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This is an interesting topic, and I've been thinking about it a lot lately because we have spring rush coming up.
When I went through rush in the fall, there were a handful of houses that everybody in my rush group really really wanted to be in. If you had listened to the rushees' opinions of these groups you would have thought that the girls were all so awesome and fun and beautiful and smart and talented and so on.
Now that I'm actually in a sorority, though, I can see that the rushees' opinions differ quite a bit from everybody else's. A lot of the fraternity boys describe the reputations of some of the aforementioned sororities as pretty girls, yes, but also skanky, snobby, or just plain sketchy girls. Meanwhile, a couple of the houses that didn't do so well in recruitment are seen as fun, down-to-earth girls. And people outside of the Greek system often have entirely different or misguided views of groups because their interaction with GLO members is limited to one or two people from each group.
So obviously it's important to take reputations with a grain of salt -- an ABC sorority member, an XYZ sorority member, a PNM, a fraternity boy and a non-greek are all going to give you different ideas about the XYZ sorority. Of course, there's usually truth to every given reputation, but sometimes it's a very very small bit of truth -- i.e., the sorority with the "fat girl" reputation that has no fat girls in it, because they acquired the reputation so long ago that all the overweight girls have since graduated. Would I join a group with a bad reputation? I probably would, although if the reputation proved to be true I might de-pledge. And obviously some reputations are more serious than others -- I wouldn't reject a GLO because the girls "aren't pretty enough," but I might if they had a reputation for not being interested in philanthropy or for their hardcore hazing.
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