Today when I was riding the brown line to campus, we passed by a sign I’d never seen before. It was a giant advertisement showing a woman looking straight ahead, and I don’t remember the name of the theater it was advertising, but the quote underneath her picture said, “More drama than a sorority election.” I thought about what we talked about in class about the prevalence of stereotypes and how often they go unnoticed because we take them for granted as being true.
The idea of drama existing in a sorority is nothing new to most people. With the popularity of movies like The House Bunny and television shows like Greek, the stereotypical view of sororities consisting of girls who will do anything to be skinny, love everything pink, spend their time shopping and partying instead of doing schoolwork, and constantly gossip about their sisters is available to people who haven’t even come into contact with any sorority or fraternity members. Rather than focussing on the positive aspects of sorority life, like the history, opportunities to network, philanthropy, and developing friendships, the majority of media gives these organizations a bad reputation.
This particular theater advertisement plays on that stereotype in a pretty negative way, perpetuating this cliche correlation between sororities and drama. I think the ad would’ve worked just as well, and been a little less stereotypical, if “sorority election” had been replaced by something specific, like “24” or “Perez Hilton” or “The Real World.” I think by pointing to an unambiguous example of a television show or person who makes their living off of creating drama, the theater could’ve avoided pointing to an overused stereotype that is not true in a lot of cases.
The issue of this advertisement isn't so much that it is stereotyping Greek life (because to be involved in Greek life you usually have to pay a pretty hefty participation fee, and therefore are not marginalized by society in that way), but the fact that they clearly chose to use a sorority and a female model because there is a stereotype that women are dramatic (see: the prefix hyst, as in hysterical, comes from a word meaning uterus. Because anyone with a uterus is hysterical (oh I just realized that there is some cissexism in that word too)).
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