>For many young women who have just arrived on campus, thinness feels like the ticket into the best possible college experience. “As a 20-year-old, I want to have the hottest guys in my phone,” one tells me. “I want to be hanging out with the pretty girls. I want to feel pretty.” If that means spending thousands of dollars a year to suppress their appetites, so be it. “People say college is what you make it,” Marie tells me. “But college is what people see when they look at you.”
God, that makes me sad to read. College can be what you make it, but these girls want to be in the best sororities and the best parties, meeting the cutest athletes on the best teams. They have others make the college experience for them. The pressure from social media and all those damn TikTok’s of “look at my dorm room at ‘Bama where my parents spent $20k to decorate!” And it looks like a Claire’s threw up in it. I do not envy college students today.
The whole time I was reading this I was thinking about how little any of this matters. College lasts a few short years and then it's over.....these women are putting so much thought and effort into being thin and rushing the top houses and putting together tiny outfits to fit an increasingly unreachable standard that they're missing the more fun and care free aspects of college life.
Unfortunately in our hypercompetitive society, making the right connections by joining the best clubs and soroties/fraternities could have a major impact on your future career.
That's true! There's definitely a networking aspect to all this that can pay off for some. I still think the majority of these college aged women are spending a lot of time obsessing over things that ultimately won't matter that much in the long run. I'm biased though, because I never had any interest im Greek life anyway. I enjoyed my time as an undergrad and have made a decent career for myself without it.
Same, my family has always been super judgy of Greek life so it was never even really an option for me lol. I was just raised to think paying for friends is cringe 😂 and to do it normally. I’m really glad to have gone to college when social media was still fun and not as competitive/toxic as it is now.
Exactly. The Greek system is such a tight-knit community, and fiercely loyal. Just being in the right frat/sorority can push your resume to the top of the pile.
I understand if you are applying and you or a relative KNOW someone in the c-suite, but I didn’t know people actually put their sorority on their resume??
Agreed. Even my much more reasonable college kids spent a lot of time (but not money) thinking about how to decorate their dorm room. 35 years ago I was perfectly happy with my white cinder block walls.
25 years ago I decorated my dorm room.
I even had plexiglass cut to make clear shelves for the pegboard wall. Many people coordinates their bedding and decor when we found out or roommates the summer before.
The saddest part was the paragraph where the women's moms were encouraging them to take the weight loss drugs warning that the sororities were going to judge them for being a size 8. What an utterly vacuous existence if that is what they, the mothers, presumably at age 40-something were concerning yourself with. I can understand a bit with a bunch of young women with still-developing prefrontal cortexes still kind of trying to figure everything out and getting mixed up in the middle schoolness of it all. I had a lot of confusion I still needed to get out of my system at that age so I get it.
But grown women! That is wild to me. And also to get the dice roll where your mom sucks that bad as to think and act that way. What about loving and supporting your child and encouraging them to love their body?
My mother told me in ways overt and covert that nobody would love me if I was fat. “I had a 22-inch waist on my wedding day,” she would say, gloating, to her preteen child.
I had a 44-inch bust when I got married…and my marriage is also twice as happy.
Well, no offense to your mom but she can fuck right off. I’m sorry she said that to you. My grandfather used to announce that my grandmother was 110 lbs the day she was married, especially when I was in junior high and visibly uncomfortable in my own skin. I’d just come home from school crying because we were all lined up and weighed and measured and I was the only girl who was 5’7” and I was definitely not weighing in at 95 lbs like other girls were reporting they were.
Here’s to making meaning and finding joy better than our predecessors did!
I suspect if the moms weren't so anxious themselves about needing to be thin, their daughters wouldn't be so caught up in it. The mothers had been in sororities, so maybe they never let go of the belief they had to be thin to be happy, or that they were doing it wrong if they weren't as thin as possible.
I’m not shocked in the least. There is a whole generation of women (now in their 40s & 50s) who have been obsessed over every reality show on TV (Bachelor, Kardashians, Housewives, Magnolia, etc) for going on 20+ years now.
They’ve raised children in suburban households where these shows are constantly playing in the background, where these behaviors and mentality have been normalized.
If that wasn’t enough, these kids and parents now get to flood their eyeballs with every IG & TikTok version of millionaire-perfect bodies and lifestyles every time open their phone/tablets.
This is the only reality these kids know. The only way to gain their parent’s or others’ attention is by imitating the promise of an “Influencer’s Lifestyle™️”.
Needless to say, it also doesn’t help when virtually all news going back a decade have revolved around a handful of manipulative, maniacal people seeking power so they can do nothing more than screw over other people as a means to enriching themselves.
The worst aspects of human society have become shockingly normalized.
Edit: Does anyone else remember the backlash against magazines exclusively putting only super-skinny models on the covers 25 years ago? Maybe I’m just old.
The groups using GLP-1s used to be bulemics. There's nothing new about obsessing over body image. You would still have the same college experience because you would hang out with people who don't do that.
Yeah, I was in a sorority when I was in college 20 years ago, and if you replaced “ozempic” with “anorexia,” something pretty close to this article could have been written back then too.
I think a lot of kids are just naturally skinny. Both genders "fill out" for some reason women want to look stunted. but hey, that is capitalism with its youth culture fetish
The dope is new, and fantastic for part of the US population (many compulsions respond to this type of med) but the situation is as old as speed for the masses.
WW2 a female relative was on ?bennies? to work w 3rd Army day and night.
By 1950s, another female relative recounted to me almost the exact story as in the 'Cut' story above, except she was at an old mouldering Female college in the south. Despite being funny and gifted and athletic, she just wanted to "fit in."
Both women got off the speed andcontinued to lead fun, productive lives till their senior years.
My grandmother was prescribed speed when she got pregnant to keep her from gaining too much weight. She didn’t ask for it or voice concern about gaining weight, her doctor just prescribed her amphetamines like he did for apparently all his pregnant patients in the early 70s. Horrifying
> WW2 a female relative was on ?bennies? to work w 3rd Army day and night.
It was specifically benzedrine (also called “bennies” and “pep pills”), and it was literally just amphetamine that the Allied militaries handed out like candy to officers and soldiers alike.
Not to be outdone, the German army went one step further and dispensed methamphetamine pills under the name Pervitin, which resulted in Allied reports of unusually long German marches, German military encampments that seemed to work day and night, and lots of German letters to home begging for more Pervitin.
Please please please let us get to the point when the attraction of men is not a thing anymore! Like men are the basest of basic levels, your worth should not depend on how attracted a man is to you. I mean, they can't be trusted in morgues, around animals and children, around fruit for fucks sake! How have women debased themselves so low to think a man's opinion or attractiveness to them is worth anything???
It was the same when I was in college, anybody who wasn’t blonde and skinny couldn’t get in the top Panhellenic sororities (there were multicultural options however that tended to be more accepting in general). Hell I remember the news story where Alabama Greek life was ordered to desegregate and that was just in the early 2010s.
True, and even in my "ugly girl" nerd sorority in the mid-90s eating disorders were rampant. I remember one woman who would only eat air popped popcorn and lettuce.
It still is. My (cute, thin) daughter is currently in college and has been turned away from frat parties because she had multicultural friends with her. Ick!
I watched the Bama Rush docu a while back. It’s such a foreign world to me, I was shocked to see how religiously people treat Greek life. Like parents will hire coaches to help their kids get accepted at rush.
“A friend who had gotten into one of the touses told her about a particularly sadistic hazing ritual in which >!new girls were woken up in their dorms, taken to a senior’s apartment, and made to take turns sitting on a washing machine while the older sisters circled any jiggling fat on the new girls’ bodies with a marker. It sounded horrible but also gave her fomo”.!<
It’s an extremely common hazing urban legend that has existed on basically every campus, but it virtually never happens. (Maybe literally never happens?) I’d put money on it being a rumor in this case, too.
I’ve often found myself wondering exactly this when I come across hazing stories like this, so I appreciate your comment. I stayed miles away from anything “Greek” when I was in college so I have no real frame of reference for this stuff. But my intuition has always suggested that some of these alleged rituals sound more like urban legend than actual practice.
Me too, we never got hazed or hazed others. But during Y2K era, Weight Watchers Points, Adkin's Diet, and phen-fen reigned supreme for many women in college.
It’s so weird how different it can be from one chapter to another. My sorority was full of stoner girls, one time we had a pledge event where we were supposed to separate a giant bag of rainbow sprinkles into different but the lines got crossed somehow and the sorority president brought a bag of brown sprinkles— so we just got drunk and did karaoke instead
But I knew another girl, same sorority but different college— and they were totally brutal. Fat shaming, forced drinking, the works.
Yup I went to a small engineering college and then transferred to a state school and the two chapters were so different. From a group of all sorts of different women with different body shapes and sizes to a group of overwhelmingly skinny white girls. Following them post college years it seems like they’re starting to mix it up a little which is cool.
It’s about 50/50 from mine. Half went on to still be silly funky ladies, living their best hippie lives- and the other half have buried their stoner sorority sister pasts and are very “Tuckernuck” if that makes sense.
I wonder sometimes if the “Tuckernuck” branch pretends now that they were in a hardcore sorority at the top of the college social structure
I just meant the new recruits are a wider variety of people compared to my time in a state school sorority. Most of the girls in my pledge class are getting married and having a kid thing currently
This is very similar to the "heroin chic" standard we were subjected to back in the 90s. The difference is that "ozempidemic" is treated as "you have no excuse to be fat," since the drugs are easily available. In fact
>“I feel like the whole standard is changing,” McCall says. “It’s like, ‘Well, there’s no excuse for people to be fat because they could just get a GLP-1. Why would we accept somebody who wants to be fat?’”
Also, anybody else disturbed by how much the moms have readily enabled this, or even PRESSURED their daughter into getting on ozempic?!
Yeah, that really stood out to me too. No wonder these girls think like this when that's the example their given. It makes me really sad for the girls; they've really been failed by their parents.
Greek culture was like that before these weight loss drugs. When I was in college, I thought that sorority rush was like a meat market - hundreds of young women dressed in black cocktail dresses dying to be accepted. It was honestly extremely disturbing. Several of the sororities and frats on my campus were shut down for either killing someone or facilitating sexual assaults. What a shit show.
Now people can abuse these drugs and get super skinny with minimal effort. I'm really curious what the long-term health effects will be.
>Claire was more ambivalent. She thought GLP-1’s were for people with real medical issues, not teenagers who wanted to look better in Revolve skirt sets. “We’re basically still kids,” she says. “I thought that was wrong.” Couldn’t Marie just hit the gym a little harder? She also worried about the drugs’ potential long-term effects since they’re so new, but Marie was living in the moment. “I don’t really care,” she says. “I’m in my prime, so I’d rather look cute now.”
On a related note- does any one else feel like the young adults of today are like freakishly obsessed with their age? Like when I went to college every women's magazine was touring "30 is the new 20" and while I wasn't thrilled about turning 30 it wasn't like the end of the world.
College is not the only time I've been cute. Claire can be cute for literally the rest of her life. Gen Alpha are acting like they may as well die if they're not 21 anymore.
I heard two young women talking about a coworker who just turned 30 and talking about how good she looked for her age. Like 30 year olds are crippled old crones? Maybe I never had this particular insecurity and never had friends with it, but it seems so extreme to what I grew up with.
We have now seen the horrific predilections of the oligarch class, and we know also that they want to keep women in the home and silent. They plant the seeds and the culture follows, so Gen Z women are being bombarded from all directions with the message that youth is their currency. It is truly everywhere in media right now, and if you have not received counter-programming (like Millennials and Gen X did), it is easy to succumb.
A well-educated, well-traveled, well-loved woman is their ultimate nightmare, and our act of resistance can be simply to pass our precious time as we please instead of fretting over time passed.
It’s very strange because if anything, people are looking after themselves and their health so that they still look great at 60. Cigarettes, alcohol and shitty food are what age you, and people are not indulging as they once did. I’m 44. I haven’t had a drink in six years and stopped smoking 24 years ago. I run and hit the gym three times a week. As a result I’m aging differently to my parents’ generation.
And sun exposure. Growing up in the 80-90’s I put baby oil on my pale skin in order to burn to get a glimmer of a tan. My kids today put sunscreen on their face religiously. It is very strange along with Sephora and the like marketing age serums to pre-teens. I’m sure the sun exposure wasn’t good for me but I still feel plenty “cute” as a 53 year old woman.
Lowk this is extra sad because looking back I don’t even think college was my prime. I think people are conditioned to think that, but I felt super hot at 30
I think it’s terrifying that an 18-year-old has been told that she’s “in her prime.” I know she means physically, but what a sad life if you think it is all downhill after that?!?
She has so much still to read, so much still to see in the world, so much still to feel, and so much still to learn about herself and others. We all do! Our “prime” is always yet to come, never in some idealized past.
I like who I am in my 30s, but it's not the same kind of hot as when you're in college and can randomly fit into size 00 jeans. Honestly though, I definitely prefer my 30s hot over college hot.
today it's ozempic, in years past it was just overexercising, undereating, with a little purging and laxative abuse thrown in for good measure. one thing doesn't change: for girls who go to school focused on popularity and image rather than on their education, spending that much time living (and eating... or not eating) together can be a total shit show of comparison and competition.
in the 00s, i remember sitting down with some girls at the dining hall and discovering that they spent meals comparing calorie counts, boasting about their workouts, and judging each other for putting dressing on their salad. having spent high school in and out of the hospital for anorexia, i got the fuck out of dodge. i may have still been in the grip of my ED as much as any of them, but i was not going to treat it like a social hour.
>She decided to rush again this winter, hoping that after a year on tirzepatide, she will be top-sorority-girl material. “I’m glad Marie and Claire were able to look past those labels,” she says. “I’m too shallow. All the girls I want to be in with are super-skinny.”
I hope that one day we will hear young women saying, "All the girls I want to be in with are super-smart." Or kind. Or passionate about something other than fitting in and looking a certain way.
It's real obvious on campus. I see quite a few sorority girls on the weekends, and you can tell many of them are underweight. I guess I just hope it's Ozempic instead of a classic ED. Overall it's shocking how much the college experience, and everyday life, seems to be regressing back to the early 00s (except for flashing! Thankfully the young ladies are not doing that in an age of everything being recorded).
I see what you're trying to say, but I would like to say that abusing GLP-1 medication is, in my opinion anyway, a (semi) medically sanctioned eating disorder.
Some people with restriction-based eating disorders use all kinds of methods to reduce their appetites. GLP-1s may be a safer way to reduce your appetite than some of the more extreme examples (I won't share here but if you had any run-ins with 2010s 'pro-ana' content, etc - iykyk) but it's in service of the same end goal.
This is exactly what the article is trying to say - the skinny girls you are seeing have an eating disorder, and they are being helped by taking an easily available prescription drug.
This is why humanities courses in college are so important: these young women deserve to be awakened to how much time they are spending on “beauty work” and what that is taking away from their potential to contribute to society, find fulfilling work, and enjoy life. There are massive systems of power that want them to be distracted away from what really matters to them, mired in the impossible goal of taking up less and less space.
I would be a much lesser person but for the ideas presented to me in college.
They need gender studies classes! Those were some of the most impactful classes I took in college. They really made me think about beauty standards and where they come from.
I learned you could skip periods on the pill and about plotzed in the class! This was not something abstinence-only education taught me I could do, and so much time and pain was saved.
Articles like this highlight the shallow nature of sorority culture, but Ozempic is also a rational choice when it gives women an advantage in the job market. We know that fat women face significant disadvantages compared to thin women, while fat men aren't as disadvantaged compared to thin men. Studies like the one below show how Ozempic will be used in this context.
"Unemployed women taking GLP-1 medications to lose weight saw a 27 percentage point increase in employment after 18 months of use, compared with women who want to use the drugs but haven't done so."
we all gape and clutch ourselves in horror at the lengths women will go to get thin. it's crazy! it's unthinkable! etc etc
while that's true, we don't spend nearly as much time confronting the underlying why, confronting the value and power awarded to thinness, and the hatred, abuse, and discrimination that fat people face.
And so much of the conversation is about Hollywood actors or influencers or sororities, when they should also be looking at how thinness helps women in employment settings and in their interactions with health care providers etc. All things being equal, these 'shallow' sorority sisters will have an easier time at work and their doctors will take them more seriously.
As a Finn, reading these kinds of articles about college life is so strange. It literally has nothing in common with how going to uni is in our country. 😳
The funny thing is, with the possible exception of the 2010s(I was 18 in 2010, and I don’t recall a specific weight loss method, but I do recall eating disorder awareness being on the rise), every decade has had some newfangled way to lose weight that usually by the end of the decade is revealed to have been toxic or have other nasty side effects.
What a depressing read. I think it helps to put it in perspective when you remember the stat they shared- these girls are trying for a spot in an org that only takes 250 people a year. That is a tiny part of the college student experience in the US. Yes, it has an obsessive following and documenting on social media, but this isnt some widespread thing happening. Not saying I don’t feel sympathy for these three girls who are harming their bodies and making themselves miserable, but is this happening at other universities?
I kind of agree. It's a big thing at SEC schools but I think it's way less common outside the South. My college definitely had the mean picky sororities (as I mentioned in my comment) but at the same time it was not at the level of like Bama where you can't have a social life if you're not in a sorority/fraternity, and the percentage of students in Greek life was way lower.
I know autism doesn’t work the same for everyone who has it, but it sure kept me completely unaware of any of this stuff in college.
I credit my parents and the actually awesome public schools I attended with building my confidence in my difference, and not teaching me to care very much about “fitting in.” I know I was very lucky in that, because I have never fit in, and it’s good to not base my entire worth on it.
I really hate to be this person, but back in college, we all just lost a lot of weight because we couldn't even afford food most days. I promise if I had Ozempic money, I would've been eating way more than 2 potatoes and stolen coffee from the professor lounges a day.
I was kinda living in my car and a sack of potatoes was $3.50 - so you just kinda microwave it wherever you can find a microwave, sprinkle it with salt and pepper packets - BIG BONUS if you can find some free butter pats. It's nutritious enough to keep you from dying, only takes about 3 minutes to microwave if you're scared of getting caught in professors' lounge cause they have the cleanest microwaves and the best coffee that you sort of just steal.
Do I regret sometimes that I was asked to rush a sorority but I turned it down cause I needed to focus on schoolwork? I mean, I had only ever been to one college party in my lifetime. I think what I took out of the experience is that I can live off of a sack of potatoes for about 2 weeks.
Man this is crazy. I glad my college experience was nothing like this. We mostly walked around in sweat pants. We had sororities but they were not a big thing.
foxaru | 16 hours ago
>For many young women who have just arrived on campus, thinness feels like the ticket into the best possible college experience. “As a 20-year-old, I want to have the hottest guys in my phone,” one tells me. “I want to be hanging out with the pretty girls. I want to feel pretty.” If that means spending thousands of dollars a year to suppress their appetites, so be it. “People say college is what you make it,” Marie tells me. “But college is what people see when they look at you.”
ahhh, horrors beyond my comprehension
thank god I'm old and fat
ZombieTrogdor | 15 hours ago
God, that makes me sad to read. College can be what you make it, but these girls want to be in the best sororities and the best parties, meeting the cutest athletes on the best teams. They have others make the college experience for them. The pressure from social media and all those damn TikTok’s of “look at my dorm room at ‘Bama where my parents spent $20k to decorate!” And it looks like a Claire’s threw up in it. I do not envy college students today.
AtomicLavaCake | 11 hours ago
The whole time I was reading this I was thinking about how little any of this matters. College lasts a few short years and then it's over.....these women are putting so much thought and effort into being thin and rushing the top houses and putting together tiny outfits to fit an increasingly unreachable standard that they're missing the more fun and care free aspects of college life.
altacan | 11 hours ago
Unfortunately in our hypercompetitive society, making the right connections by joining the best clubs and soroties/fraternities could have a major impact on your future career.
AtomicLavaCake | 11 hours ago
That's true! There's definitely a networking aspect to all this that can pay off for some. I still think the majority of these college aged women are spending a lot of time obsessing over things that ultimately won't matter that much in the long run. I'm biased though, because I never had any interest im Greek life anyway. I enjoyed my time as an undergrad and have made a decent career for myself without it.
throwawaysunglasses- | 9 hours ago
Same, my family has always been super judgy of Greek life so it was never even really an option for me lol. I was just raised to think paying for friends is cringe 😂 and to do it normally. I’m really glad to have gone to college when social media was still fun and not as competitive/toxic as it is now.
ZombieTrogdor | 11 hours ago
Exactly. The Greek system is such a tight-knit community, and fiercely loyal. Just being in the right frat/sorority can push your resume to the top of the pile.
catarms | 6 hours ago
I understand if you are applying and you or a relative KNOW someone in the c-suite, but I didn’t know people actually put their sorority on their resume??
warcraftWidow | 14 hours ago
Agreed. Even my much more reasonable college kids spent a lot of time (but not money) thinking about how to decorate their dorm room. 35 years ago I was perfectly happy with my white cinder block walls.
JohnSith | 12 hours ago
I wasn't. I needed that milk crate bookcase.
Powerful-Patient-765 | 7 hours ago
I rescued a couch off the curb that had probably been in 20 different dorm rooms. I was pretty proud of it.
JohnSith | 3 hours ago
I picked up a mini fridge that was basically brand new.
StayJaded | 13 hours ago
25 years ago I decorated my dorm room.
I even had plexiglass cut to make clear shelves for the pegboard wall. Many people coordinates their bedding and decor when we found out or roommates the summer before.
havetopee | 7 hours ago
I read that as "oh, look there's Claire's throw up" and thought, that sounds more like my college experience
memilygiraffily | 12 hours ago
The saddest part was the paragraph where the women's moms were encouraging them to take the weight loss drugs warning that the sororities were going to judge them for being a size 8. What an utterly vacuous existence if that is what they, the mothers, presumably at age 40-something were concerning yourself with. I can understand a bit with a bunch of young women with still-developing prefrontal cortexes still kind of trying to figure everything out and getting mixed up in the middle schoolness of it all. I had a lot of confusion I still needed to get out of my system at that age so I get it.
But grown women! That is wild to me. And also to get the dice roll where your mom sucks that bad as to think and act that way. What about loving and supporting your child and encouraging them to love their body?
Gildedfilth | 12 hours ago
My mother told me in ways overt and covert that nobody would love me if I was fat. “I had a 22-inch waist on my wedding day,” she would say, gloating, to her preteen child.
I had a 44-inch bust when I got married…and my marriage is also twice as happy.
memilygiraffily | 10 hours ago
Well, no offense to your mom but she can fuck right off. I’m sorry she said that to you. My grandfather used to announce that my grandmother was 110 lbs the day she was married, especially when I was in junior high and visibly uncomfortable in my own skin. I’d just come home from school crying because we were all lined up and weighed and measured and I was the only girl who was 5’7” and I was definitely not weighing in at 95 lbs like other girls were reporting they were.
Here’s to making meaning and finding joy better than our predecessors did!
TeamHope4 | 11 hours ago
I suspect if the moms weren't so anxious themselves about needing to be thin, their daughters wouldn't be so caught up in it. The mothers had been in sororities, so maybe they never let go of the belief they had to be thin to be happy, or that they were doing it wrong if they weren't as thin as possible.
hondo9999 | 7 hours ago
I’m not shocked in the least. There is a whole generation of women (now in their 40s & 50s) who have been obsessed over every reality show on TV (Bachelor, Kardashians, Housewives, Magnolia, etc) for going on 20+ years now.
They’ve raised children in suburban households where these shows are constantly playing in the background, where these behaviors and mentality have been normalized.
If that wasn’t enough, these kids and parents now get to flood their eyeballs with every IG & TikTok version of millionaire-perfect bodies and lifestyles every time open their phone/tablets.
This is the only reality these kids know. The only way to gain their parent’s or others’ attention is by imitating the promise of an “Influencer’s Lifestyle™️”.
Needless to say, it also doesn’t help when virtually all news going back a decade have revolved around a handful of manipulative, maniacal people seeking power so they can do nothing more than screw over other people as a means to enriching themselves.
The worst aspects of human society have become shockingly normalized.
Edit: Does anyone else remember the backlash against magazines exclusively putting only super-skinny models on the covers 25 years ago? Maybe I’m just old.
grumpy__g | 16 hours ago
Thank god that my college experience was very different.
gpunotpsu | 15 hours ago
The groups using GLP-1s used to be bulemics. There's nothing new about obsessing over body image. You would still have the same college experience because you would hang out with people who don't do that.
Cute-Discount-6969 | 14 hours ago
Co-sign. I was in college in the early 2000s, and most of my friends had disordered eating and over-exercising to get the result.
Rrmack | 14 hours ago
Ya plus there has always been plenty of drugs to suppress your appetite in college and beyond
candcNYC | 11 hours ago
Including smoking cigarettes.
anneoftheisland | 12 hours ago
Yeah, I was in a sorority when I was in college 20 years ago, and if you replaced “ozempic” with “anorexia,” something pretty close to this article could have been written back then too.
Whats-What-too | 12 hours ago
When I was in high school many of the girls relied on caffeine pills and cigarettes. I think those types didn’t go to college.
fergusmacdooley | 11 hours ago
I'm in this comment and it's ok.
CatRescuer8 | 15 hours ago
Same. I specifically only applied to schools where Greek life was not present or not very popular.
QualityKatie | 14 hours ago
Yeah, I could hardly buy a tank of gas. No way could I fathom spending that much on ozempic.
wwaxwork | 13 hours ago
Teenage girls have been doing dangerous things to get thin for centuries.
grumpy__g | 13 hours ago
Jupp. Still glad that my experience was different.
havetopee | 7 hours ago
I think a lot of kids are just naturally skinny. Both genders "fill out" for some reason women want to look stunted. but hey, that is capitalism with its youth culture fetish
Gonna_do_this_again | 15 hours ago
We all wanted the 90s back but not like this
WrigglyGizka | 16 hours ago
Old and fat supremacy!!
We're too busy defending democracy from tyranny to have hot people problems. What will these hotties do when the terminids come for their freedom??
adaytooaway | 14 hours ago
Cheering probably I bet most of them are trumpers.
bettertheless | 12 hours ago
The dope is new, and fantastic for part of the US population (many compulsions respond to this type of med) but the situation is as old as speed for the masses.
WW2 a female relative was on ?bennies? to work w 3rd Army day and night.
By 1950s, another female relative recounted to me almost the exact story as in the 'Cut' story above, except she was at an old mouldering Female college in the south. Despite being funny and gifted and athletic, she just wanted to "fit in."
Both women got off the speed andcontinued to lead fun, productive lives till their senior years.
Dis-Organizer | 11 hours ago
My grandmother was prescribed speed when she got pregnant to keep her from gaining too much weight. She didn’t ask for it or voice concern about gaining weight, her doctor just prescribed her amphetamines like he did for apparently all his pregnant patients in the early 70s. Horrifying
Fleckeri | 10 hours ago
> WW2 a female relative was on ?bennies? to work w 3rd Army day and night.
It was specifically benzedrine (also called “bennies” and “pep pills”), and it was literally just amphetamine that the Allied militaries handed out like candy to officers and soldiers alike.
Not to be outdone, the German army went one step further and dispensed methamphetamine pills under the name Pervitin, which resulted in Allied reports of unusually long German marches, German military encampments that seemed to work day and night, and lots of German letters to home begging for more Pervitin.
orangeluminousjoy | 5 hours ago
Please please please let us get to the point when the attraction of men is not a thing anymore! Like men are the basest of basic levels, your worth should not depend on how attracted a man is to you. I mean, they can't be trusted in morgues, around animals and children, around fruit for fucks sake! How have women debased themselves so low to think a man's opinion or attractiveness to them is worth anything???
Narwhals4Lyf | 15 hours ago
Right like im happy to be chunky I simply don’t care
wugthepug | 16 hours ago
It was the same when I was in college, anybody who wasn’t blonde and skinny couldn’t get in the top Panhellenic sororities (there were multicultural options however that tended to be more accepting in general). Hell I remember the news story where Alabama Greek life was ordered to desegregate and that was just in the early 2010s.
rockstaraimz | 15 hours ago
True, and even in my "ugly girl" nerd sorority in the mid-90s eating disorders were rampant. I remember one woman who would only eat air popped popcorn and lettuce.
Peppercorn911 | 16 hours ago
i read some reporting on “The Machine” at some college. wild wild
mmdvak | 9 hours ago
That, too, was Bama. 🫠
warcraftWidow | 14 hours ago
It still is. My (cute, thin) daughter is currently in college and has been turned away from frat parties because she had multicultural friends with her. Ick!
zipiddydooda | 13 hours ago
God that’s disgusting.
warcraftWidow | 13 hours ago
It really is disgusting. It is a major state school and known for academics yet still this shit goes on.
bubblebath_ofentropy | 9 hours ago
I watched the Bama Rush docu a while back. It’s such a foreign world to me, I was shocked to see how religiously people treat Greek life. Like parents will hire coaches to help their kids get accepted at rush.
etherealemilyy | 16 hours ago
“A friend who had gotten into one of the touses told her about a particularly sadistic hazing ritual in which >!new girls were woken up in their dorms, taken to a senior’s apartment, and made to take turns sitting on a washing machine while the older sisters circled any jiggling fat on the new girls’ bodies with a marker. It sounded horrible but also gave her fomo”.!<
Wow. Crazy article, thanks for sharing.
envyviolet | 16 hours ago
crazy that they STILL do this. one of the most common hazing practices that has been going on for decades
etherealemilyy | 16 hours ago
really?? I had never heard of that one, but I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.
The whole thing was just sad. Like they’ve resigned themselves to doing all this because it will make them happy, which obviously is not true.
veggiebikebook | 15 hours ago
Yep, my freshman roommate’s sorority did this 25 years ago
Separate_Lie_6797 | 14 hours ago
It’s so homoerotic lol like imagine sitting on a vibrating object while the other girls domme u
anneoftheisland | 12 hours ago
It’s an extremely common hazing urban legend that has existed on basically every campus, but it virtually never happens. (Maybe literally never happens?) I’d put money on it being a rumor in this case, too.
etherealsmog | 9 hours ago
I’ve often found myself wondering exactly this when I come across hazing stories like this, so I appreciate your comment. I stayed miles away from anything “Greek” when I was in college so I have no real frame of reference for this stuff. But my intuition has always suggested that some of these alleged rituals sound more like urban legend than actual practice.
CringeCoyote | 15 hours ago
Jesus Christ I am so glad my sorority never did any sort of hazing. Horrible
TreeSignificant9782 | 15 hours ago
Yeah the only hazing we did was a silly scavenger hunt that ended with voluntary binge drinking like god intended haha.
thelaineybelle | 15 hours ago
Me too, we never got hazed or hazed others. But during Y2K era, Weight Watchers Points, Adkin's Diet, and phen-fen reigned supreme for many women in college.
MrsAstronautJones | 13 hours ago
It’s so weird how different it can be from one chapter to another. My sorority was full of stoner girls, one time we had a pledge event where we were supposed to separate a giant bag of rainbow sprinkles into different but the lines got crossed somehow and the sorority president brought a bag of brown sprinkles— so we just got drunk and did karaoke instead
But I knew another girl, same sorority but different college— and they were totally brutal. Fat shaming, forced drinking, the works.
CringeCoyote | 13 hours ago
Yup I went to a small engineering college and then transferred to a state school and the two chapters were so different. From a group of all sorts of different women with different body shapes and sizes to a group of overwhelmingly skinny white girls. Following them post college years it seems like they’re starting to mix it up a little which is cool.
MrsAstronautJones | 13 hours ago
It’s about 50/50 from mine. Half went on to still be silly funky ladies, living their best hippie lives- and the other half have buried their stoner sorority sister pasts and are very “Tuckernuck” if that makes sense.
I wonder sometimes if the “Tuckernuck” branch pretends now that they were in a hardcore sorority at the top of the college social structure
CringeCoyote | 12 hours ago
I just meant the new recruits are a wider variety of people compared to my time in a state school sorority. Most of the girls in my pledge class are getting married and having a kid thing currently
anbigsteppy | 7 hours ago
What's Tuckernuck?
catarms | 6 hours ago
A clothing company
LilRedCaliRose | 15 hours ago
What in the actual F? Why would you be that desperate to have friends that you would subject yourself to this behavior?
Us moms have to teach our daughters that there are much easier and better and funner ways to make friends!
jempai | 13 hours ago
This happened at FSU to my friend who rushed fall 2019.
tres-vip | 14 hours ago
This is very similar to the "heroin chic" standard we were subjected to back in the 90s. The difference is that "ozempidemic" is treated as "you have no excuse to be fat," since the drugs are easily available. In fact
>“I feel like the whole standard is changing,” McCall says. “It’s like, ‘Well, there’s no excuse for people to be fat because they could just get a GLP-1. Why would we accept somebody who wants to be fat?’”
Also, anybody else disturbed by how much the moms have readily enabled this, or even PRESSURED their daughter into getting on ozempic?!
happygiraffe91 | 13 hours ago
Yeah, that really stood out to me too. No wonder these girls think like this when that's the example their given. It makes me really sad for the girls; they've really been failed by their parents.
WrigglyGizka | 16 hours ago
Greek culture was like that before these weight loss drugs. When I was in college, I thought that sorority rush was like a meat market - hundreds of young women dressed in black cocktail dresses dying to be accepted. It was honestly extremely disturbing. Several of the sororities and frats on my campus were shut down for either killing someone or facilitating sexual assaults. What a shit show.
Now people can abuse these drugs and get super skinny with minimal effort. I'm really curious what the long-term health effects will be.
>Claire was more ambivalent. She thought GLP-1’s were for people with real medical issues, not teenagers who wanted to look better in Revolve skirt sets. “We’re basically still kids,” she says. “I thought that was wrong.” Couldn’t Marie just hit the gym a little harder? She also worried about the drugs’ potential long-term effects since they’re so new, but Marie was living in the moment. “I don’t really care,” she says. “I’m in my prime, so I’d rather look cute now.”
AlexandriaLitehouse | 14 hours ago
On a related note- does any one else feel like the young adults of today are like freakishly obsessed with their age? Like when I went to college every women's magazine was touring "30 is the new 20" and while I wasn't thrilled about turning 30 it wasn't like the end of the world.
College is not the only time I've been cute. Claire can be cute for literally the rest of her life. Gen Alpha are acting like they may as well die if they're not 21 anymore.
I heard two young women talking about a coworker who just turned 30 and talking about how good she looked for her age. Like 30 year olds are crippled old crones? Maybe I never had this particular insecurity and never had friends with it, but it seems so extreme to what I grew up with.
Gildedfilth | 12 hours ago
We have now seen the horrific predilections of the oligarch class, and we know also that they want to keep women in the home and silent. They plant the seeds and the culture follows, so Gen Z women are being bombarded from all directions with the message that youth is their currency. It is truly everywhere in media right now, and if you have not received counter-programming (like Millennials and Gen X did), it is easy to succumb.
A well-educated, well-traveled, well-loved woman is their ultimate nightmare, and our act of resistance can be simply to pass our precious time as we please instead of fretting over time passed.
zipiddydooda | 13 hours ago
It’s very strange because if anything, people are looking after themselves and their health so that they still look great at 60. Cigarettes, alcohol and shitty food are what age you, and people are not indulging as they once did. I’m 44. I haven’t had a drink in six years and stopped smoking 24 years ago. I run and hit the gym three times a week. As a result I’m aging differently to my parents’ generation.
warcraftWidow | 13 hours ago
And sun exposure. Growing up in the 80-90’s I put baby oil on my pale skin in order to burn to get a glimmer of a tan. My kids today put sunscreen on their face religiously. It is very strange along with Sephora and the like marketing age serums to pre-teens. I’m sure the sun exposure wasn’t good for me but I still feel plenty “cute” as a 53 year old woman.
peppperjack | 14 hours ago
Lowk this is extra sad because looking back I don’t even think college was my prime. I think people are conditioned to think that, but I felt super hot at 30
Gildedfilth | 12 hours ago
I think it’s terrifying that an 18-year-old has been told that she’s “in her prime.” I know she means physically, but what a sad life if you think it is all downhill after that?!?
She has so much still to read, so much still to see in the world, so much still to feel, and so much still to learn about herself and others. We all do! Our “prime” is always yet to come, never in some idealized past.
sandrrawrr | 13 hours ago
I like who I am in my 30s, but it's not the same kind of hot as when you're in college and can randomly fit into size 00 jeans. Honestly though, I definitely prefer my 30s hot over college hot.
pillowcase-of-eels | 17 hours ago
I can't believe we suffered through five years of Megan Trainor and Lizzo and it was all for nothing.
[OP] naelisio | 17 hours ago
Pretty sure both of them ended up losing weight at that too.
le_moni | 16 hours ago
it's almost like society was still treating fat people like garbage
danceswsheep | 14 hours ago
It was nice to have a break from rabid fatphobia for a little while. People can be so mean to themselves and others
wwaxwork | 13 hours ago
Oh no society wasn't completely changed in 5 whole years.
parachutecord | 15 hours ago
today it's ozempic, in years past it was just overexercising, undereating, with a little purging and laxative abuse thrown in for good measure. one thing doesn't change: for girls who go to school focused on popularity and image rather than on their education, spending that much time living (and eating... or not eating) together can be a total shit show of comparison and competition.
in the 00s, i remember sitting down with some girls at the dining hall and discovering that they spent meals comparing calorie counts, boasting about their workouts, and judging each other for putting dressing on their salad. having spent high school in and out of the hospital for anorexia, i got the fuck out of dodge. i may have still been in the grip of my ED as much as any of them, but i was not going to treat it like a social hour.
TeamHope4 | 14 hours ago
>She decided to rush again this winter, hoping that after a year on tirzepatide, she will be top-sorority-girl material. “I’m glad Marie and Claire were able to look past those labels,” she says. “I’m too shallow. All the girls I want to be in with are super-skinny.”
I hope that one day we will hear young women saying, "All the girls I want to be in with are super-smart." Or kind. Or passionate about something other than fitting in and looking a certain way.
brockhopper | 15 hours ago
It's real obvious on campus. I see quite a few sorority girls on the weekends, and you can tell many of them are underweight. I guess I just hope it's Ozempic instead of a classic ED. Overall it's shocking how much the college experience, and everyday life, seems to be regressing back to the early 00s (except for flashing! Thankfully the young ladies are not doing that in an age of everything being recorded).
felassans | 12 hours ago
I see what you're trying to say, but I would like to say that abusing GLP-1 medication is, in my opinion anyway, a (semi) medically sanctioned eating disorder.
Some people with restriction-based eating disorders use all kinds of methods to reduce their appetites. GLP-1s may be a safer way to reduce your appetite than some of the more extreme examples (I won't share here but if you had any run-ins with 2010s 'pro-ana' content, etc - iykyk) but it's in service of the same end goal.
cranberryjuiceicepop | 11 hours ago
This is exactly what the article is trying to say - the skinny girls you are seeing have an eating disorder, and they are being helped by taking an easily available prescription drug.
[OP] naelisio | 17 hours ago
Article without paywall:
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.thecut.com/article/sorority-rows-glp-1-secret.html
Gildedfilth | 16 hours ago
This is why humanities courses in college are so important: these young women deserve to be awakened to how much time they are spending on “beauty work” and what that is taking away from their potential to contribute to society, find fulfilling work, and enjoy life. There are massive systems of power that want them to be distracted away from what really matters to them, mired in the impossible goal of taking up less and less space.
I would be a much lesser person but for the ideas presented to me in college.
LouCat10 | 12 hours ago
They need gender studies classes! Those were some of the most impactful classes I took in college. They really made me think about beauty standards and where they come from.
Gildedfilth | 12 hours ago
I learned you could skip periods on the pill and about plotzed in the class! This was not something abstinence-only education taught me I could do, and so much time and pain was saved.
LysergioXandex | 14 hours ago
You mean like humanities as a major? Because just doing the requirements needed alongside a STEM degree don’t necessarily touch on any of that.
JenningsWigService | 14 hours ago
Articles like this highlight the shallow nature of sorority culture, but Ozempic is also a rational choice when it gives women an advantage in the job market. We know that fat women face significant disadvantages compared to thin women, while fat men aren't as disadvantaged compared to thin men. Studies like the one below show how Ozempic will be used in this context.
"Unemployed women taking GLP-1 medications to lose weight saw a 27 percentage point increase in employment after 18 months of use, compared with women who want to use the drugs but haven't done so."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/glp-1-weight-loss-drugs-women-employment/
parachutecord | 14 hours ago
truth
we all gape and clutch ourselves in horror at the lengths women will go to get thin. it's crazy! it's unthinkable! etc etc
while that's true, we don't spend nearly as much time confronting the underlying why, confronting the value and power awarded to thinness, and the hatred, abuse, and discrimination that fat people face.
JenningsWigService | 14 hours ago
And so much of the conversation is about Hollywood actors or influencers or sororities, when they should also be looking at how thinness helps women in employment settings and in their interactions with health care providers etc. All things being equal, these 'shallow' sorority sisters will have an easier time at work and their doctors will take them more seriously.
anbigsteppy | 7 hours ago
exactly!!!
DeeperEnd84 | 15 hours ago
As a Finn, reading these kinds of articles about college life is so strange. It literally has nothing in common with how going to uni is in our country. 😳
tres-vip | 14 hours ago
Greek life on American college campuses is just an institutionalized version of the popular cliques aka the "Cool Kids" of high school, lol.
DeeperEnd84 | 14 hours ago
I teach Finnish high school and it seems that too is very different.
colorsnumberswords | 11 hours ago
what is finnish high school like?
Snoo_33033 | 16 hours ago
This article is…well, duh. Sororities are very focused on the right look. People will get there by any means necessary.
A_Sister_of_Battle | 16 hours ago
The funny thing is, with the possible exception of the 2010s(I was 18 in 2010, and I don’t recall a specific weight loss method, but I do recall eating disorder awareness being on the rise), every decade has had some newfangled way to lose weight that usually by the end of the decade is revealed to have been toxic or have other nasty side effects.
Snoo_33033 | 16 hours ago
Yes. In my era it was fen phen. However that’s spelled.
RadiantAd5312 | 16 hours ago
Yikes. This can’t be healthy
hellolovely1 | 15 hours ago
I was just reading that under-eating as a teen is a major risk factor for osteoporosis later in life, too!
Numerous-Fee5981 | 14 hours ago
There’s an underweight to fertility doctor pipeline awaiting as well.
cranberryjuiceicepop | 10 hours ago
What a depressing read. I think it helps to put it in perspective when you remember the stat they shared- these girls are trying for a spot in an org that only takes 250 people a year. That is a tiny part of the college student experience in the US. Yes, it has an obsessive following and documenting on social media, but this isnt some widespread thing happening. Not saying I don’t feel sympathy for these three girls who are harming their bodies and making themselves miserable, but is this happening at other universities?
wugthepug | 8 hours ago
I kind of agree. It's a big thing at SEC schools but I think it's way less common outside the South. My college definitely had the mean picky sororities (as I mentioned in my comment) but at the same time it was not at the level of like Bama where you can't have a social life if you're not in a sorority/fraternity, and the percentage of students in Greek life was way lower.
Grace_Omega | 14 hours ago
Sororities and fraternities aren't a thing in my country, and frankly the whole thing seems like an exhausting nightmare
Bright_Ices | 10 hours ago
I know autism doesn’t work the same for everyone who has it, but it sure kept me completely unaware of any of this stuff in college.
I credit my parents and the actually awesome public schools I attended with building my confidence in my difference, and not teaching me to care very much about “fitting in.” I know I was very lucky in that, because I have never fit in, and it’s good to not base my entire worth on it.
moonrise1704 | 15 hours ago
As a sorority girl on a small campus where nothing like this happens, this just made me incredibly sad.
pesliee | 15 hours ago
Gaining weight in college is a rite of passage!!!!
anbigsteppy | 7 hours ago
It really shouldn't be, given the obesity crisis.
sandrrawrr | 13 hours ago
I really hate to be this person, but back in college, we all just lost a lot of weight because we couldn't even afford food most days. I promise if I had Ozempic money, I would've been eating way more than 2 potatoes and stolen coffee from the professor lounges a day.
PC-load-letter-wtf | 12 hours ago
I ate ramen and free crackers that were meant for people who bought soup in the cafeteria lol definitely did not have ozempic money
sandrrawrr | 4 hours ago
I was kinda living in my car and a sack of potatoes was $3.50 - so you just kinda microwave it wherever you can find a microwave, sprinkle it with salt and pepper packets - BIG BONUS if you can find some free butter pats. It's nutritious enough to keep you from dying, only takes about 3 minutes to microwave if you're scared of getting caught in professors' lounge cause they have the cleanest microwaves and the best coffee that you sort of just steal.
Do I regret sometimes that I was asked to rush a sorority but I turned it down cause I needed to focus on schoolwork? I mean, I had only ever been to one college party in my lifetime. I think what I took out of the experience is that I can live off of a sack of potatoes for about 2 weeks.
Leather-Confection70 | 13 hours ago
Man this is crazy. I glad my college experience was nothing like this. We mostly walked around in sweat pants. We had sororities but they were not a big thing.
birdgoil | 13 hours ago
Is there a non paywall version?
thrama41 | 8 hours ago
OP posted it.
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.thecut.com/article/sorority-rows-glp-1-secret.html
PC-load-letter-wtf | 12 hours ago
Google paywall remover, click the top link in Google, paste the URL in. Faster than asking here really
glumavocados | 10 hours ago
So glad I went to a college without sororities. wtf
UnicornPenguinCat | 9 hours ago
It's still crazy to me that they're even real. Until pretty recently I thought it was something just made up for movies/TV (or extremely exaggerated).
mapett | 4 hours ago
Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life.
Marc385 | 15 hours ago
Paywall though?
[OP] naelisio | 15 hours ago
See my other comment in this thread for a non paywall version.