GMT,
People diss each other for wearing clothes they don’t like all the time. (Case in point, this thread). Greeks are no better or worse than non-Greeks in this regard.
http://www.vidinfo.org/video/5552886/theta-girls-just-wanna-have-fun
My favorite sorority recruitment video so far is the Theta, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Video”. They look you straight in the eye as they jiggle. Compare that to jiggle shots without faces. And I notice women made this video.
Is this the video that inspired Griffin Meyer?
Of course they do. I’ve even contributed some great, catty links to the “Ugly & Expensive” thread. But most people don’t beg to pay money to join a club where they’re going to eliminated by the wrong choice of Lilly Pulitzer dress.
Sue,
Maybe they were trying to make the point that they have some fun in college, and are not study drones or sitting bored on the sofa watching the Kardashians all day.
Some probably would; they would be the ones who are fashion infallible.
In context, that quote was to exemplify the ruse for keeping women out of the house. I imagine there are plenty of code phrases used by people (in general) to signify, “I don’t like her.”
No one (the student from Georgia or the news article/website writers/editors) noticed the prominent (slightly altered) Confederate flag in the photo? >:)
That Theta video is interesting. First of all, it’s the “Russian Ark” of recruitment videos–it appears to be a single shot, with no cuts, requiring pretty clever movement of the participants. Second, many of the shots are (to my eye) less sexualized (compare the woman going up the stairs, for example). Also, the group is somewhat more diverse–I particularly liked the fact that the woman you follow from behind in the very beginning of the video is revealed to be non-white–I thought there was a message in that. I thought the message of that video was “this house is a fun place to live.”
If this house is practicing discrimination, it is wrong. If they are actively hiding less attractive members in promotional materials, that is wrong. The idea of nixing a girl for an ugly dress - or, for that matter, forming a social group based around formal exclusion - - is pretty awful to me.
However, I, like Bay, object to the judgments being made about these girls, even if we limit the objection to “how they present themselves” rather than “what they inherently are.”
If I were watching a promotional video for a swim team, I’d expect a lot of pictures of dives, strokes, team celebrations after a win, and teammates cheering on each other during races. My conclusion would not be “Oh, I guess these people are morons who do nothing but swim 24-7.” Neither would it be “These people might be very bright, but why did they choose to present themselves as dumb jocks?” I would recognize that, in the context of recruitment for a SWIM TEAM, you’re probably not going to see library shots.
People don’t join sororities because of their record of scholarship, or even because they have great volunteering opportunities. They join to find sisterhood in a chosen social group. So, for the purposes of this promotional video, it seems more or less appropriate to me to show a bunch of well-dressed girls running around doing silly things together. If you are someone who would prefer to be wearing sweatpants, this sorority probably isn’t for you, and that isn’t, to me, particularly problematic: there isn’t anything wrong with being more casual, but there also isn’t anything wrong with liking to dress up. It doesn’t make you shallow or trivial, or anything but someone with an eye for fashion.
Yeah, I probably could have done without some of the more…um… appreciative shots. Chalk that up to the male director.
How hard would it have been to throw a physics textbook or a copy of “Hamlet” into the background of one of the scenes? The only book I saw in the video was a yearbook with a magnifying glass laid across it.
I also thought the Theta video was nice. These girls were also pretty, but they were not sexualized despite wearing tank tops, shorts & bikinis.
“Is this the video that inspired Griffin Meyer?”
No. Apparently the 2015 Arizona Theta video was the inspiration, not the cutesy 2014 edition. That one appears to have been taken down as too caliente.
See, I didn’t like the Theta video at all. The shot of the room with all the bunk beds looked like a city jail cell to me.
But that’s why they produce the videos. They appeal to some, they don’t appeal to others.
The Marie Clair quotes are from the 2013 uproar. Phi Mu is the house the black women pictured in many of the bid day shots from 2014 joined.
We can argue whether the Alpha Phi video was good all day long. The fact that the house took the maximum number of NPM this year shows either that it did appeal to 18 year olds or that the videos don’t matter.
Aside from Southerners being ridiculed for their accents, which is kind of appalling in this day and age at a school that only admits the "very best students," I thought the lack of regional diversity, along with the heavily lopsided membership of private school graduates, in the venerable Hasty Pudding Club interesting:
[quote]
The Hasty Pudding Club, a co-ed social club that begins to recruit students their freshman fall, has drawn criticism for a membership that favors students from certain geographic areas.
In the Hasty Pudding Institute of 1770’s 2014 annual report, undergraduate Hasty Pudding Club President Matt G. Wardrop ’15 addressed the organization’s strides in reaching a diverse range of students in their annual fall punch. “Much like Harvard College, we view diversity as being at the very core of the Pudding experience,” Wardrop wrote, citing a membership base ranging from Cambridge to “as far as Australia’s Gold Coast.”
The numbers tell a different story. Data from the HPC’s fall 2013 punch class, detailed in a critical Crimson op-ed last fall and crossreferenced with data from The Crimson’s Class of 2017 freshman survey, show that 77 percent of HPC punches hail from the Northeast region, compared to 41 percent of students who identified as such in the entire class. Furthermore, 85 percent of HPC punches attended private school, according to the data, compared with 39 percent of the Class of 2017 as a whole./quote
Also, I found it understandable, but kind of sad, how few of the students recruited for their “regional diversity” no longer feel they can return to those regions after graduating. That’s their choice, certainly, but it also feels like Harvard (and other elites) kind of poach the best and the brightest without any consideration for how it will impact their hometowns.
The tone of the Theta video is quite different to my eye. If I were shooting the video, I’d leave out the hair flipping and the bikini shots, but there’s nothing in here for a university to object to (unless it’s BYU).
The biggest difference from the Alabama video that started the thread is body type and presentation diversity. In the Theta video, we saw size 10s and size 2s. We saw eyeglasses. We saw ponytails as well as perfectly ironed hair. We saw faces with and without makeup. We saw some bathrobes and oversize tees. It’s obvious that no one curated the membership for a uniform look, either at rush or at video casting. (And of course, no black man was used as a promotional prop.)
“See, I didn’t like the Theta video at all. The shot of the room with all the bunk beds looked like a city jail cell to me.”
Sure, but you saw what the inside of the house looked like and the fact that they have cold-air dorms. That’s useful, substantive information about what it’s like to be a member of that house, not just fantasy material.
“The fact that the house took the maximum number of NPM this year shows either that it did appeal to 18 year olds or that the videos don’t matter.”
They were publicly criticized by their university, and we can only guess that there was a sterner reaction privately. Clearly, the university didn’t like it, and it has different interests at stake than an individual house.
And what did the University actually DO about it? Nothing. Even the student newspaper disagreed with the University’s statement and said the statement singled out this video while ignoring others that were basically the same. The University says nothing about the all black fraternities and sororities that show no diversity.
I tried to look at the websites for black sororities and fraternities at UA. Not much there with a lot of stuff that’s 2-9 years old. Does anyone here actually know anything about them?
Wasn’t the university’s statement just the one sentence? I found it to be benign. It could be taken to mean something like, you should keep your videos accessible only by your target audience and not post them on youtube, so you don’t provoke a ridiculous backlash.
“Is this the video that inspired Griffin Meyer?” No, that would be Russ Meyer.
Here’s the statement, from Deborah Lane, Associate Vice President for University Relations:
Actually, Russ Meyer would have found this video to be sorely lacking, so maybe it’s not really aimed at men after all.