Going After Girls

This chapter revisits the sorority community made infamous in Alexandra Robbins’ 2004 bestselling sorority expose Pledged. In the sixteen years since the book’s publication, there has been a marked turn in the recruitment practices at Southern Methodist University (SMU) from one that picks women apart to one that marks them as objects of desire. From unabashedly erotic recruitment videos in which women signal their desire to enter into platonic relationships with other women through sexual innuendo to recruitment activities that are thinly veiled imitations of Bachelor-style marriage proposals, wedding ceremonies, and honeymoons, SMU’s sorority recruitment reimagines the friend making process as a series of rituals that do not culminate in sexual intercourse, but rather the creation of a sexless sanctuary. The physical embodiment of this sanctuary is, of course, the sorority house. Since their first inception in the 1870s, sorority houses have served as material manifestations of the aspirational family home. The second half of this chapter uses readings of digital and in-person house tours, magazine spreads, and interviews with current and former sorority house residents to show how the longstanding trope of the “dream home” has shifted from being a residence designed for the traditional nuclear family to a palatial mansion where men are not welcome.