The Faux-Feminists Are at It Again

Author’s Note: Because AL Bailey’s gender was not clear to the author, he employs gender-neutral pronouns throughout this post. He apologizes for any opacity that may result. 

When was the last time a fraternity or sorority made national news for something positive?

A quick perusal of Google News reveals a slew of tawdry headlines. In just the last few weeks, the University of Central Florida has suspended its Sigma Nu chapter for a leaked video in which fraternity brothers enthusiastically discuss raping “sluts” and “bitches,” and Iowa State University’s administration elected to punish its Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter with a four-year minimum suspension for the alleged rape of a female student in January. Fraternities at Clemson University, the University of Virginia, and elsewhere have also found themselves grappling with the legal system after their own run-ins with the courts.

The Greek parade of shame seems to have added a new member to its ranks, this time a sorority at the University of Alabama. That university’s Alpha Phi chapter became the target of criticism from a freelance journalist named AL Bailey, whose post decrying the sorority’s recent recruitment video as “worse for women than Donald Trump” garnered attention from across the country.

Overwrought hyperbole aside – Trump’s astonishingly sexist and racist electoral platform reaches an inestimably larger audience than any sorority – Bailey makes a handful of good points. It’s a shame, then, that they’re buried in the hastily-assembled anti-feminist detritus that comprises the remainder of Bailey’s column.

To start with Bailey’s salient remarks, it’s no secret that Greek life at UA is a vestigial remainder of a rightfully bygone era in American history. While institutional racism is far from vanquished, the bulk of our nation has at least had the decency to fight it into relative obscurity – or rather follow along with the brave souls who do the fighting for the rest of us. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and many of the selfless activists who died on the burning cross of racism throughout the long campaign for equality may have been given pause if they had known that a Southern student government would vote overwhelmingly against racial integration in 2014.

It’s almost a given that prejudice of all sorts will live on ad infinitum in the darker corners of society, but universities are meant to be ivory towers, institutions that promote and advance progress and social equity. College faculty and students have again and again spurred American society toward a brighter future, in spite of the occasional exception: Woodrow Wilson, for instance, was the president of Princeton University before becoming the most personally odious man to occupy the White House since the end of the Civil War.

Wilson, a Southerner who reinstituted federal segregation policies and screened the shocking Birth of a Nation in the White House, would likely have been proud to preside over the University of Alabama’s not-so-secretly segregated Greek system. The Crimson White, UA’s student newspaper, revealed in September 2013 that an abundantly-qualified sorority recruit who happened to be black was denied a bid from 16 of the school’s (effectively all-white) sororities. The story sparked animus on- and off-campus: how could such a fatuously backward culture persist or even thrive well into the second term of a black president, some 50 years after the University of Alabama was forcibly integrated?

Several months later, in March 2014, the university’s student government bewilderingly managed to make its situation worse by refusing to act on a resolution that would have condemned any segregation, de facto or de jure, that existed within the school’s Greek community. Of the 32 voting members of the student senate, only five cast a vote for the resolution. That bears repeating: one can literally count on one hand the number of UA student senators who deemed it appropriate to denounce segregation in the year 2014. The next month, the senate reneged on its apparent commitment to the memory of Jim Crow and passed a new iteration of the integration resolution, which still did not require any action by fraternities or sororities.

While effecting progress in race relations at Alabama has long been the social equivalent of pulling a perfectly healthy tooth, that makes the original vote no less reprehensible, nor does it excuse the pitifully sanguine praise the latter vote elicited from the newly-elected student government president after his body’s racial mulligan: “I believe the resolution passed tonight is a great solution” to a problem nobody at the school noticed or cared to notice over the span of eleven presidencies, from Eisenhower to Obama.

And so that is the environment in which this video, which accumulated some half a million views on YouTube in the week after its release, was produced. The video’s sudden relevance and popularity were abruptly cut short by its sudden deletion, however, apparently impelled by Bailey’s post.

Given the climate of race-based prejudice at Alabama, one might expect Bailey to have devoted a great deal of time to wondering to where all the faces of color that should be in the video were vanished. And yet in their nearly 700-word column, Bailey saw fit to mention race an overwhelming twice, only thus managing to double their count of stylistically dubious ellipses.

From what, then, could the rest of Bailey’s article be constructed? The author objects primarily – and secondarily and tertiarily – to the self-imposed objectification of the young women who appear in the video. Bailey complains that the video is “so hyper-feminine, so reductive and objectifying, so Stepford Wives: College Edition,” that the women in the video are actually recruiting “hormonal college-aged guys” and “older, male YouTube creepers.” On this latter point Bailey may be correct: to pen this riposte, I, who am certainly older than at least some of the sorority sisters depicted on screen, stooped to watching the clip.

My age and obvious creepiness aside, Bailey’s (and their acolytes’) priorities seem to be curiously aligned. In short, they are more concerned with what young women choose to do to themselves than with what those women do to powerless others.

The reader should keep in mind that the cast of a film or TV show is often deliberately crafted to target a specific audience, made up of the demographics most sought after by the creators of media. So long as videos like this contain not one black face, we can safely assume that their makers are uninterested in reaching women of color. It’s 2015, and this is the United States. That is, put simply, unacceptable.

The misaimed punches thrown by Bailey do not wane as the article continues. Bailey persists with their line of argument, blaming the women of Alpha Phi and their sort for the endurance of the societal sexism of the flavor embodied by men like the titular Donald Trump and (bizarrely) Bill Cosby, whose career as a likely rapist has been revealed piecemeal over the past several months.

Again, it strikes me as strange that a man who at last count had garnered a following of millions of Republicans in part by calling Mexicans rapists and making crude comments seemingly referring to journalist Megyn Kelly’s menstrual cycle could be compared favorably to a gaggle of college ladies. Bailey’s comparison to an alleged serial rapist in Bill Cosby also rings hollow given the relative magnitude of Alpha Phi’s “crimes.”

That is still not the crux of the problem with Bailey’s salvo against the women of Alpha Phi, though. The fundamental problem, to which I earlier alluded, is that Bailey presumes to tell women what to do with their bodies. Bailey complains that by wearing certain clothes and behaving in certain ways, women degrade themselves and their intellectual value. At its most vague, that’s a true statement – a woman who harbors an anti-intellectual worldview is indeed degrading her own scholarly worth. At last check, however, fraternities and sororities are neither academic honor societies nor clubs for modern-day Puritans, and Alpha Phi’s video made no remark on the relationship between classwork and sorority life.

Bailey would submit, of course, that the very absence of the academic merits of being a sorority sister from the video is cause enough to denounce its anti-feminine (or as Bailey puts it, “hyper-feminine”) character. To wit, Bailey argues that the dearth of explicit references to what they believe should be a core value of sororities everywhere is an unconscionable assault on all women.

Although AL Bailey’s gender is not immediately clear from their post, I suspect that similar arguments promulgated by men about, say, the attire and behavior of rape victims would be negatively received. Telling women what they ought to wear or how they ought to act is frowned upon, and rightly so! Feminism, insofar as has been revealed to me, is fundamentally about liberation from and the destruction of our society’s entrenched patriarchy. Those goals seem unlikely to be achieved by shaming women for advertising their sorority in the way that they choose.

The homogeneity of color that Bailey correctly scorns is damaging to society as a whole, but the sum of all that in the Alpha Phi video does far less damage to the feminist cause than do thinkers and writers like Bailey. Impressing upon young women the cookie-cutter feminism advanced by Bailey only limits their ability to express themselves, a result that is surely counter to the spirit of gender equality.

It’s indisputable that the objectification and undue sexualization of women is a real problem in the US today (one that indeed manifests itself in the uncouth or even boorish behavior of men like Trump, Cosby and even moderate Republicans Senator Mark Kirk of “bro with no ho” notoriety and Jeb “not sure we need a half a billion dollars for women’s health issues” Bush). But deriding women for the choices they make for themselves has no place in the feminist tent, nor any place in the public forum at all.