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On our campus, one particular house, XYZ, prided itself on being a glam girl, snob house. It actually fed into the "I am brilliant and don't hate me b/c I'm beautiful" theme that they wanted everyone to believe. Every once in a while, they would accept someone who was obviously "not" the house type, a girl who was either more on the plain side or terribly overweight. And it was always pretty clear why that was happening. Penelope NewMember might weigh more than she should, but she had a rich daddy and a nice car, or Priscilla Pledge was an ace in her pre med classes and not only raised the chapter GPA but also kept the other pre meds afloat by helping them study.
What really bothered me was that if a girl like that had joined our house, the fraternity perception was--oh, she's plain or fat or whatever, because our chapter was more diverse. But if she joined the XYZ house, then in spite of what she looked like, she was given a "pass" because she was considered to be in the elite house. It was so twisted. So the whole "looks matter" approach can work the other way--it was like membership had its privileges. The non Greeks at our school (the ones studying ancient Greek) were just baffled by the whole system and shunned us as an entire species.
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