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Welcome to 2024! As a college professor, I watch as all around the country the new semester is starting on university campuses. A new semester brings new academic challenges, new experiences, and hopefully an active social life for students. Unfortunately, a new semester also brings old dangers to college women as the rates for sexual assault on college campuses remain disturbingly high: One in four American college students faces unwanted sexual activity without consent. Some estimates suggest that college women who join sororities are three times more likely to be sexually assaulted than those not affiliated with the Greek system. In this post, I want to highlight some new and fascinating research that shows just how much feminism has changed college women’s consciousness, and yet how little that has managed to alter the risks they face from male classmates. Today’s college women critique the institutional rules that structure the party culture on their campuses and clearly enable sexual assault and “date” rape. But they have yet to find a way to change it.
Simone Ispa-Landa and Sara Thomas interviewed 68 women, many more than once, to understand why young women join sororities, even though they understand that fraternity parties are risky places where women are sometimes drugged, and often encouraged to get drunk enough to engage in sexual activity that they would otherwise refuse. Of course, by legal standards, a drugged or drunk person cannot consent because they are under the influence—and both the women and the men know this. It is widely discussed among sorority women. So why do they join an organization that puts them at risk? The answer seems to be quite simple: They actually want to go to these risky parties because they are the central spoke in the campus social scene. College students, men and women alike, want to have what respondents in my own research on “hooking up” call “the college experience”—involving parties, drinking, and recreational sex.
But gender matters. It is women who are at risk in this party scene. The system institutionalizes male dominance. What this new research by Ispa-Landa and Thomas shows us is that many of these young women are feminists who analyze the risks involved, and critique them as unfair and sexist. Sorority women today think it unfair and unwise that all of the parties are in the men’s residences, and that fraternity members control the strength of the drinks, the setting, and the themes. I’ve been studying the college campus scene for decades and was still shocked when I interviewed Ispa-Landa and she gave me an example of a theme for a party at a well-respected private university: “CEO’s and Ho’s.” To go to that party, the men dress up as captains of industry and the women dress up as whores. Think about that: Men in fraternities ask their female classmates to dress up as whores. They ask bright young women training to be doctors, lawyers, and business leaders themselves to dress as sex workers. But it gets worse: the loud music, the low lighting, and the opportunity to slip drugs into a young woman’s drinks are also stage-managed by the men.
Ispa-Landa and Thomas's interviews show conclusively that today’s college women, including sorority women, have a feminist consciousness. Unlike the women’s responses in my own and others' 20th-century research, most sorority women now articulate a critique of the system. They realize it puts them in danger. They assign one woman to stay sober and watch out for their sisters. They argue with the alumnae and paid staff who control their sorority houses, trying to change the rules. They want to host their own parties, and control the turf for their own social lives. But the older women who run the show refuse to change the rules. According to Ispa-Landa, at least part of the reason is financial: Insurance coverage for fraternities is very expensive, both because of hazing accidents and because fraternities host parties where people get drunk, hurt, and sometimes raped. The fraternities had to create a pool to self-insure and that’s pricey. The sorority leadership sees that and wants to avoid such costs. But they do so by putting sorority women at risk for date rape.
What can be done? Ispa-Landa suggests we need a radical imagination. Why can’t sororities host parties that are not defined by crazy binge drinking, loud music, and too much sexual violence? She suggests we “re-structure parties, build in safeguards…mixer cocktails before the party, so people get to know one another. Spaces for breaks and water. Have after-party options such as movies…so not everyone is expected to get drunk and go to someone’s room.” She also suggests that a campus bar would be much better than alcohol supplied by fraternities. Of course, a safe campus bar would require us to admit that 18-year-olds drink, both on campus and off. Perhaps people old enough to vote and join the army should also be allowed—legally—to drink alcohol. Surely a big part of the problem is we have underage men providing illegal alcohol to underage women. When activities are illegal, but condoned widely, effective regulation is impossible.
Why should universities allow single-sex clubs of any type? Perhaps universities should ban any organizations that subject men and women to different rules and regulations. The Greek system as it now stands is a formally male-dominated institution that justifies sexism, treating women and men differently. The Greek system implicitly teaches young women to accept sexist rules and regulation, and teaches young men to expect to control heterosexual relationships. The meta-message is that men control sexual relationships and that women must conform to their desires or be frozen out of the fun. Universities should be at the forefront of liberating women from systems that oppress them. Single-sex institutions with one set of rules for men and another for women are anachronistic. If all Greek houses were coed, universities would have created an institutional change symbolizing a great step forward for gender equality on college campuses.
