When Charlotte finally arrived toward the end of the meeting, a few girls presented the group’s final recommendation: she should switch with Grace and move into the quad so that no one else in the house would be affected. Charlotte only smiled. Shortly afterward, she came up to the Penthouse to see if any Pents wanted to go to a frat party. The girls were still talking about the meeting.
“Charlotte,” Sabrina said, “we’re all sisters, so we’re supposed to be friends. Why can’t we all live together? Is it really that big a deal?”
Charlotte raised her chin. “Yes,” she said. “There are certain people I could never live with, and people who could never live with me.” She sat down on Fiona’s bed, where the two conversed quietly.
“I guess we won’t be rooming together,” Fiona said within Sabrina’s earshot.
Sabrina was startled to hear Charlotte’s mocking laughter. “We still could,” she said smugly, “if we really want to.”
C.C., the vice president of House Affairs, was frantic. She told Sabrina in tears that the handful of girls who had spent the fall semester abroad had already sent word back that they refused to live in the house if they had to live in the quads or the Penthouse. In her elected position, C.C. was obligated by Nationals to make sure every bed was paid for, which was becoming an increasingly unlikely scenario.
Sabrina and C.C. had each gained enough merit points to move downstairs. C.C., Sabrina could see, wasn’t going to move because it would make her job more difficult. Sabrina hated the Penthouse—living with twenty-five other girls was extremely difficult for a person who cherished her privacy—but she didn’t want to cause C.C. additional grief (or draw her sisters’ ire) by kicking girls out of downstairs rooms if it meant they would move out of the house rather than live in the Penthouse. Sabrina decided to keep her bed in the Penthouse. She was staying at Mike’s three or four nights a week anyway.
Their relationship was progressing, but Sabrina was still uneasy with the fact that they were teacher and student, a sensation she attributed to her personal insecurities, not to him. The awkward part was the way he was treating her in his class. He didn’t call attention to her, positively or negatively, in front of the other students—nothing like that—but he was grading her papers harder than he had graded them before they had started dating, and much harder than he graded the work of other students in the class. Instead of her usual As, Mike was giving her B+s, which were a slap in the face to a student who was used to 4.0 semesters. Before they began dating, she had received As on her last two quizzes. But on the quiz he handed back today, he took a point off because she had one spelling mistake, an error that had nothing to do with what Mike taught in class. While at Mike’s house, Sabrina read some of her classmates’ papers. Though the content was decent, the papers were fraught with grammatical and spelling mistakes, but Mike still gave them As. He told Sabrina that he had graded her harder than the other students because he could tell that she was much more talented than her classmates. He wanted her to “realize her potential.” Sabrina was resentful but didn’t want to say anything to him about it yet. She would wait to see what grade he gave her for the semester. She loved him, she thought, but wondered whether her visions of him as her husband had perhaps been too hasty.
Double Standard
DECEMBER 13
VICKI’S IM AWAY MESSAGE
i have the boys at state wrapped around my finger!
AFTER DANCING AND DRINKING WITH WILLIAM THROUGHOUT the Beta Pi Winter Formal, Vicki was sorry to see it end relatively early, at 1 a.m. She would have preferred to stay the night at the hotel, but sorority rules required that sisters ride the chartered bus back to the house. Nonetheless, several seniors decided to stay at the hotel anyway. They told the juniors and sophomores and their dates to spread out on the bus so that it wouldn’t be obvious that a handful of sisters were missing. William and Vicki spent the rest of the night smoking and sleeping in his room at the Iota house.
When Vicki got back to the Beta Pi house the next day, Dan called her.
“Do you want to go to a fraternity Formal with a fellow Californian this weekend?” he asked, so nonchalantly that he caught Vicki off guard.
“Okay,” she said.
“You sure?”
“Um, yeah.”
“Cool. Don’t worry about paying for anything. I’ll even cover breakfast,” said Dan.
“Breakfast?” Vicki asked, startled.
“Vicki, it is a Formal.” The Formals for the fraternities on campus were overnight affairs, including travel to faraway cities and anywhere from one to three nights in a hotel.
In the hotel room Vicki and Dan shared with another brother and his date, Vicki self-consciously put on a bit of makeup while the brothers watched curiously. At the dance, Vicki stuck close to Dan and the few Beta Pi sisters who were fellow dates. When Dan went outside for a cigarette, Vicki snuck into the lobby and checked her cell phone voice mail. William had called twice to tell her he was wondering where she was and that he was waiting for her to come over. Vicki hurriedly left a message for William so that he wouldn’t think she had disappeared for the night. After the dance, when Vicki and Dan got back to their room, Dan passed out immediately on the bed. Relieved, Vicki curled up on the opposite side until morning.
The next afternoon William called. “Where were you?” he asked.
“Out with a friend,” said Vicki.
“I’m a little jealous, I have to say,” he admitted.
“Ha-ha, I made you jealous,” Vicki teased. William was not the jealous type.
At William’s Iota Formal the following weekend, Vicki was dismayed to hear William refer to her as his girlfriend. “I love everything about you,” he kept repeating when they were in their hotel room after the dance. “You’re fun, you’re pretty, and you’re smart.” Hoping his effusiveness was merely prompted by alcohol, and wanting to avoid a serious relationship discussion, she didn’t object. Instead, she changed the subject before he might try to say the three words she didn’t want to hear. Olivia had warned Vicki that if she were to suggest to William that they act less like a couple, he wouldn’t handle it well. He had already IMed Olivia that she and her sisters were going to have to do a better job of sharing Vicki with him in the spring semester.
In the morning, however, as they woke up sober, William kissed her and ran his hands through her hair, which now was long enough to brush her collarbone. “I love you so much,” he murmured. Vicki tried not to gasp as he kept kissing her.
“I’m tired,” she said when they pulled away.
“Why is this so weird?” he asked, sensing the change in tension.
“Um, I just got out of this serious relationship. I wasn’t expecting you to say that to me. I don’t want a boyfriend.”
William spoke casually. “It’s okay, Vicki, it’s just an emotion. What I said isn’t that important,” he reassured her. “It’s just something we have to get past so we don’t wake up in the morning and it’s weird.” Vicki felt better.
Setting Boundaries
DECEMBER 14
CAITLIN’S IM AWAY MESSAGE
I am a prisoner here of my own device.
THE SECRET HOUSE MEETING ABOUT CHRIS, MEDIATED BY the House Mom, lasted an hour. Caitlin was surprised at how civil it was. Caitlin, Amy, and Grace agreed that Chris would be allowed into the house—after Winter Break. For the remainder of the semester, if Caitlin wanted to see Chris, she would have to meet with him at his apartment or elsewhere. The girls also set rules in place for the spring semester. When school resumed in early January, Chris would not be allowed in the house drunk, which meant that he couldn’t sleep over after events like Formal or Crush Party. If Chris became violent again, he would be forbidden to enter the house entirely. And if the couple argued loudly enough to bother any of the sisters, the girls could vote again on whether Chris would be allowed back in.
“I don’t think he should be allowed in if there are any arguments at all,” said G
race.
“I just don’t think that’s reasonable,” said Amy, shaking her dark curls emphatically.
“We shouldn’t have to be woken up because they’re screaming at each other,” Grace said.
Caitlin hadn’t known that their screaming fights throughout the semester had awakened the other girls. “Why didn’t you guys just tell me, anyway?” she asked.
“If you got over whatever you were fighting about, we didn’t want to drag up something bad,” Grace said.
“Oh please,” Caitlin said. “It’s not like I didn’t know what the fights were about or how they ended. It’s not gonna offend me. If it were me, I’d say, ‘Buddy, I could hear you last night so maybe try and watch that next time.’”
Caitlin despised the idea of treading on eggshells, but she felt worse about how the agreement would inconvenience her relationship. Fall semester lasted right up until Christmas, and she wasn’t going to be able to see Chris at all over Winter Break. Chris was even angrier about the stipulations. “Why can’t they just suck it up?” he asked her. “They don’t know when I’m in your room half the time anyway.”
It seemed ridiculous to Caitlin that, at nineteen, her relationships could be controlled by her sisters, who didn’t understand that Chris hadn’t meant to hurt her. After all, she was the one who had clocked him. And the couple had already made up. As a peace offering, Chris gave her a CD full of the love songs he believed characterized their relationship. Even Sabrina, Caitlin’s voice of reason, was convinced that Chris wouldn’t get violent again. Caitlin’s mother blamed Caitlin’s “hot temper.” But the Alpha Rhos wouldn’t listen to Caitlin. Caitlin’s only comfort was that the tension with Amy over their fight about Chris had abated.
The Scope of Authority
NO MATTER THE LENIENCY OF A CHAPTER, IF IT IS AFFILIATED with a national sorority it is beholden to the sorority’s national rules. This is why C.C. panicked about not being able to provide Alpha Rho Nationals with a report that all beds in the house would be paid for—and why Charlotte, a stickler for the rules, knew that she would be able to exploit the Nationals’ established merit points system. National sororities impose extremely strict rules on their chapters, usually stricter than those of campus Panhellenic Councils and, according to most sorority girls, always stricter than those of their fraternity counterparts. Sorority sisters at the University of Kentucky, for example, told me about what they called a double standard. “When the fraternities have a Formal, they can have it over a weekend and stay overnight at a hotel in Canada,” one said. “But we aren’t allowed to get rooms at hotels, and we can’t have any event—even Date Parties or mixers—outside of a fifteen-mile radius of Lexington.”
I had expected to find rules designed by Nationals to protect collegiate members from unsafe situations (and itself from potential lawsuits and insurance hazards); I had not expected, however, to find that national regulations could command such a broad scope of behavior. One sorority guide, for instance, explains, “Sorority girls have moral obligations that extend beyond promising to follow sorority ideals during initiation. If a member does not follow sorority morality guidelines, her pin may be jerked. If a girl’s pin is jerked, she is kicked out of the sorority.” When I asked the National Panhellenic Conference chairman about these types of rules, she vaguely explained, “Each sorority has its own standards—standards of behavior you’d expect of anyone whom you’d like to think of as a nice person. It’s just about how that’s interpreted at the local level.” The fact remains that sororities are entrenched in the traditions of their past. Over and over again at the NGLA Conference, the leaders emphasized “going back to the basics” and returning to the ideals and standards of the organizations’ founders.
One point of contention here is that “sorority morality guidelines” aren’t being developed by religious, law enforcement, or university officials; rather, they are formulated and passed down from the women who work for a sorority’s national headquarters. These are women with dubious qualifications, for whom there may be no specific requirements save enthusiasm—certainly no degree requirements—who may be stuck in a time warp, from the era of their own active sorority membership. (Campus advisers sponsored by the university, by contrast, usually have a graduate degree in student personnel administration, counseling, or educational administration.)
Another troublesome aspect of these moral standards is that they leave room for interpretation by the girls who lead the chapter. For example, the sorority guide specifically states, “The most common reason a girl is kicked out of a sorority is that others feel she has a questionable reputation—QR. Questionable reputation is the term given to a girl whose conduct, behavior, or appearance is not acceptable according to her sorority’s guidelines.” In the same way that Charlotte was able to use the national rules to her advantage, so, too, could the “mean girls” described in November’s chapter use “QR” to run a less popular girl out of their sorority.
The guide goes on to delineate certain types of behavior deemed morally unacceptable for sorority members (in these direct quotes, the emphasis is in the original):
• Sorority girls do not have sex. The easiest and most common way a member’s reputation comes into question is for her to have sex indiscriminately and indiscreetly. Spending the night with a date is generally unacceptable for sorority girls. It is usually overlooked at least the first time a girl passes out (from drinking too much) at her date’s place—unless he lives in a fraternity house, where it is never acceptable . . .
• Any sleeping over is only accepted on weekend nights . . .
• Sorority girls don’t do drugs. Being caught smoking pot or partaking of other drugs is another way for a member to get her pin jerked . . .
• Sorority girls do not dress inappropriately. A sorority member may acquire a QR from something as innocent as the way she dresses. Although sororities do not dictate specific dress codes, there are definite dos and don’ts . . . The way you dress may express a loose moral attitude, which reflects on the entire sorority. Tight or revealing clothes must be avoided at all times.
The vagueness and contradictory nature of the latter rule in particular (no specific dress code, yet definite dos and don’ts) seems to reserve a sorority’s right to apply the rules to unspecified guidelines, thus allowing for purely arbitrary enforcement. The guide admits, “She may not know that she has broken a standards rule because many are unwritten. For example, the sorority may not teach pledges how to dance . . . but if a pledge (or active) dances too suggestively at a fraternity party, her pin may be jerked. Girls are kicked out of sororities for even more minor ‘standards problems,’ such as wearing midriff tops or tight jeans.”
Considering how many navels I saw at Date Dash, if this abridged list of rules still held true, there would be no Alpha Rho at State U. There would certainly be no Bitsy. But the guidebook, surprisingly, wasn’t from an era all that different from the present day—or all that removed from, say, Madonna. It was published in 1985, and many sororities still expect their girls to follow the standards it describes. Similarly, Caitlin confided to me that as Alpha Rho vice president, she had heard of another sorority’s national office that was currently debating instituting a countrywide rule that would mandate the specific items required for an official rush uniform—right down to the color of sisters’ thongs. “It would make them look a lot nicer,” Caitlin said.
“But the idea that they can mandate a thong?”
“Yeah.” Caitlin explained, “Some people wear big, frumpy underwear and their butts don’t fill it and when they bend over, their underwear comes out of their pants.”
National offices manage to enforce their broad list of regulations in several ways. Before they can be initiated, girls in many sororities are required to sign an agreement promising to abide by the Nationals’ rules. Even these written rules can be arbitrary. Kappa Delta warns new members, “Any promiscuous behavior on the part of a member or new member will result in N
ational Probation or termination of her pledge . . . Kappa Delta expects each member and new member to conduct herself in such a manner that neither her activities nor the appearance of such activities would elicit unfavorable thoughts, judgements and comments about herself and/or the sorority.”
To monitor chapters, Nationals regularly send representatives, who often stay in the guest bedroom of a house, attend meetings, and observe the active members. These representatives can include regional directors, local alumnae, or “traveling consultants.” Known under names that vary by sorority, traveling consultants are alumnae dispatched by national offices to check up on a chapter and help it become more aligned with national standards. Usually a year or two out of college, these women can spend a week or more examining a chapter’s notebooks, making sure their finances are satisfactory, and, occasionally, meeting with the campus Greek adviser. They then write a report on the chapter and deliver it to national headquarters. (“Employers look at this as valuable experience,” the National Panhellenic Conference chairman explained to me. “They’re getting around all of those airports by themselves.”)
Nationals also control chapters by appointing a number of advisers, whose duty it is to make sure the chapter is following proper policy and procedure. In addition, Nationals keep in touch with campus Greek officials: there is usually a university Greek adviser or Office of Greek Life and/or an adult director of the campus Panhellenic Council. Using these representatives’ reports, Nationals can inflict penalties on a chapter to keep its girls in tow, such as “social probation,” which limits or prohibits chapter-sponsored social events. Moreover, a chapter’s elected executive board is comprised of sisters supposedly willing to take on the extra responsibility of encouraging their chapter to adhere to Nationals’ standards.
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