Salon has an interesting article about a “feminist sorority” at Trinity College in Connecticut. While this isn’t the first local fraternity/sorority to break out of the mold (although I dispute there being a mold so much as there are personality types that tend to join Greek organizations more than others), it’s the first I’ve heard of that had feminism as a political ideology. (Although, come to think of it, it’d be strange if that hadn’t occured in the 1960s and 1970s somewhere, somewhen.)
But sororities in general seem to be changing — very, very slowly. “There is a movement to make these groups more progressive and relevant in the 21st century because they understand that if they don’t progress they might get wiped out,” says Alexandra Robbins, author of “Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities.” The primary obstacle: “The sense of tradition in these organizations is so strong that any movement toward change is inevitably going to encounter a backlash.” Still, Robbins recently worked as a consultant with the national leadership of one sorority whose highest-ups “were thinking about more revolutionary changes than even I suggested,” she says. “It was very encouraging. The day might not be so far away when a ‘feminist sorority’ no longer has to be just a ‘local.'” (Single-chapter fraternities and sororities that do not have national parent organizations, like Zeta, are known as “locals.”)
I wholeheartedly agree that Greek life is going to inevitably change, perhaps radically, in the future. I also think it’ll happen sooner than the above-quoted Robbins thinks. At Pi Kappa Alpha at Tech, graduating seniors are given the floor to speak about whatever they want in a beer-and-pizza-ceremony. I commented at that time that I thought the day of single-sex chapters by national policy would be gone before my brothers had sons rushing Pikes. It just doesn’t seem to be something that can indefinitely withstand the changing times.
I do think there will be fraternities (and sororities) that won’t survive. Some will get sued and refuse to change, and shut down. Others will remain sufficiently hidebound that, eventually, they will be too out of step with 21st century college students to be any sort of draw.
The ladies (and gentlemen) of the Zeta Omega Eta sorority are just a sign of things to come.
Behold, your new homepage. Play around with it a little. Click on a panel and drag it around. For your homepage convenience, there’s now an Add to Protopage button on the left hand menu of this site.
(Source.)
On a related note, Fred, Merl, Shylo, Steve: Your RSS feeds are hosed.
Why aren’t they making things like this for adults?
- A must-have for all boys, this cool hooded jacket has built-in headphone speakers in the hood
- Made of 100% nylon and polyester
- Multiple blue colors with yellow accents
- Regular fit
- Machine wash
That’s right, it’s a jacket you can plug an iPod into!
I need a new jacket. I like those colors. And yes, I’d love to have a hood that doubles as headphones.
Alas, it’s only available in kids’ sizes.
Sheesh.
Although the big surprise twist isn’t that much of one, The Skeleton Key
is still a very entertaining and stylish supernatural thriller, with an all-star cast, wonderfully spooky scoring and great directing like they aren’t supposed to do any more. And what’s more, it gets the difference between voodoo and hoodoo right.
Kate Hudson and especially John Hurt absolutely sell the story, and the entire conceit of hoodoo not being dangerous unless you believe it teases viewers not to believe.
Recommended for fans of supernatural thrillers like the Serpent and the Rainbow, the Ring and the Sixth Sense.
The Internet scares the bejeesus out of the newspaper industry, as I’ve mentioned before. Although the industry’s current slump in circulation began before the birth of the World Wide Web, there’s certainly reason to be concerned: Even more than radio or TV, the Internet provides an immediacy that the daily newspaper, which once was the place where breaking news was reported, can’t compete with.
I’m a big advocate of newspapers competing by working smarter and harder. The Internet, at this point, does not cover all news equally, and some of it, it doesn’t cover at all. Newspapers, which have infrastructures and credibility, can and should push their ways even more aggressively into these areas. At the end of the day, a newspaper Web site is no different from a blog or a rumor site, except that the newspaper site can have a credibility and authority the others can’t match. (Obviously, if it doesn’t have that, fixing that is job one.) So pursuing, say, local news and politics — which regional media rarely does — is a key part of the picture.
But so is using the Internet to reimagine the news business. It removes a great deal of the overhead from taking on aspects of other media, and can potentially bring in more eyeballs and, more importantly, help develop more of a relationship with the eyeballs already there.
So what does this mean for the Hesperia Star? Well, the holidays will delay a formal announcement, but we will have what I think is a first of its kind for a weekly newspaper (maybe a first for local newspapers generally) announcement early in 2006.
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