Pledged (34 page)

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.”

“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: