Sorority Hookup Part 2

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Sorority Hookup Part 2

Rebecca Rubin is a freshman at the University of Florida, where she is majoring in Journalism.
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During the week-long process of sorority recruitment, a Potential New Member (PNM) can talk to around five sisters per house. Conversation topics range anywhere from clichéd banter, such as social events or summer plans, to interesting chatter, like a cool vacation you took or unique hobbies. But regardless of where the discussion goes, there are some secrets sorority girls will just never spill to a PNM.
On the outside looking in, the customs of Greek life may seem transparent: socials every week, frat tanks for days and throwing up your sorority’s sign whenever possible. However, there are many aspects you’d only get to know once you join. Check out some of the things sorority girls will never tell you about being in a sorority!
You probably realize you’ll need to participate in events to be an active member, but most sisters won’t reveal just how much time you’ll actually devote to the chapter. Most chapters require sisters to acquire a certain amount of points to maintain status as an active member. These points can come from attending socials and mixers or participating in philanthropic activities. Or, it could include going to assigned tailgates for football games or anything else that a chapter sees fit. This can add up to hours and hours of activities per week!
“There are weekly chapter meetings, which are mandatory and are two hours on Sunday nights. New Member meetings were Sundays for usually an hour. We attended those for eight weeks until initiation,” says Melanie, a junior at Florida State University and a Phi Mu sister. “During social season we had about one [social] a week, but those weren’t mandatory. Anything that is a good representation of the chapter is required, like participating in other chapters’ philanthropies or attending intramural games.”
Melanie says that participating in these events is deemed very important. “There is an unspoken obligation and expectation to be involved,” she says. “A lot of the girls didn’t realize how much goes into it, but my chapter makes it very easy for you to be as involved or not as you want to be.”
An awesome perk of being in a sorority is always having a place to call home. Whether you live in the house or not, that’s typically the place where meals are served and sisters come to hang out, study, relax and gossip. But these enormous homes are not always as fairytale-like as they may seem.
Ashley*, a Cornell sorority alumna, reveals, “Our house had extremely loud pipes when the heat was on. Girls would ask about it, and we would have to make up lies during rush. Also you’d never tell a rushee something like we have to pay for laundry or that we don’t have snacks out constantly like other houses.”
While these white lies might seem unfair, a sister would never want you to base your views of a chapter and its members on the house!
The new member period of joining a sorority is also referred to as the honeymoon period. Everyone you meet is wonderful and every event is the most fun you’ve ever had. You bond with your new sisters during meals and everything about your chapter just couldn’t be more perfect. Not to say any of this isn’t true, but this obsession probably won’t last forever. Between freshman and senior year, you’ll likely tend to start going to fewer events every semester.
“The majority of the girls aren’t very involved and just go to eat food,” says Emma, a recent graduate and sister of Alpha Chi Omega at Florida State University. “People stop going as often when they get older because they live off campus, so it takes more time and effort. Girls stay active members but won’t participate in socials or date functions because they don’t have the participation points to attend.”
There’s a lot more to sorority life than just mixers and retreats. Most sororities are governed by the National Panhellenic Conference , which has strict guidelines all members have to follow. Sororities get fined for every Panhellenic rule that is broken, such as sisters contacting PNMs during the week of recruitment.
For example, Ashley dishes, “You would never tell a rushee that everyone will be fined if the lists of girls who we are inviting back for the next round for rush are late to Panhel.”
The rules are there to give sorority life some structure, even if they seem unnecessary. However, this may leave PNMs with a bitter taste in their mouths about the National Panhellenic Conference. So, sisters tend to avoid the subject at all costs.
Although it seems like it on Facebook, not all girls in the chapter are soul mates. Unless you have an incredibly small pledge class and chapter, there’s a good chance you won’t be best friends with everyone.
“Out of 200 girls, only about 10 are your true friends for life,” Emma says.
Throughout your time, you’ll hopefully find a tight-knit group of girls whom you’ll become close with. As for the other girls, they’re great lunchtime companions and study partners, but you probably won’t be asking them to be your bridesmaids.
“I’m close friends with about six girls in my chapter; the rest are just acquaintances,” says Jill*, a junior at Michigan State University and sorority sister. “There are 150 girls in total, and it’s impossible to know everyone personally.”
While some girls are obsessed with their sororities from day one, others don’t always feel that draw. Throughout the four years, girls tend to drop out , whether it’s because of money issues, loss of interest or personal reasons. Regardless, your pledge class is bound to get smaller each year.
“Girls drop because it can get too expensive, their school work gets too difficult or they just feel like they haven’t made any great friends,” Emma says.
Jill also says that the expenses of joining a sorority play a huge role in girls’ decisions to drop. “[Dropping] is rare in most sororities here because most girls who join know what they’re getting into,” she says. “If they do it’s because of the money or it just isn’t their thing.”
Unless you go to one of these schools , your college’s dining hall food probably isn’t top-notch. A perk of sorority life is having a chef cook for you and your sisters, which means that the food can be more tailored to your tastes. However, the food can tend to get cyclical since it can be challenging to feed such a sizable group of girls.
“The food is cooked in mass quantities and has lots of butter,” Emma says. “We eat a lot of pasta and chicken and vegetables. I got sick of the food at the end of the semester after eating everything at least five times.”
Although these are some things sorority girls wouldn’t spill, there are so many more aspects that can make your sorority a great community within your school. Sometimes the secrets of a sorority can even be the best part. Whether the secrets are exciting, funny, interesting or discouraging, they all help to make each chapter unique.
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For today's college students, is hookup culture unfixable?

On the first night of Dartmouth’s fall term, a svelte young woman runs up to the door of my old sorority, pulls off a breezy white dress, and races inside in her bra and thong. She’s apparently eager to join the party. Inside, sisters are running around in short polyester ’70s dresses and glittery pink sunglasses: their “tackies,” intentionally awkward outfits that are something of a middle finger to the Lilly Pulitzer sorority set. Weekly Wednesday meetings — modeled loosely after fraternity meetings — where sisters roast each other and drink lots of beer, have just ended. 
Downstairs I find a pong game, in which players use handleless paddles to hit Ping-Pong balls into full cups of beer arranged on a large piece of plywood. If you sink a ball into the cup, your opponent drinks the whole beer. If you hit a cup with a ball, your opponent drinks half. It’s a little after 11 p.m., and no one is slowing down.
“You were an ’05! Cool!” says my pong partner.
From the look of it, little has changed since I graduated ten years ago. The floor is grimy and covered with plastic cups. A girl is riding a pong table like a surfboard, and another is grinding to Fetty Wap. I show my pong partners the wall in the house my best friend and I painted, a repeated print of Keystone Light cans, the school’s watery beer of choice, that’s still standing.
I’ve come back to my alma mater because it sits at the crossroads of two major themes of modern-day college sex: hookup culture, which seems as rampant as I remember it, and sexual assault, which Dartmouth is gaining an unfortunate reputation for. In the Ivy League, Dartmouth is tied with Yale for the highest incidence of sexual assault of undergraduate women, according to a recent Association of American Universities survey (though Princeton didn’t participate); the education-research company StartClass just released research indicating that Dartmouth has had the highest reported rate of sexual assault on campus of any college with more than 5,000 students in the past decade. (Dartmouth has said this means it’s doing a good job of encouraging students to come forward. “We want to see the prevalence of sexual assault go down and the incidence of reporting go up,” says Justin Anderson, a spokesperson for the school.) Last year, a freshman here was targeted with a personalized “rape guide” posted on a campus chat room and said she was sexually assaulted in a fraternity shortly thereafter. She was one of the 28 percent of undergraduate Dartmouth women who report being sexually assaulted during college.
Lately, researchers have been making an obvious but controversial point: that these two trend lines are in fact related — that hooking up puts students at higher risk of having nonconsensual sex, and that there are elements of this culture, not just at Dartmouth but across the country, that are more complicated than “yes means yes.”
“To understand date rape, you needed to understand the dating culture,” says sociologist Kathleen Bogle, author of Hooking Up , one of the first books to document this culture. “And to understand the sexual-assault problem, you have to understand the hookup culture.”
Hookups, for those who went to college before the term came into vogue, can range from kissing to sex. Partners can be strangers, acquaintances, or best friends, but about half of them are getting together for the first time. On average, women have four drinks before a hookup and men have six. The encounter might lead to a relationship but typically doesn’t. Often, nobody talks the next day.
“It’s backwards dating,” explains one Dartmouth senior woman. “You have sex with a person, then if you like the sex, and you kind of like their personality, you ask them out. It is freeing in some senses. It’s very sexually liberating, and great for women who like to take control of their lives, and great for men. But it also creates a lot of problems. There’s no communication, and there’s lots of alcohol. It’s a recipe for disaster.”
There are, of course, plenty of reasons why students of all genders and all sexualities choose to hook up. It’s physical pleasure without emotional risk. It’s exploratory and experimental. You can try new things, discover preferences. On a college campus, surrounded by available peers, it’s especially convenient.
And many students find it a mostly positive experience. Molly, a Dartmouth senior (names have been changed at their request), says she’s had plenty of good sexual experiences in her time at school, but also several sketchy hookups and one she considers assault. An older guy pledging one of the “better” fraternities wanted to get together, and she was flattered. One night, she outlined her terms. “I said we can have sex if we are going to be exclusive, but I want to hook up” — in this sense, fool around without intercourse — “a few times before we have sex, to prove we are exclusive.” According to Molly, he agreed.
“Then he started putting himself inside my body,” she remembers. “And he was like, it’s just the tip, it’s just the tip. His roommate was passed out, literally unconscious from drinking, in the bed next to us. He kept continuing to enter me anyway. I was like, ‘No, I really don’t want to.’ And he was like, ‘I’m not really going in, I’m just putting it in a little bit.’ Slowly but surely, he went further and further. I kept saying no, and he kept going anyway. Eventually I realized he was going to have sex with me whether I wanted it or not.”
He wasn’t wearing a condom, so she told him to get one. “He was actually so drunk at the time that he didn’t finish, thank God. After that he ignored me for a week.”
Molly says there are few conversations about consent happening during hookups. “The current mind-set is that they should just keep going anyway,” she says. “This is where you get into this trouble of them not hearing you say no. Maybe I could be clearer. But no one wants to be the person who says to someone’s face, ‘I don’t like you, this is awful.’ ”
According to Molly, the majority of her friends at other schools have been sexually assaulted during college, except for the ones who had boyfriends. “If you are completely unavailable to be part of the hookup culture, then people don’t seem to see you as a target.” But if you opt in, she says, you are vulnerable.
Research from Bucknell psychologist William Flack puts statistics behind what can easily be concluded by anecdote. In a study about the incidence of unwanted sex among university students, both women and men said 77.8 percent of unwanted sex happened in a hookup (compared to 13.9 percent in a relationship and 8.3 percent on a date). “It’s safe to say that when you are looking at sexual assault, hooking up is a significant risk factor,” says Flack, who started studying hookup culture in 2001 at the suggestion of his students.
To older generations, the suggestion that hookup culture could be leading to sketchy sexual situations makes complete sense. But in certain circles on campus today, this link is extremely controversial. To suggest that women may put themselves at risk by hooking up — by getting blackout drunk, by getting into bed with someone they do not know — is considered to be an offensive example of victim-blaming. In a recent essay in the Harvard Crimson called “ Here’s How I Was Raped ,” student Viviana Maymi articulates this point of view: “Everyone has the right to get as drunk as they want to without the threat of being raped … Victims did not ‘put themselves in that situation’ as a result of having been drunk … When a drunk driver enters a car, he knows he is impaired, which is why he is responsible for the death of the person he runs over. Likewise, at a party, a perpetrator knows he is impaired, and should be held accountable for the drunken assumptions he makes and acts on.”
Despite the risks, hookup culture has become surprisingly idealistic, based on a sense of trust that you can take a fellow student home and nothing bad will happen. “The very idea that one should be able to go out and drink and wear sexy clothes and not be sexually assaulted is something that did not even cross the minds of women that are older than me. They thought sexual assault was a guarantee if women were behaving like this,” says Elizabeth Armstrong, a University of Michigan sociologist who studies sexuality. “This generation is surprised they are not as safe as they thought they were, and as they think they should be, and as they are entitled to be. What they are asking for and expecting is where we need to go. But the fact they are surprised we haven’t gotten there yet puts women in terrible risk.”
The past few years of campus activism have certainly raised awareness of the bad things that can happen — though whether there has been an uptick in sexual assault or an increase in the reporting of sexual assault is hotly debated. Much of the messaging is focused on educating students about affirmative consent: “ Yes means yes .” (Dartmouth, for its part, is also attempting to address sexual assault on campus by, among other things, adopting an affirmative-consent policy and launching a smartphone app that allows students to chat with campus safety. It’s also banned hard alcohol.)
But the very nature of the hookup may make people less attuned to, or even interested in, what’s going on with their partner. “I think hooking up and emotionless sex is great,” says David, a senior who identifies as queer. “Love it, love third-wave feminism, do what you want with your body. But hookup culture is inherently bad because you’re hooking up with people you don’t care about, so you’re not concerned about their safety. I don’t think you’re as worried about this random person feeling weird about it the next day, because you don’t know who they are.”
Alcohol, of course, vastly complicates the issue. Students say that Dartmouth is educating them that if they have had any alcohol, they can’t give consent for sex. But that message, they say, is not realistic. “We’re a bunch of 20-somethings who are in charge of our own Greek houses and have no real adult supervision,” says David. “I think you could walk into a
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