fraternity

Yet, here at the poster child for liberal higher education, Greek life persists as a bastion of aging understandings of gender and sexuality.

When people in Greek life and beyond blur hotness and power together — when some bigger institution or body has to tell us who’s hot and who’s not — we perpetuate a culture in which those who don’t have racial, class, gender or body privileges are unable to obtain social and political power, or even just feel sexy.

Individuals inside the UC Berkeley chapter of the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, or Fiji, house could be heard repeatedly chanting a homophobic slur in a video taken Sunday evening and shared with The Daily Californian.

I accepted the various forms of physical and emotional abuse from my partners because they filled this void and reminded me of my father.

Being in Greek life should be an opportunity to surround yourself with people you connect with — a way to spend time outside of school doing things you enjoy. I chose my sorority because I loved the company of so many women in the house, and I still do. But spending my weekends in houses full of strangers, waiting for the party to end made being in Greek life feel more like a job I paid to participate in than the inclusive community I had hoped for.

Anger is the easiest reaction. It fills your lungs like a flash flood, washing all other emotions away. But anger does not have to be the last reaction.

Like Harvard, the UC Berkeley administrators ought to consider abolishing sororities and fraternities once and for all.

It's date party season, and you know what that means: You'll spend hours of your life thinking about dresses, makeup and shoes so that a dude you've never met before in Rho Alpha Pi Eta will — I don't know — attempt to validate your self-worth through physical appearance alone or something?