Opinions

Feminism: It’s Greek to me

As a sorority girl, I dread the moment when someone comes to me and says that they read an article about Greeks in the paper.

Far too often, I hear a follow-up about a fraternity brother doing something horrible at a party or an affiliated woman being a complete monster to a younger sister. Nothing is more frustrating than having a completely inaccurate stereotype consistently perpetuated by individuals who really don’t deserve to call themselves affiliated.

It’s not an accurate representation of who we are and what we do.

For the first time in a very, very long time, though, the New York Times brought to light my favorite part of being in a sorority – the inherent feminist attitude and safe space fostered by being in such a dedicated group of women.

The article, “When a Feminist Pledges” by Jessica Bennett,  blew the lid off the idea that being a feminist and being a sorority sister are mutually exclusive by following the stories of women in different sororities across campuses that actively identify with and promote the idea of feminism.

In fact, the two coexist beautifully and strengthen each other.

I’ve been a feminist for as long as I’ve known there was a word for wanting fair treatment and equal rights for women the world over. When I made the decision to join Delta Zeta – which, to be fair, was out of left field for me at the time – I had a ridiculous amount of people asking me how I could have forsaken my standards to join such an outdated, problematic organization.

Pump the brakes.

The idea of a sorority is feminist by definition – women coming together to live with, learn from, support and advocate for other women.

It will never make sense to me how anyone could so severely misunderstand an organization quite literally created to give women a space of their own. The six women behind my own sorority were so oppressed at the time of founding in 1902 that they weren’t even allowed to sign their own names on the charter – they had to get a male sponsor to sign in their favor to gain any amount of legitimacy.

Sororities were fought for. Sororities were a battle. Sororities were the loudest possible way for women to say they saw the structural inequalities universities set up in favor of their male counterparts and weren’t having it anymore.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t some problems with the system. That doesn’t mean every single woman with Greek letters splayed across her chest identifies as a feminist, or would even want to.

But it does mean, at the core of our history, sorority women fought for themselves – their rights, their freedoms, their choices, their spaces, their equality. And now, so many years later, a lot of us are carrying on that fight.

And, as Columbia University junior and Kappa Alpha Theta member Jing Qu told Bennett, sometimes the very best way to do that is from the inside.

One Comment

  1. Avatar
    Aristotle Bean

    Campus feminists — that third-wave “I say equality but I really mean something else” feminists, — really need to give their PC gender politics a rest.

    If you wish to save feminism as a political movement from irrelevance, you need to return to its roots. That means abandoning the “nanny state” mentality that leads to politically correct speech codes and college disciplinary committees that have come to replace courts and due process in, say, campus sexual assault fiascos.

    You should tackle serious matters, like rape in India and honor killings in the Muslim world, and Muslim female genital mutilations in the US that are more of an outrage than some woman going on a date on this campus. Or silly affirmative action quotas in the Senate.

    Give up these screwy leftwing ideas that you can teach an incoming male freshman “not to rape.”

    The sexual stalker, who is often an alienated loser consumed with his own failures, is motivated by an atavistic hunting reflex. He is called a predator precisely because he turns his victims into prey.

    Give up Hillary’s “Blame men first” feminism, a perversion of healthy feminism.

    Find out why every feminist I know who graduated from this university regrets 5-10 years later how ridiculous so much of her college-level feminism turned out to be when confronted with experience and reality.

    Discover how wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder. Disregard hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” and learn how the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.

    Stick to academics and stop letting legislators and school administrations “infantilize” you with their laws and codes to supervise students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.

    Don’t be like so many young middle-class women, raised far from the urban streets, who seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. Treat the world as it has always been: a wilderness.

    Realize that the price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.

    Reject current campus dogma, tracking liberal-Left, and perpetuating illusions about sex and gender. The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Learn how ridiculous Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind.

    Notice how the horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of this university except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. Learn that the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.

    Realize that liberalism, and it’s bastard-child, third-wave feminism, lacks a profound sense of evil.
    Study, and then denounce, the gender ideology dominating at this campus — an ideology that denies that sex differences are rooted in biology and sees them instead as malleable fictions that can be revised at will. Realize the screwiness of the assumption that complaints and protests, enforced by sympathetic campus bureaucrats and government regulators, can and will fundamentally alter all men.

    Consent laws? Male rape awareness courses? Sex crimes like rape-murder emanate from a primitive level that even practical psychology no longer has a language for. Psychopathology, as in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s grisly Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), was a central field in early psychoanalysis. But today’s therapy has morphed into happy talk, attitude adjustments, and pharmaceutical shortcuts.

    There is a ritualistic symbolism at work in sex crime that college feminists do not grasp and therefore cannot arm themselves against. And they pass this ignorance on.

    Learn the well-established evidence that the visual faculties play a bigger role in male sexuality, which accounts for the greater male interest in pornography. Learn that the sexual stalker, who is often an alienated loser consumed with his own failures, is motivated by an atavistic hunting reflex. He is called a predator precisely because he turns his victims into prey.

    Misled by the naive optimism and “You go, girl!” boosterism of their upbringing, young Cal State feminists do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark. They assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement containing no messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic. They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.

    Chest-pumping feminism is cute and all, for a minute. But when you realize the despicable ideology underlying it, you should reject it and find another way to be cute.

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