TOO HAPPY, WHITE AND FEMININE? Yep, that’s what an angry AL.com writer seems to think about a sweet and upbeat sorority recruitment video posted by the University of Alabama’s chapter of Alpha Phi sorority. The writer, A.L. Bailey, complains:
No, it’s not a slick Playboy Playmate or Girls Gone Wild video. It’s a sorority recruiting tool gaining on 500,000 views in its first week on YouTube. It’s a parade of white girls and blonde hair dye, coordinated clothing, bikinis and daisy dukes, glitter and kisses, bouncing bodies, euphoric hand-holding and hugging, gratuitous booty shots, and matching aviator sunglasses. It’s all so racially and aesthetically homogeneous and forced, so hyper-feminine, so reductive and objectifying, so Stepford Wives: College Edition. It’s all so … unempowering. . . . Yes, sororities are known for being pretty and flirty; they aren’t bastions of feminist ideologies. But perhaps they shouldn’t completely sabotage them either.
Why do I get the impression that A.L. Bailey is either an ugly, angry feminist who is jealous of the obviously pretty, happy, All-American college girls displayed in the video, or a nerdy, self-righteous progressive male hipster who could never get a date with one of these lovely young ladies? They seem fully empowered to me, and it’s not their responsibility, as college-age sorority girls, to fly the flag of radical, liberal/progressive feminism. In fact, A.L. Bailey seems utterly unaware of the possibility that these young women might think of feminism in very different ways from his/her own antediluvian stereotype.
According to Scott Greer of the Daily Caller:
What this author is really saying is that these women shouldn’t be so darn white, happy and feminine.
Unfortunately, Bailey is not a fringe outlier. Her article is only the latest salvo in the left’s war on sorority girls.
Last Friday, The Washington Post published an article urging the removal of “the Southern belle from her inglorious perch.” A noted ideal for sorority women in the southeast, the belle in the eyes of the Post is instead a horrific icon of white supremacy.
Thankfully, according to WaPo, southern schools like the University of Georgia are taking the bold step in banning the southern belle’s dreaded “hoop” skirt. This skirt, as the author Elizabeth Boyd believes, is just as much of a “racial symbol” as a noose or Confederate battle flag. That’s why it must go — and so must the belle herself.
Well, I’m certainly no big fan of the hoop skirt, having worn them several times for proms and sorority events when I was a young woman living in Atlanta. But to suggest that the hoop skirt–or being a Southern “belle”–is a “racial symbol” is patently ridiculous. Hoop skirts are uncomfortable and inconvenient, which is why they are no longer worn very often. But they have nothing whatsoever to do with any racial beliefs, anymore than wearing cotton clothing does. Just because cotton was grown principally in the South and harvested by slaves, does this make cotton a “racial symbol”?
C’mon people, grow some common sense, and maybe a little self esteem. Not everything associated with “the South” is racist, and certainly being a southern “belle” or gentleman–i.e., someone of good manners, grooming and education–is something we should be encouraging, not disparaging. And yes, such individuals can come in all races, religions and ethnicities. And a sunny disposition–on anyone–is always preferable to the depressing, too-serious angry liberal/progressive attitude of perpetual grievance.