It’s a mystery how TikTok’s algorithm works, but one thing’s for sure: we were all invested in #BamaRush. Even if you didn’t necessarily watch the original TikToks, you certainly interacted with ones that made fun of the sorority girl stereotypes of thousands of women going through recruitment. The virality of these TikToks and their glimpses into the rush process reminded me of one of the greatest cinematic masterpieces of all time: The House Bunny. I watched the film the other night with a bowl of ice cream and a glass of wine, just like the beloved protagonist Shelley Darlingson (AKA Anna Faris) intended. If you’re unfamiliar, the film is about a woman who lives in the Playboy Mansion with Hugh Hefner (yes, played by himself). When she’s forced to leave the Mansion, Shelley meets a group of girls at the Zeta Alpha Zeta sorority who are in desperate need of makeovers and a new house mother. She hopes that she can use her charm and knowledge of all things boys to get Zeta 30 new pledges, and save their house from shutdown. Pretty altruistic of her, if you ask me.
The House Bunny isn’t meant to be particularly profound or earth-shattering — it’s chaos and it’s comedy – but it’s the perfect example of how quick we are to ridicule sorority girls like the ones on #BamaRush TikTok. In The House Bunny, there’s Phi Iota Mu, the pretty-and-popular sorority filled with girls who only care about looks and the amount of money in their pledges’ pockets. These girls are vapid, shallow, and mean, and they represent a certain “kind” of sorority girl – the ones of the early 2000s, mini-skirt-and-shiny-blonde-hair variety. The Zetas, meanwhile, are uncool and ugly, sporting darker, more raggedy haircuts and appearing disinterested in the greatest and most fulfilling aspect of college life: talking to boys. Though we’re rooting for the Zetas throughout the movie, we’re also making fun of them for their cluelessness and their apathetic attitudes toward sorority life. Similarly, with the Phi Iota Mus, we hope they crash and burn, that their lipgloss smudges and their hair goes all awry and that they, too, are forced to experience what being unpopular on a college campus is like.
Even though The House Bunny is just a funny movie, it’s dripping in internalized misogyny, and, really, the way the sororities and the girls in them are portrayed is just a more hyperbolized version of the way we view them in real life. Sororities might not be so blatant about their favoritism of certain pledges, and they might not directly steal your bids out from under you, but there’s always been this undercurrent of misogyny running through the very veins of Greek life. We love to make fun of sorority girls — laughing at their matching outfits, ridiculing them for their taste in men (read: frat boys), twirling our hair and speaking like absolute imbeciles in faux-imitation of them — and we don’t care if they notice. From our vantage point, it’s a universally known fact that sorority girls are boring, basic, and (bottle) blonde — they like posting aesthetically pleasing photos during rush on Instagram, getting drunk on Friday nights and passing out at frat houses, and calling every single girl in their sorority their “sister” unironically. This is supposed to be funny to everyone, including sorority girls themselves. We’re all supposed to laugh at this depiction of women in Greek life, because if we don’t, we’re one of them, and there’s nothing worse than being like a sorority girl.
The House Bunny certainly isn’t the only piece of media to make fun of sorority girls — think Legally Blonde, Sydney White, the entirety of the TV show Greek — but I think it’s important to focus on why we find it so necessary to make fun of sorority girls in the first place. There’s not quite the same attention and mockery placed on fraternities. While we might mock them for their hazing rituals, or how ridiculously drunk they get every weekend, we still see them as full, self-actualizing individuals capable of intelligent thought. We seem to forget that women who live in sorority houses and like to wear cute outfits and go to frat parties are also capable of stringing sentences together. These women are future doctors, lawyers, and politicians; they are economics majors and biology majors and communications majors, and none of these majors are “girlier” or less legitimate than the next. Like men in fraternities, women in sororities plan for recruitment and eagerly await bid day every year, yet they’re the only ones ridiculed, suggesting that femininity, and women in general, are regarded as less valid than masculinity and men.
When there’s no one calling fraternity boys cult-like or foolish, that is the patriarchy, and internalized misogyny, at work. We live in a world where almost 90% of Fortune 500 CEOS are white men, and only 31% of senior roles in the U.S. are held by women. We should be doing more to uplift women in a world dominated by men. Instead, we’re taught that doing “girly” things, like posing with Greek letters, living with our sorority sisters, and singing songs about sisterhood, are negative things, as though “girly” is a bad word and caring about so-called “girly” things is silly. We seem to think that it is cool to poke fun at these girls, as though we are more feminist because we are rejecting the stereotype of the “typical” sorority girl. We think feminism is about spurning anyone who fulfills the archetype of sorority girl, but this is not feminism: it is misogyny disguised as feminism.
Molly*, 22, a recent graduate of Emory University and an alum of the Delta Zeta Chapter of Kappa Alpha Theta, says that she believes making fun of sorority girls is a means to condemn the Greek system as a whole.
“I think there are a lot of aspects of sorority life and culture that have taken on very hierarchical and misogynistic tendencies,” she says. “If anything, when people make fun of sorority girls, it comes from a place of anger within a lot of women that want to reject those ideals that are placed on them at a young age.”
Molly believes that the continued emphasis on physical appearance is what propels women, in Greek life or not, to make fun of sorority girls. “Why is there so much focus on looks when joining a sorority? Because sororities want girls that will attract fraternities,” she says. “That’s why it’s so funny. It’s ironic, really.”
We say we’re way past the notion that women do anything to please men, but sometimes the way we cater to the male gaze is more subtle and more subconscious than we realize. We think of misogyny as men making fun of women, and internalized misogyny as women doing things like wearing makeup or a cute outfit to please a man. A lot of the time, though, misogyny is quieter: it’s women making fun of other women in an attempt to appeal to men, even if they don’t totally realize it. It’s women laughing at sorority girls for being “basic” or brainless in order to differentiate themselves from those girls. It’s sorority girls laughing at other sorority girls out of fear of being pigeonholed as “one of them.” It’s women attempting to take out their rage on the Greek system, a system that practically encourages sexism and treating women like objects, by directing their anger at the women who are often unknowingly complicit in the system.
And, sometimes, it comes from a place of envy: the sorority girls who attract all the fraternity boys are often the subject of scorn because other women want these things, too. Carlianne, 21, a senior at the Fashion Institute of Technology, says that, many times, the green-eyed monster is the culprit. “I had a friend who would always say things like, ‘I hate sorority girls, they’re like a cult,’ and I always found it really immature to stereotype an entire group like that,” she says. “[My] school doesn’t have sororities, but tons of my friends are in them and don’t fit the cult stereotype she was describing at all. It seemed to stem from a place of insecurity and almost jealousy from the girl saying disparaging things about them.”
Fear, anger, jealousy — these are the reasons why we make fun of sorority girls. There’s no doubt the Greek system needs a serious overhaul — misogyny lurks in every corner of Greek life, from the unnecessary regulations placed on sororities during rush to the way women are expected to bow to the whims of the fraternities they associate with. And misogyny is only the tip of the iceberg — Greek life is also inherently racist and heteronormative, a system that has yet to make it out of the mid-nineteenth century with the rest of us. It will take a lot more than recognizing internalized misogyny to fix Greek life, but it is a good start, and a great reminder that pitting women against women is fruitless and will only serve to preserve this archaic system for years to come.
*Name has been changed.