Dropping Greek life was character development. When I was a freshman coming into college, I truly felt like my entire college experience depended on what sorority I got. I was so excited to go through recruitment; I came from a predominantly white, upper middle class area, I was prom queen and first runner up for homecoming queen. I was confident that I was going to get any sorority that I wanted based off of my high school experience. I had built up this whole idea that Greek life was going to provide me some college movie experience and that this is the only way I could develop friendships. Looking back on this, that is so naïve. While I did meet some amazing people, I contributed to an outdated, racist system for my own social benefit.

     Going through the rush process alone should have shown me that Panhellenic was not an organization worth investing in. For over a week, freshman girls are expected to look their best in their most expensive clothes and win over the current sorority members. Each conversation you have with the different girls is maybe 3 minutes. We are given 3 minutes to make a lasting, worthwhile impression to show the current sorority members that we can fit in that group. This process is sleazy, grimy, and dirty. You are not supposed to be allowed to comment on anyone’s outfit, but they do. Because the conversations are only 3 minutes, the current sorority members are doing a lot more than just listening to our conversation. They are evaluating our looks, our social media, our past involvement, and for certain sororities, our parents income. More often than not, most sororities already have an idea of who they want to offer a bid before the rush process even begins. From my personal experience doing recruitment, a week before the rush process begins we make PowerPoint slides with the girls we need to keep an eye out for because they have a good social media presence and have a strong resume. The girls who are on the list are considered our “top girls”, basically the ones we want to have the most before we even talk to them. More often than not, the sorority that I joined would not get a lot of the girls on our top list. My sorority would try to give everyone an equal opportunity, but creating a PowerPoint based off of appearance and involvement in school counters that argument. When I was going through the rush process, I was not one of my sororities top girls. I just had a good connection with one of the girls I talked to and it supposedly worked itself out.

         After being accepted to said sorority, I thought my college experience was set to be the best it could be. Making friends was hard, but I eventually found a group that I connected with. We did the usual sorority things such as meeting guys, going downtown, and occasionally doing some service work. The hardest struggle for me was the way I compared myself to every other member. There is an unspoken pressure to make sure you always look good because you represent your sororities name. My friends were beautiful, and I felt inferior being around them because I was not as blonde, tan, or skinny. This was something that I struggled with as a freshman, and only continued to get worse as a sophomore when I lived in my sorority house with 60+ girls.

     In the house girls were constantly exchanging clothes, and this was something I could not be a part of because I was simply not the same size. This alone caused me so much more mental distress than I can explain. While none of my friends ever intentionally made me feel less than for that, it was subconscious side comments that hurt me. For example, when I would a girls to try on her shirt and they told me not to bother because it was too small for me. I had never tried harder to lose weight than when I lived in my sorority house. I would wake up, eat a 60 calorie yogurt then have two salads for lunch and dinner. I became obsessed with working out and lost weight at an alarming rate. In about 4 months I had lost over 40 pounds. When I was losing weight someone in the house told me it looked like a balloon popped in my face because it was so much smaller now. I know none of these girls ever meant to hurt me with these words, but it did. A huge hindrance of Greek life that is not discussed enough is the extreme pressure one faces to meet society's beauty standard to please or fit in to your specific sorority. It was not until I lost a lot of weight that people started to notice me.

      Fatphobia is very real and very present within Greek life. Because of this, I developed a very serious eating disorder and still struggle with it today. I am very thankful for my three roommates who were living with me in the sorority house for noticing how dangerous I was living my life. When I first started losing weight they were happy for me because they knew that was what I wanted, but when they noticed it was becoming an unhealthy obsession for me they spoke to me privately. I am forever going to be so grateful to these three women for helping me realize how traumatizing what I was doing really was. While the rest of the house, my entire social media, and every guy I walked past was telling me how wonderful I looked, my roommates were the ones to notice how hard the situation really was on me. While I cannot place all of the blame of developing an eating disorder to Greek life, it was definitely a huge factor in leading me to my lowest point. I had never had such a deep desire to feel wanted and accepted until I lived in the house and I constantly compared my life and experience to the girls around me.

     It is important to note that fatphobia is rooted in anti-blackness and the connection that has to Greek life. Fatness was not always seen as culturally undesirable in the Western world (Mooney, 2020). For centuries, famous artists such as Peter Paul Ruben’s showcased heavier women as the pinnacle of beauty. As the art and fashion historian Anne Hollander wrote in a New York Times article from 1977, "The look of actual human bodies obviously changes very little through history. But the look of ideal bodies changes a great deal all the time" (Hollander) While the 1977 Times article considers the switch to thinness as the preferable body type to be part of "a period of revolution in both taste and politics" in the late 18th century, Strings' research traces how that "revolution" is actually rooted in slavery and Protestantism. "With the dawn of the slave trade, skin color was the original sorting mechanism to determine who was slave and who was free. But as you might imagine, with slavery progressing through the century, skin color became a less reliable source of sorting various populations," Strings explained. "Therefore, they decided to re-articulate racial categories, adding new characteristics, and one of the things that the colonists believed was that Black people were inherently more sensuous, that people love sex and they love food, and so the idea was that Black people had more venereal diseases, and that Black people were inherently obese, because they lack self-control. And of course, self-control and rationality, after the Enlightenment, were characteristics that were deemed integral to Whiteness'' (Mooney, 2020). I believe that this trend is still going on within Greek life. It has already been established that Greek life illustrates historical forms of oppression, and fatphobia is another one of them.

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Hollander, A. (1977, October 23). WHEN FAT WAS IN FASHION. Retrieved November 30, 2020, from https://www.nytimes.com/1977/10/23/archives/when-fat-was-in-fashion-abundant-flesh-was-a-thing-of-beauty-to.html

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Mooney, T. (2020, August 20). The racial origins of fat stigma. Retrieved November 30, 2020, from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fat-shaming-race-weight-body-image-cbsn-originals/