Spring Sorority Rush: The Lie, The Atrocity, The Ultimate Boner Killer

Rob Fox12 years ago

Spring rush is a lie. Spring rush is in January. January isn’t spring. January is winter. Spring is when new life blooms. Winter is when hobos shit in trashcans, wait for their excrement to dry out, and use it as fuel for their trashcan fires so that they don’t freeze to death behind Arby’s.

That’s no time for something as lovely as sorority rush. Sorority rush is a beautiful but terrifying genesis for the freshman girls’ college career. Like so many baby sea turtles scurrying to the ocean before bloodthirsty seagulls can rip them to shreds, the freshmen girls move between the houses, hoping that the older girls speaking with them don’t tear their self-esteem apart with a seagull-like ferocity.

That deserves a grand stage! A bright summer day! Sorority rush shouldn’t be hidden away in the dreariness of January, because that kills the whole vibe. When I watch sorority rush I want to be amused and entertained and yeah, I’ll admit it, a little aroused. Does that offend you? What? You don’t get hungry at the grocery store? Sue me. Wait, are there any early acceptance girls under 18 in this hypothetical rush? No. Okay, phew. Fuck you! Sue me!

Could a sorority rush in January be any more depressing? I imagine if one were to watch such an event on a particularly gray winter day, with all the girls running in and out of old buildings and everything seeming so dull and dead, that they might mistake the present for the cloudy, confused memories of an elderly woman with dementia, who sits limply in her wheel chair in a random hallway of her nursing home, staring at the wall, only to be eventually shaken from her trance for a 4pm dinner and slowly groan at her overweight, African-American nurse wheeling her towards split pea soup, “Pearl tells me that Delta Gamma is for flapper girls…and…and that the Tri-Deltas are ridden more than a main street trolley.”

This is your future.

From a fraternity man’s perspective, winter rush, as it could be more aptly described, kills all the best parts of the sorority rush process. It kills them like one hobo kills another while fighting over a half eaten Beef n’ Cheddar behind that Arby’s where they were huddling around their poo fire. While some schools are far enough south to avoid winter weather altogether, most of the schools that are forced to smile and take winter rush like the administration prescribed suppository it is must do so under harsh, frosty conditions.

The girls go from house to house in jackets. JACKETS! Do you know what’s sexy about a jacket? Ask a Canadian, because I have no fucking clue.

“Aye, buddy, check out that huttie. You can ull-most see a boob through her sooper tight jacket. I’m toh-tally into sooper tight jackets. That’s so hut. I’m going to go masturbate pretty thoroughly to that. Will you pour hut water on my meat pole so my hand doesn’t freeze to it again? Thanks. You’re my best friend.”

During winter rush there is no sundress day, or at least no enjoyment of it. Everything is covered, like so many alibis after a fraternity strip club outing gone horribly wrong. There are no lingering, flirty and technically forbidden conversations in the street in front of fraternity houses. The girls scamper from house to house, trading our brash but charming sexual harassment conversation for an ass grab from old man winter, as his icy hand shoots up their dresses in the form of a winter breeze.

Gone too are any front yard shenanigans. Yes, making the pledges build a snow fort and having a blackout, Schnapps-fueled snowball fight is fun. But is it better than a front yard fiesta flowing with margaritas? I’ll take sunburn over frostbite any day.

I think back to my own days ogling sorority rush with less shame than a stripper dancing for a billionaire with chronic short-term memory loss. For a four-year stretch, every late August, I spent a week on a couch on a lawn, sipping on a cup of frozen liquor magic known on the streets (of Greek Town) as “Trops.” I was on that couch on that lawn, drinking the Trops to combat both my sobriety and the humid Missouri heat. Anyone will tell you, that’s one of the best weeks of the entire school year, culminating with bid day parties.

What if it were in January? Granted, I still would have been out on that lawn drinking Trops and mentally cataloging newly legal adult females while sitting on a snowfa built by pledges, but then again I’m a Trops-addicted alcoholic, and a tireless pervert (incidentally I included those exact labels in the “other qualities” section of my résumé when applying to TFM). But still, I would have been freezing! It would have been miserable for everyone!

I suppose some joyless fun murderer could make an argument that putting recruitment off a semester allows the girls to more easily make friends outside of their house. This is, quite literally, a rational and therefore widely accepted lie. The girls who rush, whether it be first or second semester, will typically live in a freshman dorm all year regardless. They will live in that dorm with girls from all other houses, and girls who did not rush. They are completely capable of being friends with those girls regardless of when they join a house, and most of the time, regardless of when they join, they do end up friends with those girls. House affiliation will kill a friendship only if a girl lets it, it does not matter when that affiliation begins.

Sorority girls at Mizzou, which has rush in the fall, have friends all over the sorority scene. I knew groups of girls who were closer to their friends from Jones, a freshman girl’s dorm, than they were to their own sisters. All winter rush does is deprive girls of a choice, and when it comes to sorority rush I’m pro-choice dammit. At least give them a plan B.

The one other common argument for winter rush is that fall rush puts too much pressure on the freshman girls too quickly. Maybe that’s true, I’ve never been through sorority rush in the fall or winter or ever, so my perspective only reaches so far. But is an immediate, intense week really more stressful than a semester long underground rush that still culminates in an intense week? At SMU, for example, every single sorority shadily and/or blatantly recruits girls all first semester in preparation for a “week” of winter rush. How can spending an entire semester watching what you say, who you hang out with, and what you do be less stressful than one single week of rush?

That’s bullshit.

But enough with serious arguments, let’s get back to the point at hand, FALL RUSH MAKES ME HORNIER IT IS BETTER WINTER RUSH IS STUPID IT IS HARDER TO SEE BOOBS AND ASS AND LEGS AND DRINKING OUTSIDE WHEN IT’S COLD SUCKS BALLS FUCK YOU WINTER RUSH! /rant