Between that and “Snakey-K” (???), I’m afraid you’re saying things I’m just not understanding. (Yes, I get the reference to the board game Clue, but I haven’t a clue what you are trying to say.)
PG: It was part of the survey results reported in the thesis linked to in the article referenced in the OP. That’s one of the things I was wondering what you thought about when I asked if you had read the thesis and what you thought about it. I have no idea what validity those surveys have but I did think they were interesting.
adding: If I understood correctly, and if the survey is valid, it says the thinnest girls end up together at the top house. There is some sort of metric for measuring “topness” of houses. I would be delighted to be corrected if this is a misinterpretation of what I read.
It’s possible. I’m sure you would be more able to comment on that than me, for example.
I am very interested in the point you want to make. Since I am both old and not a critical thinker, I don’t have the energy for a whole lot of back and forth to get there. I told you what I think. I would be interested to know what you think, if you want to tell us.
“adding: If I understood correctly, and if the survey is valid, it says the thinnest girls end up together at the top house. There is some sort of metric for measuring “topness” of houses. I would be delighted to be corrected if this is a misinterpretation of what I read.”
Ok, if that’s the case, then I still don’t have a real opinion of it. Yes, top houses tend to have more attractive girls. Such is life. Attractiveness has social capital pretty much everywhere, film at 11. Take away the Greek system tomorrow and nothing changes about that fact.
PG: My point is like congregating with like. I don’t think that is limited to southern groups. I know you disagree but I’ll just keep bringing it up periodically.
I would talk about shoes some, but JustOneDad wore me out already.
adding: “attractiveness” is a social construct. imho.
There is, but I’m nearly certain you either don’t want to hear it or don’t want to believe it.
But this “top house” thing only has the power that other people ascribe to it. If you personally don’t care for the people in the “top house” for whatever reason (and wouldn’t it be superficial to hate 'em because they’re beautiful?), then what “topness” do they possibly have that is meaningful? What’s more important - what you think of other people, or what they think of you?
What IS it on CC where it’s assumed that you have to give power to people who you don’t respect?
246:The metric has to do with trying to judge which sororities were getting their top choice bids.
Are you saying I don’t want to understand the underlying research tools this master’s student was using, or are you saying something else? My bubble is 75% “best in their fields” experts and scholars. The smarter they are, the more gracious they seem to be about explaining themselves to those less intellectually endowed.
If you read the thesis, what did you think about the research tools used? What did you think about the analysis? Do you agree with the conclusions?
PG: I don’t hate the top house. The top house has sorority power because it gets its top bid list. Girls are competing to get into that house. It has power beyond the campus because the alums are very well connected women. The top house is selecting pledges, not only on thinness but also on potential of success in later life. They want the whole package. imho.
@pizzagirl @alh With regard to the top house discussion, I have always been perplexed by what that means. Which Sorority characteristics are best from a frat guy perspective (hot and easy) could be a lot different from what is best from a sorority girls perspective (sisterhood and fun). When I see rankings, I never understand which criteria they are based on.
Hot and easy is not what is ranked. But, it may co-exist. Lots of hot and easy girls do not have the rest of the package. Some of you have very cartoonish ideas about these organizations.
If I am correct, the author of the thesis expected to find high status women, at top sororities, were hooking-up less. Instead they were hooking-up more. I don’t know what the definition of hooking-up is in this paper and may have read right over it.
This makes sense to me. There is still a double standard. imho. The higher a woman’s status, the less negative impact multiple partners will have on later life opportunities. She has less worry about her reputation than a lower status woman.
I think many if not most, college women like sex and want to have lots of sex. I think some of them want to have sex with men in whom they have no interest in pursuing a relationship beyond that sexual encounter. I have no idea how many of these women exist. I suspect this is behavior many wouldn’t think it in their best interest to make too publicly known. In this era of history, we accept women like sex less than men and want less of it. I don’t believe that has always been the case. I think there were historical eras where the common wisdom was that women were voracious and men needed to be protected from them. I may be wrong about that. I may be wrong about everything I write. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least.
The top sororities are selecting for conventional attractiveness and other attributes which predict success in later life. I am using a very mainstream definition of success. All things being equal, they select new members who are already well connected. (this is an allusion to a previous thread PG and I on where a poster argued; everything being equal you take the guy who is rich and whose dad has a private jet)
So the top sororities will have the most conventionally attractive women who are also most willing to have hook-up sex due to lack of consequences for them. No doubt the fraternities see these as hot and easy groups. It doesn’t seem to me that precludes them being groups focused on sisterhood and fun.
"PG: I don’t hate the top house. The top house has sorority power because it gets its top bid list. Girls are competing to get into that house. It has power beyond the campus because the alums are very well connected women. "
Again, this is where the north vs south thing comes in. I am pretty confident that if you took all the sorority houses at my alma mater and lined up the alums of each according to whatever measure of professional success you wanted to come up with (salary, job title, admission to grad schools, etc.), there wouldn’t be any meaningful difference between any of the houses. These are fun social organizations that make the college years fun and create sisterly bonds, but it’s hardly as though the Kappas get all the great perks in life while the Chi O’s have to suffer with the bad ones. It just has nothing to do with real-world, after-college success at all. So, again, there’s no “power” other than in the minds of the kinds of people who care about whether a house is top-tier or not.
Let me ask the question a different way. I’ll postulate that my house would be regarded as “upper middle tier.” Not one of the top 3, but not at the bottom. In what way would my life possibly be different if I had been in one of the top 3 houses - or one of the bottom 3? Answer: None whatsoever, except I might have had an ivy leaf or a key or a kite or whatever as my insignia, and had a different group of friends. But they wouldn’t have been a worse or better or less accomplished or more accomplished set of friends. Just different.
I find this whole influencing-my-life’s-entire-direction to be really strange.
PG: While I do believe membership in a particular sorority (like attendance at a particular college) may provide certain advantageous opportunities , I don’t believe I’ve ever argued anyone’s life path will be severely or negatively or irrevocably limited without those advantages. It may just be an easier path to the same ultimate goal.
I really don’t think this is a north vs south difference of opinion. It is possible that there are much fewer differences in status and access to power among sorority women, as a group, at elite private universities than sorority women, as a group, at large public universities. I agree that sorority women, as a group, have more in common than women who don’t choose to belong.
adding: What is your answer to much2learn’s question?
I’m sure much2learn is right - what guys look for is different from what girls look for.
Pizzagirl & alh - I’ll share my experience as a male from the northeast. It’s a little in between both of yours.
I work in a male dominated industry where a lot of the civic and philanthropic leadership comes from. Professionally, at least in my experience no one really talks about what fraternity they were in, nor is it a source of bonding if the two people didn’t know each other before. What schools we attended does occasionally come up, and there’s a little bonding over that. Also, I do try to help out the new graduates from my alma mater who we hire, but what house they were in doesn’t matter to me at all.
And I really think that what social groups I was in during college didn’t change my life’s trajectory that much. However, at least at my alma mater, the pattern is pretty clear. Alumni who were in the upper tier houses dominate certain measures of success out of all proportion to their numbers - business success, fame, politics, philanthropy, civic leadership, willingness to give back to the school, etc. They aren’t dominant among those who’ve gone on to become accomplished scholars or researchers though.
I don’t think the success of alumni from upper tier houses has anything to do with “connections” or power with family wealth being a big exception. I think it’s because they are selecting their membership on qualities like social charisma, general attractiveness, family wealth, drive, and emotional intelligence (you might not associate this with frat guys but think about it). All of these help people become successful in many fields. I also think the Greek system selects out the bottom 10-20% of the worst students, but I’m not sure because my alma mater was one of those highly selective colleges where this effect wouldn’t matter as much.
alh - the thesis asks the frat guys to rank the sororities by tier and averages the responses to come up with the status measure. So status is defined as whatever the guys perceive it to be. Similarly, the sorority girls rank the fraternities.
Lots of things that were interesting in the thesis (which I skimmed), but two in particular stood out to me. FYI - the student is still learning some of the basic tools. Lot of things that could be improved. And do not underestimate the data challenges.
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The mean number of hookups per sorority girl were 5.71 (with 2.50 partners), while the mean number of relationships was only .23 / girl - 25 times more hookups than relationships ! This wasn’t like my experience in college - either times have changed or I missed out on a lot of fun !
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(Adopting the language of the thesis) - Hernandez expects that thinner girls don’t “have” to have as many hookups because of their “erotic capital” (i.e., they’re “hot”). The data confirms this expectation. But he’d also expect that girls in top houses wouldn’t “have” to have as many hookups, and this is wrong. So there’s something about being a member of a top sorority that correlates with having more hookups. A top house member has about 0.9 hookups more than a member of an average house, after controlling for their higher thinness and greater alcohol intake (as a proxy for price).
Alh:
Do you really believe this? That the path to success is made demonstrably easier because of a particular sorority? Is that because of parental connections in that top sorority girls may have more successful parents who can help out a sister with a job or internship? Or is it because they attract higher status men?
I find it hard to believe that the path to success is easier in any real way for a sorority member in a top house.
And the bottom line of the thesis is that sorority girls had 2.5 hookup partners as a mean. Hardly a different guy each week. One problem with the thesis is that almost no men answered and of those that did, virtually none answered the “hookup” questions.
If the thesis is to be believed, the Party Rape paper may be overstating the amount of time the girls did hook up with the guys.
The [Explaining Party Rape](http://gendersexuality.uchicago.edu/projects/sexual_assault/pdf/2006_armstrong_ethnography.pdf) article I posted earlier, the one where the authors spent a year with freshman women at a party dorm at Indiana, was eventually turned into a book by two of the authors, [url=<a href=“http://www.amazon.com/Paying-Party-College-Maintains-Inequality/dp/0674049578%5D%5Bi%5DPaying”>http://www.amazon.com/Paying-Party-College-Maintains-Inequality/dp/0674049578]Paying for the Party[/url ], which was heavily referenced in the USC thesis.
Paying for the Party appears from the reviews to be a work of advocacy, (I haven’t yet read it) so you may or may agree with the conclusions. But the authors use a mountain of data. They ended up following their party floor women for five years to see what happened to them.