Pledged (9 page)

When Sex Turns to Scandal

WHAT HAPPENED TO CAITLIN IS HARDLY UNCOMMON.
Several studies h
ave found that rape and sexual assault are particularly prevalent at Greek events and houses. Out of the four State U sorority sisters whom I chose to follow throughout the academic year, two turned out to have been raped by fraternity brothers after Greek functions: Caitlin by a new acquaintance and Amy by a friend (I didn’t know about these incidents when I chose the girls). It would be irresponsible, though, to suggest that these kinds of episodes, however common, characterize the Greek system as a whole or that they occur only in the Greek system. Yet it is still important to explore the sexual side of fraternity-sorority relations because of its broader statements about the image and function of sororities and the power distribution within them.

In the Greek system, sex, whether assault or affair, rarely remains an issue between the participating individuals alone. At one university, sorority sisters convinced a sister who was raped at a fraternity party not to report the rape because if she did, the fraternity brothers would “hate” them and wouldn’t invite them to parties anymore. In Caitlin’s case, the rape caused a lasting rift between the entire sorority and the entire fraternity. When I asked Caitlin why, after her experience, she would still want to be a part of this system, she told me that what happened to her could have happened at any party. When I asked her why she fought to return to Alpha Rho, she said that besides the chance to hone leadership skills, she had by then also already forged a connection with her pledge class. “In high school, I bounced a lot between groups and was kind of a loner. So in Alpha Rho, it felt really good to feel like I was part of a group. Since we had to be at the house several days a week for pledging, I’d already spent so much time with these girls,” she told me. “I was so proud of myself because I had gotten into my first-choice house. I couldn’t see cutting that out of my life.” In fact, because the rape had occurred within the Greek system, Caitlin said she felt more protected than if she and the rapist had not been Greek. “I know Kappa Tau Chi can’t do anything because there are enough people who know about it. There’s a ‘They can’t touch me’ mentality,” she said. “But it’s still awkward at functions when the sisters are wearing letters and standing with their house and the brothers are wearing letters and standing with their house. I’m standing in my letters with my sorority and I’m sure they look at me and think I’m evil.”

Several sororities have rules that seem to discourage sex; some, if not most, have a strict bylaw forbidding men from venturing upstairs in the house. Many sororities impose a curfew on male guests and forbid sisters from hosting them overnight. During one mid-Atlantic sorority house meeting I attended at the beginning of the year, the adviser instructed the sisters that they even had to “escort male guests to the bathroom.” But that hardly deterred the girls; that mid-Atlantic house was known as one of the most promiscuous houses on campus. State U’s Alpha Rho and Beta Pi both utterly ignored the no-overnight-guest rule. Some of Brooke’s Texas Eta Gamma sisters blatantly defied it by regularly sneaking boys into the supposedly secret chapter room to have sex.

But the real problem isn’t one of sorority sisters hustling boys into a no-guy zone under cover of bunk bed. The more interesting issue is the sorority system’s contradictory perspectives about sex. On the one hand, the girls are reminded of the need to appear chaste and ladylike; on the other hand, they are pressured to find dates for a multitude of events and are encouraged to go to fraternity formals, which often include an overnight hotel stay. This paradoxical view can confuse new members, who then look to the older sisters to lead by example. An interesting power structure ensues, on two levels. From the fraternities’ perspective, sororities generally consist of attractive girls who have already been prescreened through the rush process. These girls have dates to offer because they need escorts to the many Greek system functions. So a sorority can afford to be a selective group, which is why it is the sororities who usually have control over the Greek Week escort process and can choose the highest bidder (or most generous suitor) from among the fraternities. But the sexual power structure
within
sororities is even more fascinating. When girls are put in charge of other girls—younger girls who don’t yet understand the political landscape within the house—sex can become a commodity and a way to establish dominance within the sisterhood.

In 1997, a sorority girl came forward to announce that her sorority had ordered her pledge class to sleep with an entire fraternity. The pledge class was sent to stay at a fraternity at another college, where the girls were told to have sex with the brothers. “You have to sleep with the brothers here in order for you to cross over,” the pledges were told. “You have to sleep with them . . . That’s your duty.” At first, the girl thought it was a joke. But when she again was told that her pledge class had to have sex with the fraternity brothers as well as the fraternity’s pledges, she refused and depledged.

Other university groups have attempted to capitalize on sorority sisters’ sexuality. One of the biggest sex scandals to hit the sorority system allegedly occurred at Southern Methodist University in the late 1970s and early 1980s. SMU boosters reportedly set up a student-run network that paid sorority sisters to have sex with athletic recruits to persuade them to play for the SMU Ponies (the boosters also supposedly bribed university secretaries to alter course grades for athletes and paid other students to take tests and write papers for football players). Under the supervision of the boosters, an SMU law student known as “King Rat” worked with four other students to pay about a dozen sorority girls $400 per weekend to seduce recruits. They gave the sisters a booster’s credit card, a fur coat, and a Mercedes-Benz to use to entertain the athletes. The girls were instructed to sleep with the recruits both to convince them to come to SMU (with promises of continued sex if they did) and to get information about what other schools were illegally offering the high school athletes. The sorority sex network, which began in 1979, ended in 1985 when the sorority sisters became too frightened by the emergence of AIDS to continue sleeping with strangers. These and other allegations led the NCAA to impose its first “death penalty” on a football program when it prohibited SMU from playing football in 1987.

The SMU sex scandal, which the media dubbed “Ponytail Gate,” seemed to involve consenting sorority sisters who were willing to sell sex as something of a fund-raiser (as an alternative to, say, bake sales). But other sorority women have stepped forward since then to claim that they were expected to provide similar services despite their unwillingness to participate. One evening in 1988, a sorority girl who was a little sister to the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity at Florida’s Stetson University attended a punk-themed mixer. At the “Pike” house, the little sister, wearing a denim miniskirt, black stockings, and black shoes, went to the bar area and drank a couple of rum runners. She went into another room where she had an “upside-down margarita”: she lay down with her mouth open while three brothers poured three kinds of alcohol down her throat. Eventually she passed out on the dance floor. When she came to, she was being gang-raped by fraternity brothers, who scattered when she started to scream. “How could they do this to me?” she shouted. “I’ve done so much for them.” The next day, the little sister returned to the Pike house and resigned. She later found out that while she lay semiconscious and stripped of her skirt, stockings, and shoes, several of the brothers poked and slapped her and poured shampoo over her body as they laughed and pointed. She also learned that the event had been a “spectrum”—a fraternity term for sex as spectator sport; while some brothers raped her, others stood outside on top of a bicycle rack to peer through a window at the scene. A former Pike later admitted that the house held spectrums twice a month. The little sister dropped out of school.

Fraternity chapters started the little sister programs (a different group from the Little Sisters within sororities) in the 1960s, but by the late 1980s universities had begun to abolish fraternity little sisters because of claims that the fraternities were sexually exploiting the girls. In 1988, the Association of Fraternity Advisers resolved that the program treated the women as “subservient or ‘second-class’ status.” At the University of Missouri-Columbia, which suspended its little sisters program after a spate of sexual assaults in 1989, some of the girls were forced to drink alcohol and read sexually explicit material before meeting their “big brothers.” The University of South Florida terminated its program in 1990 because of complaints of sexual harassment. And a 1994 report from the University of Rhode Island discussed how fraternity brothers referred to little sisters as “freshmeat” and held parties where some female students were denied entry because their breasts were too small.

But experts told me that these organizations continue to exist, both openly and underground, even though neither the National Panhellenic Conference nor the Interfraternity Council condones little sisters. According to the 1985 book
Rush: A Girl’s Guide to Sorority Success,
little sisters are generally defined as a group of between eight and twenty girls, often sorority members, chosen by fraternity brothers to “help the fraternity plan and hold parties and have money-raising projects to buy the fraternity expensive gifts.” Little sisters often pay dues and attend weekly dinners and little sister meetings at the fraternity house. The relationships often become far more complex.

Many fraternities also expect the little sisters to be their cheerleaders at athletic events, to cook for them, to clean up after parties, and to serve as trophy dates to help them recruit new brothers by flaunting their sexuality to rushees. Fraternity brothers use pictures or slide shows of their little sisters to lure recruits and suggest that joining the fraternity will give them sexual access to these girls. The pictures have ranged from charts explaining the number of beers it took to seduce each little sister to glossy, full-color centerfold advertisements of the sisters in bathing suits accompanied by the explanation, “Chosen on the basis of beauty, charm, and loyalty to [this fraternity], they remember our birthdays, host parties for us, and generally take pretty good care of the brothers.”

“Take pretty good care” is quite the euphemism. Several little sisters have admitted that their membership included sex with many of the brothers, with gang rape a distinct possibility. Studies of these programs have shown that a girl is often expected to have sex with most of the brothers in order to be accepted as a little sister in the first place. Indeed, there have been cases when little sisters who refused to have sex with a brother were kicked out of the program, or “had their jersey pulled.” Even girls who have merely broken up with a boyfriend in the fraternity—or who have dated a member of a different fraternity—have had their jerseys pulled. But fraternities have also kicked out sisters who became too promiscuous, leaving a blurry line between what is considered appropriate little sister sexual behavior and what is shunned.

At one little sister initiation ceremony, the girls had to touch their breasts while simulating oral sex on a banana. They still would not receive their little sister pins unless they French-kissed the other little sisters sexily enough to meet with the brothers’ approval. Some fraternities auction off their sisters in an annual fund-raiser known as “Slave Auction.” As the little sisters are encouraged to drink and “hump the pole” on a stage, brothers bid on their “services,” including baking, cleaning, and driving.

Competition to become a little sister is intense. When a fraternity selects a little sister, the brothers might take her for a limousine ride or give her roses. “They . . . sing and put you on their lap and lean on one knee,” one little sister told then-doctoral student Mindy Stombler, who studied the programs. “It was seen as a big honor,” another sister said. “It feels good that so many guys have picked you. When they came and got me, I was so light-headed that I almost fell over.” The perceived prestige is partly why the girls accept this kind of treatment—and may similarly explain sorority sisters’ devotion to the importance of fraternity relations. A little sister told Stombler, “Something that made me so mad was that they would tell us to go up to the would-be pledge and make sure that he is having a good time . . . [The brother would say] ‘You know, dance with him or give him a drink or something or walk outside with him,’” she said. “I wouldn’t stand up at a little sister meeting and say, ‘They’re using us.’ I didn’t feel like I had the power to do that.”

OCTOBER

Clothes are the first thing sororities will notice about you. You must dress appropriately. Proper attire does not necessarily mean expensive designer clothes. (But wearing them can’t hurt!) Rather, your clothes should fit into your personal style while expressing a sorority girl image.

—Rush: A Girl’s Guide to Sorority Success, 1985

Big and little sisters exchange presents on every holiday (Christmas, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Halloween, Easter, and so on). Birthdays are expensive gift-giving times. Popular gifts are handcrafted or specially made objects that represent the sorority’s symbol, crest, colors, or Greek letters. Needlepoint is very popular, as are hand-painted wooden and acrylic objects. Fresh flowers are a must.

—Rush: A Girl’s Guide to Sorority Success, 1985

OCTOBER 6

SABRINA’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

if i’m going to waste time, i’m going to do it right.

FOUNDERS DAY, OCTOBER 6,
was one of the few occasions when all thirteen Alpha Rho alumnae advisers—a general supervisor and an adviser for each executive board position—showed up at the house. On each anniversary of the founding of Alpha Rho, the girls were required to dress in “badge attire,” which meant they had to wear their gold, bejeweled Alpha Rho pins, or “badges,” and dress as if they were going to church or synagogue: no denim, no sneakers. Usually the unofficial dress code in the house was dictated only by what most girls happened to be wearing that season. But badge attire was ordered for alumnae functions, certain events, and one chapter meeting—the “formal meeting”—each month.

Sabrina padded downstairs in jeans at 3 p.m., when the girls had been instructed to come down to the entry hall. Sabrina wouldn’t have to mingle for long; when Caitlin came back from her lacrosse scrimmage, she was supposed to take Sabrina to a campus bar to watch a National Football League game. As the sisters gathered on the front stairs to sit and sip iced lemonade while waiting for the alumnae to show up, they eyed the crystal-fringed dining room, where fancy trays sported finger sandwiches, berries, and coffee cake cubes. Fiona, the event chair, had announced to the group that no one could eat anything until the alumnae arrived.

About two dozen alums walked in the door—women ranging from their twenties to their seventies. By 3:30, the girls were finally allowed to converge on the tables. Immediately, Fiona made a beeline for Amy and another sister, who, at size 10, were the largest girls in the sorority (though by no means portly). “Make sure you don’t take too much food,” Fiona hissed. She didn’t warn any of the other girls, who piled their plates high.

After the group mingled, Fiona ushered the girls into the chapter room for speeches. Every year on Founders Day, the returning alumnae spoke to the sisters about what it was like to be in Alpha Rho, what Alpha Rho had done for them, and how the sorority had remained a part of their lives since graduation. As the room hushed, there was a loud knock at the chapter room door. Fiona opened it a crack, and the entire room turned to look at Caitlin, their vice president.

“You can go in and sit down,” Fiona whispered. “She’s getting ready to speak.”

“Oh, I’m just picking up Sabrina and passing through,” Caitlin whispered back. Sabrina, relieved, slipped out the door while Fiona watched, mouth agape.

“But this is
Founders Day
!”

“Yep,” Caitlin said, laughing, and she and Sabrina, braids flying, scampered out of the house.

Despite the occasional outing, Sabrina was working harder than she had in previous semesters. Accustomed to getting a 4.0, she had received Bs on a few papers already this term and had resolved to work harder. Part of the problem was that she had added shifts to her waitressing schedule and she was taking more course credits than usual. On the first day of classes, she had checked out a creative writing class just to hear what the class was about. She hadn’t planned on taking it; she didn’t need the credit. But Professor Stone, a good-looking man in his late thirties, had interesting things to say and seemed like such an engaging teacher that Sabrina decided to cram his course into her schedule.

Now that Sabrina lived in the Alpha Rho house, where she was constantly barraged by reminders of Alpha Rho commitments, she was having a difficult time balancing her heavy courseload with the sorority. When she had accepted Alpha Rho’s bid as a freshman, she hadn’t foreseen the scores of obligations that would come with it. Nor had she expected membership to be so expensive. It didn’t seem to bother the rest of the Alpha Rhos that there were a multitude of less obvious sorority costs in addition to the dues. For instance, sisters were supposed to buy Alpha Rho–lettered clothes in blue and green, the sorority colors. When Little Sisters were assigned in early March, each Big Sister had to buy gifts: food, Alpha Rho clothes, Alpha Rho trinkets, jewelry. For Greek events, sisters had to purchase tickets and were strongly encouraged to buy the party favors and T-shirts the sorority inevitably created to go along with every event—in addition to new dresses, shoes, accessories, jewelry, and limousines for every semiformal and Formal. They were also constantly being asked to donate to various charity and sorority fund drives. This was on top of the cash needed for the frequent casual sorority outings to bars, clubs, or restaurants. Most sisters didn’t think twice about the money. Sabrina couldn’t get it out of her mind.

Moneyline

THE FINANCIAL COMMITMENT A SISTER MUST MAKE TO HER
sorority can be enormous. In fact, many girls cite this as one reason why candidates who wouldn’t be able to withstand the financial drain of sorority membership simply won’t be accepted to the sorority in the first place. Wealth becomes a prohibitive prerequisite. (At Syracuse, one Greek newspaper boasts that, as at many schools, “Social Greeks tend to be the wealthiest and most mobile segment of the SU student population, pledging a social life and bringing a large disposable income.”) When sororities evaluate candidates during rush, the rushees’ financial status, which sororities determine partly by assessing the rushees’ wardrobes and asking what their parents do for a living, plays a major role. If a sorority doesn’t believe that a girl will be able to pay sorority dues—which can range from a few hundred dollars to $2,500 a semester—it’s not likely to accept her as a member. (Sabrina had made clear to the sisters that she would take on enough hours waitressing to afford her dues.) Sorority dues cover the costs of sorority functions as well as fees paid to the campus Panhellenic association and the chapter’s national office.

Sorority chapters also impose fines on members who miss meetings or house events; Brooke’s Texas house fined its girls up to $50 if they let their grades slip, skipped sorority study hall, or missed activities such as decorating the Homecoming float. The emphasis on finances can partly be explained away by the reality that sororities are run like businesses. Each campus chapter is expected to contribute a certain amount of money both to the national organization and to the national organization’s philanthropic cause.

Moreover, in certain houses, there is an image to uphold. State U’s Alpha Rho was not so homogeneous that any sister who didn’t conform to certain fashion standards was necessarily shut out; Sabrina wasn’t shunned because she couldn’t afford the Louis Vuitton bags that her sisters clutched. But once as we walked from a restaurant to her house, passing a pack of designer-clad sorority girls giggling loudly, Sabrina said quietly to me, “Sometimes it feels like I’m the only one who’s not wealthy.” She wasn’t bitter about the stark line between her and her sisters, though I occasionally caught her wondering what might have been had money not played such a large role in these girls’ lives. “It’s natural that people gravitate toward people more like them, and I’m not a lot like them. I can’t buy a new Formal dress every semester,” she said. Sometimes Sabrina tried to blend in: she’d see her sisters carelessly spending money at malls and bars and convince herself that since everyone else was splurging she would, too. But she always ended up regretting her indulgence and secretly returning the items later.

Obligation

OCTOBER 11

VICKI’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

my life has officially been taken over

VICKI AND OLIVIA WERE SHOPPING IN THE CITY WHEN
their Beta Pi
sister Ashleigh, a sweet though oversensitive girl who tended to wear hot pink, called to warn them. Tonight was Dance Marathon—a popular nationwide fund-raiser—but many of the sisters who were supposed to represent Beta Pi had left for the weekend for a fraternity semiformal at a lakeside resort and waterpark. As a result, the Beta Pi president was calling the remaining sisters to assign times to dance throughout the night in a hotel ballroom. “If you see a strange number on your cell,” Ashleigh told Vicki, “don’t answer it. The only sister she’s excusing from Dance Marathon is Laura-Ann because she has major period cramps.”

Vicki groaned. The last thing she needed was another last-minute Beta Pi commitment. If she had been told ahead of time that the sorority needed her to dance that night, she would have done it because she knew the money raised was for a good cause: a neonatal care unit at a local hospital. But now? Forget it. Of all of the inane sorority rules Vicki was expected to follow, she couldn’t see why she should have to prioritize last-minute dancing in the middle of the night.

Vicki was afraid to go back to the house, where the sisters might see them, but the girls had to drop off their things and shower and change before going out that night. They parked a few blocks away, where Olivia’s car would not be noticed, spit-wiped Olivia’s wrists free of her telltale perfume, and sneaked inside the back door. When they heard people talking on the main staircase, Olivia quickly led Vicki up the back stairs, the girls stifling their laughter as they managed to slip unseen into their room. Once inside—relieved that Morgan and Laura-Ann, their roommates, weren’t there—they didn’t turn on the lights and play music as they usually did when they were getting ready to go out. Instead, they whispered and tiptoed back and forth between closets as they arranged their clothes for the night. “We’re, like, so shady!” Vicki murmured giddily.

Vicki and Olivia peeked out of the room to see if anyone was around and, when the hall was empty, sprinted in their towels and shower shoes to the bathroom. While showering, they kept their towels with them inside the stalls so other sisters couldn’t identify them. As they crept back to their room they heard voices complaining downstairs. “There are girls hiding in their rooms upstairs so they don’t have to dance, and that’s not fair.” Vicki and Olivia looked at each other wide-eyed and, muffling their laughter, shimmied back into their room. While Olivia applied her usual thick coat of eyeliner, the two were plotting how to escape the house unnoticed when Olivia’s cell phone rang—its distinctive tune, to Pink’s “Get the Party Started,” easily recognizable to the sisters down the hall. With a sigh, Olivia picked up to hear the Beta Pi president asking her to come downstairs. The sisters who had been in the house that afternoon while Olivia and Vicki were shopping had grabbed the most convenient dance shifts: 5–7 p.m. or 7–10 p.m. The only ones left for Vicki and Olivia, the president told them, were 2–5 a.m. or 5–9 a.m.

“Oh. My. God. Just because we weren’t here doesn’t mean we should get stuck with the worst shift,” Olivia fumed. Vicki slouched quietly by her side.

“There’s nothing we can do about it,” the president said.

“It’s not our fault the fund-raising chair didn’t do her job.” The president relented and allowed Olivia and Vicki to split the 5–9 a.m. shift.

After joining Olivia at a bar to drown their frustration in Amaretto Sours, Vicki managed about an hour of sleep that night before she had to get to the ballroom. Although each sorority was required to have girls dancing at all times, sisters could get away with standing and making mild gestures, if necessary. Vicki spent her shift folded in a corner for two hours, hiding behind her wavy blond bangs and grumbling to herself about the pointlessness of being there as she waited for Olivia to relieve her. She couldn’t even spend the time talking to her friends back home because they didn’t stay up that late. That night the sororities that participated in Dance Marathon raised tens of thousands of dollars.

Pancake Philanthropy

DANCE MARATHON, A COMMON GREEK FUND-RAISER
, underscores a sentiment I observed in many sorority houses: community service, widely publicized as a cornerstone of sorority life, often revolves more around donations than actual service. The level of commitment to community service varies widely by the chapter. Some chapters do nothing. Only on occasion did I come across a sorority that in fact exhibited a regular commitment to service rather than philanthropy, such as the groups that signed up for “Adopt-a-Grandmother” at a local senior center, cleaned up trash around a riverbed, tutored, or visited a children’s hospital to give young female patients manicures and accessories to make each feel like a “Queen for a Day.” Many chapters, however, merely profess a commitment to community service, spending no more than an hour a semester making and distributing arts and crafts or holding an annual party and donating the proceeds.

Because what I’ll call “event philanthropy”—a once-a-semester or yearly function for charity, like Dance Marathon—is so popular, I spent an October evening with a West Coast university Tri-Delt house to observe the annual traditional fund-raiser of many Tri-Delt chapters: a middle-of-the-night, all-you-can-eat pancake buffet party.

It was 12:30 and the Tri-Delt house was packed. After paying the $10 cover and getting the Tri-Delt triangle drawn on my hand in permanent marker to prove I had paid, I wove my way through the students, around the all-male a cappella group serenading a pack of swooning sisters wearing identical T-shirts designed for the party, and past a table heaped high with small pancakes, slices of coffee cake, and Krispy Kremes. Many of the Tri-Delt sisters were taking shifts in a satellite house, where they were frantically flipping pancakes and rushing them back to the Tri-Delt house.