The video you’re about to see may offend and even disturb you.
No one will think less of you if you decide not to watch what may be one of the most horrifying clips of our time.
But, for the brave and bold among you, here is the University of Alabama chapter of Alpha Phi’s 2015 sorority recruitment video:
Oh, you didn’t see anything wrong with this video? That would make you like most sane, well-adjusted people.
A.L. Bailey of AL.com is not one of those folks. In a column that went viral over the weekend, Bailey said the video was “worse for women than Donald Trump.”
How could a five-minute recording of pretty sorority girls having a blast being, well, pretty sorority girls, hurt women?
Because it’s “all so racially and aesthetically homogeneous and forced, so hyper-feminine, so reductive and objectifying, so Stepford Wives: College Edition. It’s all so … unempowering.”
Yes, to have fun now as a young woman, you must have enforced diversity, not be so girly and do some undefined empowering in the middle of doing somersaults.
Actually, according to this angry AL.com writer, these women shouldn’t be so joyous anyway because it “completely sabotage[s]” feminism. These Alpha Phis should instead be dead serious so they can constitute a “united front for empowerment.”
What this author is really saying is that these women shouldn’t be so darn white, happy and feminine.
Unfortunately, Bailey is not a fringe outlier. Her article is only the latest salvo in the left’s war on sorority girls.
Last Friday, The Washington Post published an article urging the removal of “the Southern belle from her inglorious perch.” A noted ideal for sorority women in the southeast, the belle in the eyes of the Post is instead a horrific icon of white supremacy.
Thankfully, according to WaPo, southern schools like the University of Georgia are taking the bold step in banning the southern belle’s dreaded “hoop” skirt. This skirt, as the author Elizabeth Boyd believes, is just as much of a “racial symbol” as a noose or Confederate battle flag. That’s why it must go — and so must the belle herself.
How a school can rid itself of this beloved female archetype is never offered by WaPo. But it is implied that the schools should eradicate all traces of traditional southern culture and aesthetics to ensure no one will ever feel the heel of oppression from antebellum ladies again.
Boyd believes sororities are the primary perpetrators of this insidious ideal and utilize it to exclude minorities from their associations.
Both Bailey and Boyd’s screeds against southern sorority culture are boosted by the vast literature deeming Greek life unbearably white, and thus, tacitly racist. Not to mention sororities also promote harmful gender roles and beauty standards that just don’t have a place in the twenty-first century.
A sorority at the University of Southern California faced a similar backlash to Alabama’s Alpha Phi in January after its rush standards emphasizing makeup and strict dress codes were leaked to Jezebel.
So, really, sororities are hated for practicing the all-American value of freedom of association. These young women willfully chose to join these organizations. They also get to choose who they want to be in their groups. They also maintain and enjoy the culture that’s associated with sorority organizations out of their own free will.
Sororities aren’t hurting anybody by frolicking around in swimsuits or hoop skirts. And the girls appear to be unharmed in the process of engaging in their own supposed oppression.
But free choice and free association are concepts that anti-sorority critics don’t recognize — unless they correspond with their own views. The reason why there’s growing hatred towards sororities, and Greek life in general, is due to the alternative it presents to the left-wing campus orthodoxy.
College campuses are quite obviously insane. Serving as bastions for the latest hare-brained idea of tenured radicals, colleges want their young students to conform to a predetermined set of expectations: They say traditional gender roles are bad; They say white people hanging out with too many folks that also happen to be white is unacceptable; They say standards of beauty lead to oppression; They say old-time southern culture is irreparably evil and must be eliminated.
By choice, women in southern sororities forego these commands and embrace a lifestyle that is very out-of-line with the prevailing college orthodoxy. Critics would prefer that these young ladies express the kind of feminism approved by the editorial board of Jezebel rather than the rollicking good time of the Alpha Phi video.
In other words, they’d rather have these girls be bitter activists against sexist air conditioning than students enjoying their youth.
They want women to look more like this….
…instead of this:
Alabama Alpha Phi girls (YouTube)
Remember, feminism is all about choice — unless you choose to be in a sorority.
