By Miss Misery
Correspondent
Disclaimer: This is a satirical piece and does not reflect real individuals or events.
In recent years, sororities have been under fire for perpetuating harmful beauty standards amongst their members which has led to increased insecurity and depression among young women.
As these organizations feel these negative consequences contradict their goal to empower young women, they felt it was time to be the change they want to see in the world. After many long deliberations, a series of controlled experiments and the publication of two peer-reviewed research papers, they reached the perfect solution: establish a pre-set image of what their model member looks like and only take new members who already fit that image.
“Our findings will be a breakthrough in promoting confidence for a select set of young women,” Rebecca Fierson, the president of Alpha Gamma Gamma, said.
Part of their studies found that women joining sororities felt an increased dissatisfaction with their appearance once a part of the organization due to internal comparisons between sisters. Particularly, social media came into play, as an anonymous respondent in the study said: “it felt like certain sisters had more value because of their appearance. They would be featured more on the sororities’ Instagram and it ended up being unintentionally alienating to us sisters who felt excluded. Like, why were we left out of the image?”
“This was a common theme amongst respondents,” Fierson said. “This feeling of unintentional alienation of young women in their organizations was heartbreaking to uncover. We hope that by intentionally alienating most women, we can encourage the girls who don’t fit in to develop a healthier relationship with their unwanted bodies.”
Alpha Gamma Gamma appears to be leading this initiative, though numerous sororities are following suit. Another group, Zeta Zeta Tau, sent out a Google Form to girls interested in rushing, which had them fill out important measures of character such as height, weight, hair color, whiteness and combined family income. They explained that having these measurements would allow the organization to weed out the unwanted girls, allowing them to immediately face rejection and not have to cope with their insecurities in the organization.
We decided to press Fierson on this philosophy, questioning the ethicality of determining what women are worthy of benefiting from these organizations based on arbitrary measures and shallow perceptions of image. Fierson’s bold response says it all:
“When has Greek life ever cared about being ethical?”
Disclaimer: This is a satirical piece and does not reflect real individuals or events.
