I Fought Back Against My College's Sexist Fraternity

[XemaSab]

Ten years ago this spring, I entered a fraternity house in broad daylight to see fellow sorority women perform a drunken strip-tease. The event had no official title, it was simply known as a lip synch. Its purpose, if you can call it that, was to see which sorority had the best song-and-dance routine. The best performance was determined by a panel of judges, mostly brothers of the fraternity, and that year, a “celebrity” guest judge: a professor in the college’s government department.

The event was one of more than half-a-dozen competitive events that made up the fraternity’s week-long charity fundraiser, known as Derby Days. The entire effort was held in the name of raising money for a network of children’s hospitals. But what was really at stake that afternoon was who was going to be deemed the most desirable group of women. And that made me feel numb, and then enraged, for reasons I would struggle to articulate for years to come.

Some of the Derby Days events were benign—a penny war, for example—but most, like the lip synch or the beauty pageant or the skit contest, had a clear message. The winners were the most sexually attractive group of women to a certain group of men.

If you had asked me before I went to college if these events would’ve upset me, I am not sure what I would’ve said. I never considered myself a prude, nor was I sheltered from the world of sexual innuendo. I spent my high school years at a liberal boarding school in the Northeast, where we watched endless reruns of Sex and the City and gossiped about our classmates’ hook-ups.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/i-fought-back-against-my-colleges-sexist-fraternity/284040/