Totally missed this reply, hence my tardy for the party reply.
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Originally Posted by Kevin
No comment on your organization's ideals, those may ultimately be incompatible with what I'm about to say, but I'm not sure that these women who do attend these parties and play into these themes are necessarily anti-feminist. Heck--they're exhibiting a lack of sexual inhibition, freedom and power, if nothing else. Or at least that's one possible interpretation. And of course, many of the women attending these events, in many cases, will be GDI, so the founders' values concept really doesn't apply.
Maybe you're placing too much emphasis on the theme and too little on how people behave? The later is just as important as the former.
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I think it is really interesting you labeled this as feminism, since I never used that word.
What I'm getting at is the endless statements and complaints coming from Greek women about how we're stereotyped and not taken seriously by outsiders and our own kind. In this forum there's a thread titled "Under Attack Again" and other posts are about bad PR, image issues, and so on. If I'm going to respond to your statements and include feminism, I'm going to go with feminism not being part of contradictory actions and behavior. I take issue with the contradictory behavior of Greek women, unaffiliated (your GDI) women and their behavior aren't my concern since they aren't sorority members.
If as sorority women we want to shake off the stereotypes, and actually be about what we say we're about (values, aims, educating women, bettering the world, etc.) we can't get butt hurt when we put ourselves in positions opposed to what we say. Many young women have issues with sex, relationships, feeling as if they are being taken seriously, confidence, life in general and supposedly sororities were founded as a place for women to better our lives. I have yet to see how a theme party where we're hoes has power, freedom, or lacking sexual inhibition. For one we're mocking women who actually do that for a living, by choice or not, and I don't see any power, freedom or letting go of sexual inhibition can come from a party organized by men and held in their home. We still don't have power and a few hours on a Saturday night with a keg of Natty Light in a basement isn't loosening sexual inhibitions. We'd be able to be who we want to be whenever we want and involve men on our terms, not theirs.
I also find other theme parties in poor judgment, anything that can subjugate, demean, or demoralize a group of people. White trash, NASCAR, Gangsta, Luau, Fiestas, all have or have the potential to go poorly, and take us right back to my original point. Contradictory. Let's spend Saturday doing philanthropy for say, a local agency that helps people of a lower socioeconomic status or for an agency that helps people who have been the victims of sexual or domestic violence, then stereotype them in a costume that night. We're not doing ourselves any favors and complain about it, yet we as Greeks keep doing it.
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Originally Posted by DrPhil
That's exactly how some feminists view it. There are different waves of feminism, and feminists with different views, for a reason.
That goes with the notion that there isn't one way that women should act. If some women want to act wild at parties and participate in themes that others deem degrading, those women are not automatically lacking self-esteem or anti-feminist, especially if they consider themselves knowledgeable and willing participants of a consenting age.
Did I and would I ever attend those parties? No, I think they're stupid for a number of reasons. But, I do plenty of other things that some women and men consider non-womanly/non-feminine and some feminists consider non-feminist.
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My response to Kevin above is about him bringing up feminism. It isn't even about feminism for me, it is about a group of adults making a choice and then complaining when that choice has negative results (sorority sluts) and complaining about said stereotype. I'm of the feminist idea where you can do whatever the hell you want but you need to own it, it being behavior, ideas, life choices, whatever. I have a lot of respect for people who choose to be sex workers, choose being important here, and think as a costume it isn't respectful of those women. I didn't even get into the racial and economic issues surrounding sex work, but those exist below the surface of this issue.
I never went to those parties either. Usually a theme wasn't even an issue for me finding it distasteful, but more along the lines of a party not being worth my time if it required a theme to make people be interested.