Sorority Women Don't Talk About Alcohol
...and it's costing us
“PLEASE remember, ladies,” pleaded our sorority recruitment chair. “All pictures with alcohol need to be taken down from your rooms this week.”
“If I see them,” she added, flashing a stern look, “you’re gonna be fined.”
This order was eye roll-inducing at the time. Now, it’s a picture of what’s broken with sorority culture.
Sorority women aren’t good at talking about alcohol. And let me start by saying… I get it.
I went to Indiana University, known nationally for elite academics, Big 10 athletics, and… as a top party school. You couldn’t really separate the party part from the last two, even if they tried at orientation. I’ll admit, the ability to have fun (aka drink a lot) was just as important to me as the academics in my decision to attend.
I wasn’t alone. Even our mediocre football team gave us an excuse to brag about how good we were at drinking. Students drunkenly stumbled around the lots well before noon kickoffs, wearing shirts that said “Never Lost a Tailgate”. The score was an afterthought - drinking was a bigger part of the culture.
So I get why it’s awkward to talk about.
Nobody wants to admit to breaking rules.
It’s not (usually) getting people thrown in jail.
And it’s just sort of what we do, right? Nobody wants to make it weird.
So just like the pictures, conversations around drinking get shoved in the junk drawer.
But here’s the deal.
This is costing us in three huge areas: Women’s empowerment, life after graduation, and our overall relationships.
Let me explain.
Women’s empowerment
NPC (National Panhellenic Council) has an umbrella rule across its 26 sororities that bans alcohol in sorority houses. As a result, each national headquarters pays lower insurance premiums. It’s good business. No drunken ruckus in our sorority houses equals less overall damage.
However, that decision at a national level comes at a cost for the members: it gives most power around alcohol to fraternity men. The fact that you technically can’t have a wine and charcuterie night in your own house means that, now, you’ve got to come up with a way to drink that both men and women want to partake in. Most guys aren’t interested in The Bachelor and wine…
Sorority women also share the sentiment that it’s hard to not feel that you owe something to the fraternity men who are opening up their doors and giving you free alcohol - a perfect setting for drinking more than you may have wanted, among other things.
Let’s just say it… most sorority headquarters don’t trust their adult members to drink like adults. By avoiding the subject altogether, knowing how attractive alcohol already is to college students, we create an unnecessary mystique around it.
Now, it’s even more attractive because you’re not allowed to do it. Now, members want to drink even more than they may have otherwise, and a fraternity house is usually their best option. Headquarters are practically teeing it up for women to rip shots and black out without even realizing it.
I understand where it’s probably not in a sorority’s best interest to house cases of bottom-shelf vodka in their basement. But the fact that many women can’t have a Twisted Tea in their mini fridge for fear of being sent to Standards…I would argue that doesn’t feel a ton like women’s empowerment. We seem to be better at punishing our sisters for drinking rather than having adult conversations around it.
To be clear, I’m not advocating for consuming any amount of alcohol. What I am suggesting is that perhaps our rules around alcohol are working against our fraternal values of women’s empowerment .
To empower means to “grant authority to”. I don’t think many women feel authority over their drinking decisions. I think they feel there’s very few options for them to actually get a “tasteful buzz” on, so they need to drink the way other people (usually men) expect them to. I believe we have more power than we think to influence that at a chapter and national level, but change isn’t going to rise out of radio silence.
Life after graduation
My first job after college was in sales at a “work hard, play harder” tech company in Chicago. The kind of office where reps rode around doing demos on hoverboards, and kombucha and Stella Artois were on tap. I had stars in my eyes when I toured the office for the first time.
Whatever pressure I felt to drink in college was child’s play compared to the scene at office happy hours.
In particular, I remember Closing Days. The last day of the month was known as “Closing Day” - when our office put a bow on the month’s sales. The expectation was to go out and get obliterated for making (or missing) quota, and it was very rarely optional for you to not partake. Of course, everyone was expected to show up to work bright and early the next day. I grew to loathe Closing Day.
Outside of work, I felt clumsy trying to make new friends in the city, and it seemed the only way people were interested in connecting was over drinks at the bar.
Even at home with my family, connection seemed to always involve alcohol. “Come on be fun” and “take a shot with me” were phrases that my sorority sisters and now my biological sisters used (quite effectively, I’ll add) to get me to join in on whatever the drink of the night was.
After college, of course, drinking is legal. But being “legal” doesn’t mean that all of the sudden everyone respects your decision to drink or not. I would actually argue it’s easiest to fend off peer pressure from friends. Family & coworkers is where it gets tough.
We’re all going to face this pressure to drink at some point. How we respond has a huge impact. The irony is, high achieving jobs (that many women aspire to) often line up with high achievement drinking. The question is not “will women face temptation to get drunk?” - we will. The bigger question is, “what’s the cost of skipping the conversation while in college?”.
By not having healthy conversations around alcohol, we set our sisters up for a life full of relationships & connections where drinking is the centerpiece of their fun. Which brings me to my last point…
Relationships
A light bulb moment occurred for me the first time I heard a friend describe friendship as either “company” or “community.”
In my early 20s, I based a lot of my decisions on who I wanted to be friends with on who was down to go out. I saw gals who never wanted to as uptight or boring. I never considered that they might actually have other valuable ways to spend their time.
The culture in my sorority was that drinking was the primary way to have fun, so I naturally wanted to have friends that liked having fun. This was common at IU.
It got me a lot of company, in that I was rarely ever visibly lonely. But my senior year I fell into a depressed, self-destructive season, and I looked around and realized I was lonelier than I had thought.
I didn’t feel like I could talk to my friends about hard things that were on my heart & mind, and I realized it was because our friendship wasn’t built on vulnerability. It was built on nights out.
What pulled me out of it was not self care or more nights out. It was forming “community” friends - people who actually wanted to do life with me outside of a bar or fraternity party.
If we don’t set a precedent of genuine, authentic, “community” friendships in our chapters, then alcohol will set a precedent for us. And it’s going to be shallow sisterhood. As one chapter president shared with me recently, “sisterhood is not formed in a fraternity basement”.
To be clear, a fraternity basement is not a bad place to hang out with your sisters, and neither is a bar, but they’ve become the defaults for too many college women. We’re making it hard for community friendships to take root, as well as making it really hard for the sisters who don’t want to drink to feel like they have a shot at making friends.
I wonder if my sorority had gotten real with me about alcohol - the pros and cons - would I have felt like I needed to drink in order to make friends…
What now?
I believe we can change all of this. But we have to decide to talk about it.
We need to decide to stop pretending that alcohol isn’t something that nearly every sorority women struggles with at one time or another. Maybe some of you constantly struggle with it.
Tastefully Buzzed can’t be just one of the few in the lonely camp of people talking about sorority drinking culture. I see our job much more as fanning these conversations into flame, and igniting a movement of more vibrant women who are through with alcohol taking away from rather than adding to their life (and yes - it can do both).
We say take those pictures of boys and booze back out of your junk drawer. This is your life, and right now, those things are a part of it. I want to know why you drank too much last night… and then I want to help show you a better way.