I have to admit that at first the media blitz about the Glenbrook North hazing incident–the May 4 powder-puff football ritual that turned so vicious it sent five juniors to the hospital–didn’t register. Hunting for updates from Iraq, I scanned the headlines about it and felt a vague, removed contempt toward the students involved. But I didn’t read the articles.
Yet viewing the abbreviated clip I mostly just smelled the chill grass, the damp earth, the beer, the shampoo and the hair spray. Mostly I saw the smoky green woods and felt the good crackle of sweaty exertion in the cold. Something about it looked fun. And so I worried a little. Maybe it was me.
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The main thing to do on a Friday night was to attend a game, where excitement came in the form of walking around the dark track that encircled the floodlit field. Even in junior high I was going to the public library and leafing through the college catalogs, dreaming of larger vistas, but when in Rome, the quickest way to have fun is to participate. Plus, there just weren’t enough people in my town to form a lot of specialized cliques–there were no punk kids, no Deadheads, no computer nerds–and in order to socialize you had to make odd alliances. It fostered a strange sort of tolerance. I enjoyed growing up in Meadville. It could be I’m the better for it.
That was the function of the sororities in Meadville. There were three: Reunir, for the jocky or popular kids; Alpha, for the smoking-lounge burnouts; and Miramar, for those who could go either way. They were well established–my boyfriend’s mother had been in one. In my era most sorority girls, myself included, belonged to Reunir. Out of a student body of about 800, I’m going to say there might have been 70 or 80 girls in Reunir. As soon as a new crop of sophomores was initiated, we’d start cruising the freshmen–who were still down at the junior high–for the next year’s pledge class. I read somewhere that a grudge stemming back to junior high boyfriends helped fuel the Glenbrook North brutality; in Meadville the high school guys regularly plucked pretty ninth graders to date, but Reunir co-opted the boys’ interest and made the genders competitive partners in the turning out of fresh meat.
Turning on the TV one morning this summer, before I changed the channel so my son could watch Clifford the Big Red Dog, I finally caught a glimpse of video showing the sort of atrocities I’d read about: an arc of transparent pink paint thinner streaming through the air, 12 years of organized soccer coming to bear on someone’s clenched ribs. I’m not a person who believes there’s good violence and bad violence, and the girls’ behavior was deplorable. Still, it didn’t jolt me quite as much as the interaction between them and their male classmates. These guys weren’t skulking in the shadows–they were walking around with beers and hoisting the senior girls in the air so they could tap-guzzle. They played an integral, if not central, role in the drama. They were the Girls Gone Wild producers, taping the girl-on-girl action for their own pleasure and maybe more. If the socioeconomic differences between my high school and Glenbrook North don’t go far enough in helping me exonerate myself of retroactive complicity, maybe the differences in gender dynamics do.
The final ordeal was the vote, where each sophomore had to stand on a chair in a darkened room and, illuminated by a flashlight more commonly used for deer spotting, answer questions thrown at her by the sisters. Are you a slut? Do you think you have a great ass, is that why you wear your jeans so tight? Did you let Tony P—- feel you up at the Clarion game? In my three years the interrogation wasn’t as brutal as it was rumored to have been in the past. We’d exhausted ourselves by the second rush. Votes were tallied after sophomores left, and the next day at school they found out who’d made the cut. At Reunir’s end-of-the-year banquet, the sophomores traditionally serenaded the rest of the club with James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend.”
