pledge period. But under this year’s national rules, it seemed that all of those activities could be construed as hazing. Because they were so confused about the rules and afraid of possible repercussions, the Alpha Rhos decided they were safer not doing anything to or with the pledges at all. So they planned nothing. The only items the pledges received were a Bid Day jersey, the usual “new member guide” (a binder full of rules and regulations sent down from the national office), and the “pledge pin”—a cheap, tiny pin that would be replaced by the gold Alpha Rho pin during the initiation ceremony. The only pledge activities were “Clue Week”—the week leading up to the assignment of Big Sisters—and a weekly pledge test on Alpha Rho history to prepare the pledges for the national Alpha Rho exam they would have to pass before they were initiated.
About a week before initiation, however, the sisters realized that eliminating pledge activities had caused a more urgent problem than violating national rules. Several of the older girls complained to the pledgemaster that initiation was around the corner, yet they still didn’t actually know their soon-to-be-sisters. Usually each new pledge class took care to buy sisters lunch, send them cards, or invite them to coffee in an effort to show the sisters they cared enough to meet them. “This year the pledges aren’t doing anything,” the sisters griped. “It’s their job to go out of their way to get to know us and they haven’t done that.” The pledgemaster agreed to yell at the pledges, who arrived together at the house the next day, cleaned the sisters’ bedrooms thoroughly, and left adoring notes on each sister’s pillow.
“And now, since the pledges got in trouble,” René told Amy, “Traci feels really bad. She knows you, Sabrina, and Caitlin had to do pledge things and be at the house and stuff, and Traci doesn’t have to do anything. Traci doesn’t feel like she belongs.”
“Everyone just loves Traci,” Amy reassured her. “The sisters were sweating her like no other. People were like, ‘I wanna be her.’”
René was silent.
“Anyway,” Amy said, “do you want to go to the bars tonight?”
René’s answer was the same as it had been all semester, even though Amy was careful to invite her to activities that had nothing to do with the sorority. “Nah,” she said. “I have stuff to do.”
That night, Amy got ready for Date Party alone.
Revelation
MARCH 22
CAITLIN’S IM AWAY MESSAGE
Only child, my ass. Scha-wing!
EXCITED BUT NERVOUS, CAITLIN WAITED IN THE CHAPTER room with the other sisters on Revelation Night, the night before initiation when each pledge learned which sister would be her Big Sister. On Monday, the pledgemaster and her assistant, who knew the pledges the best, matched up pledges with the sisters who wanted to be Big Sisters and informed each Big Sister who her Little Sister would be. Caitlin wasn’t surprised that she didn’t recognize her Little Sister’s name. She didn’t know the names of most of the pledges, unlike Sabrina, who had quickly bonded with Andrea, C.C.’s Little-Sister-to-be. But Caitlin, who was an only child, didn’t care whom she was assigned to. She just wanted to be a Big Sister.
Once Caitlin realized who her Little Sister was (she had to have the pledgemaster surreptitiously point her out one night before a pledge meeting), she was pleased. She knew that the girl was quiet and not annoying, like some of the other pledges, and that she was a fellow athlete who played on State U’s club soccer team. Caitlin spent the next few days shopping for her Little Sister. Every day that week, she was supposed to give the pledgemaster a box of presents to pass on to her Little Sister. Each box contained clues to the Big Sister’s identity, as well as some Alpha Rho items. The Big Sisters had been told not to spend more than $200 on gifts for their Little Sisters, but Caitlin couldn’t help spending more. She wanted to make sure that her Little Sister’s boxes were filled to the brim and that her Little Sister wasn’t one of the pledges—there were some every year—whose boxes were dinky and halfhearted compared to those of the other pledges. Caitlin packed her boxes with Alpha Rho clothes, mugs, picture frames, and a stuffed swan, the sorority mascot. For clues she included apple-flavored candy and apple pastries (representing her hometown, the Big Apple), a key chain with a pair of miniature running shoes (representing her athleticism), and a collection of scrunchies (representing the ponytail Caitlin wore nearly every day, to her sisters’ amusement).
Now Caitlin stood in a circle of sisters, waiting anxiously for the Revelation ceremony to begin. Caitlin pelted herself with what-if questions. What if she and her Little Sister didn’t have much in common? What if her Little Sister didn’t like her? Finally, the pledgemaster led the eager pledges into the darkened chapter room and hooked them into the circle. One by one, the pledgemaster called out the name of a pledge, who stood in the middle of the circle. The girls on the perimeter passed around a lit candle and sang a syrupy song about families. When the candle reached the pledge’s Big Sister for the second time, she ble
w out the candle and stepped forward to hug her new Little Sister.
As Caitlin’s Little Sister stepped to the center of the circle, Caitlin was overcome with a sense of warmth. When Caitlin had first joined Alpha Rho, she didn’t know anything about Greek life. She didn’t even know if she would remain a part of it. A year later, she was proud to have stuck with her sorority, proud that she had been able to get so much out of it, such as the leadership skills she had gained as vice president. Caitlin wasn’t close with her Big Sister or Grand Big Sister—what with her mother’s constant harping, she didn’t desire guidance and control from any more females. But now, as she was about to receive a Little Sister, Caitlin thought about how that meant that instead of being one of the youngest girls in the house, she now knew enough to be able to guide a new girl through the process. She could teach her Little Sister how to experience sorority life without getting caught up in the superficialities, and how to navigate sorority politics while keeping her outside life intact. But the most important advice Caitlin planned to give her Little Sister was that if she gave Alpha Rho the chance, it might introduce her to her new best friend, as it had for Caitlin and Sabrina. This was her Little Sister’s night, Caitlin knew, but she couldn’t help feeling that this was a special night for her, too. Caitlin decided that this was the defining moment of sorority life for her, the moment that affirmed that joining Alpha Rho had been the best decision she had made in college. She couldn’t wait to assume the role of Big Sister.
After the ceremony, the new Big Sisters took their Little Sisters to an assigned bedroom, where the rest of the family awaited them. Caitlin, her Big Sister, and her Grand Big Sister chatted with their newest addition, who was enthusiastic about meeting her family. They gave her “Welcome to the Family” cards and a sweatshirt on which they had hand-sewn the Alpha Rho letters in their “family pattern”: a blue and green tartan. Some families made their new members undergo a family-specific initiation, which usually consisted of drinking a shot of the family’s traditional drink, but Caitlin’s family didn’t do that. Instead, before they drove her home for the night, they presented Caitlin’s Little Sister with the “family lavaliere,” which had been passed down from Big Sister to Little Sister for several years.
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