Alpha Chi Omega’s standards create unhealthy images
After Jezebel posted a leaked email on Friday from the USC chapter of Alpha Chi Omega detailing strict dress code standards for the sorority girls pre-rush, the story spread to BuzzFeed, KABC-TV, Cosmopolitan, Entertainment Tonight, Daily Mail, MTV News and other news outlets, garnering millions of views in the span of a few days. According to Buzzfeed, the sorority rules dictate hair color, eyebrow shape and required Spanx-wearing, which spurred titles of articles ranging from “Crazy Leaked Sorority Email” and “Pure Madness” from E!Online and the Huffington Post. These articles paint a clear narrative: the incident has been written off as evidence of petty sorority life rooted in standards that only meet the eye.
The email, sent in 2013 from the Personal Development and PACE (Promote Alpha Chi Every day) Chair to the rest of the sorority, certainly presents troubling implications regarding diversity in the Greek system at USC. But it is all too easy to explain the attitude of the email by immediately defaulting to the cookie-cutter sorority girl stereotype and denouncing the beauty standards stated in the email as a product of being obsessed with vanity. The argument ignores the implicit unanswered question: why exactly does Alpha Chi recruitment feel that these standards are necessary? Perhaps the hierarchies of Greek life have a say in constructing guidelines for appearance.
“A huge core component known throughout the Greek system is that the top houses base their selections for their house primarily on appearance,” said a member of a USC sorority, who wished to remain anonymous. “Alpha Chi is trying to raise its status by doing the only thing that seems to have success, which is to fill its house with girls that all look the same and act the same.”
The emphasis on perfect physical appearance, then, is a phenomenon that stretches across Greek life. More disturbingly, physical perfection appears to be interlaced with conformity. And though conformity — whether in the form of matching tank tops with Greek letters or gaggles of sorority girls making Greek hand signs — pulses into the subtle underlying framework to interactions within Greek life on campus, it’s also surprising, considering that USC is one of the greatest champions of diversity. In a place that so greatly celebrates the unique abilities and backgrounds of every student, it is almost counterintuitive to advertise a superficial sameness instead of honoring the unique and delightful women that sororities contain. But perhaps the idea of commonality, and not differences, draws people to Greek life to begin with.
But the worship of physical perfection among sororities is disconcerting, because physical appearance appears to precede intelligence, integrity, compassion and sisterly bonding as criteria for being a sorority sister. Sororities are filled with intelligent and compassionate people — but because a Greek system controlled by no one dictates status based on physical appearance, dress code and hairstyles become paramount to distinguish the haves from the have-nots. And somehow, this superficial distinction is supposed to signal the sisterhood in which some of a recruit’s deepest human bonds could potentially be created.
To be fair, superficiality is not so much a Greek issue as it is an issue of human nature. After all, as an Incognito study shows, women only need 20 seconds to pass judgement on other women, and the first judgement is usually based on the waistline.
And so a lifelong sisterhood should fly in the face of superficiality. Yet there persists a weird hypocrisy between the idea of a self-esteem affirming sisterhood and the requirement that that sisterhood is contingent upon a certain physical appearance. If the institutionalized friendship of sororities relies on the bond of acceptance and the freedom to show and explore one’s identity, then it cannot require a sister to be someone other than herself. And in a world already riddled with ridiculously unrealistic expectations of beauty for young women, the necessity for physical perfection is conducive to unhealthy body image while simultaneously inhibiting personal and professional growth.
To be part of a formal commitment between women, simply for the sake of it, is a beautiful thing. But the glass image of sisters supporting each other does not come without rough edges. It is imperative to respect, promote and wholeheartedly glorify the awesome new pixie cut or avant garde fashion choices of our sisters — but as women, it is perhaps more imperative to stop judging each other at all.