sex with athletic recruits to persuade them to play for the SMU Ponies (the boosters also supposedly bribed university secretaries to alter course grades for athletes and paid other students to take tests and write papers for football players). Under the supervision of the boosters, an SMU law student known as “King Rat” worked with four other students to pay about a dozen sorority girls $400 per weekend to seduce recruits. They gave the sisters a booster’s credit card, a fur coat, and a Mercedes-Benz to use to entertain the athletes. The girls were instructed to sleep with the recruits both to convince them to come to SMU (with promises of continued sex if they did) and to get information about what other schools were illegally offering the high school athletes. The sorority sex network, which began in 1979, ended in 1985 when the sorority sisters became too frightened by the emergence of AIDS to continue sleeping with strangers. These and other allegations led the NCAA to impose its first “death penalty” on a football program when it prohibited SMU from playing football in 1987.
The SMU sex scandal, which the media dubbed “Ponytail Gate,” seemed to involve consenting sorority sisters who were willing to sell sex as something of a fund-raiser (as an alternative to, say, bake sales). But other sorority women have stepped forward since then to claim that they were expected to provide similar services despite their unwillingness to participate. One evening in 1988, a sorority girl who was a little sister to the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity at Florida’s Stetson University attended a punk-themed mixer. At the “Pike” house, the little sister, wearing a denim miniskirt, black stockings, and black shoes, went to the bar area and drank a couple of rum runners. She went into another room where she had an “upside-down margarita”: she lay down with her mouth open while three brothers poured three kinds of alcohol down her throat. Eventually she passed out on the dance floor. When she came to, she was being gang-raped by fraternity brothers, who scattered when she started to scream. “How could they do this to me?” she shouted. “I’ve done so much for them.” The next day, the little sister returned to the Pike house and resigned. She later found out that while she lay semiconscious and stripped of her skirt, stockings, and shoes, several of the brothers poked and slapped her and poured shampoo over her body as they laughed and pointed. She also learned that the event had been a “spectrum”—a fraternity term for sex as spectator sport; while some brothers raped her, others stood outside on top of a bicycle rack to peer through a window at the scene. A former Pike later admitted that the house held spectrums twice a month. The little sister dropped out of school.
Fraternity chapters started the little sister programs (a different group from the Little Sisters within sororities) in the 1960s, but by the late 1980s universities had begun to abolish fraternity little sisters because of claims that the fraternities were sexually exploiting the girls. In 1988, the Association of Fraternity Advisers resolved that the program treated the women as “subservient or ‘second-class’ status.” At the University of Missouri-Columbia, which suspended its little sisters program after a spate of sexual assaults in 1989, some of the girls were forced to drink alcohol and read sexually explicit material before meeting their “big brothers.” The University of South Florida terminated its program in 1990 because of complaints of sexual harassment. And a 1994 report from the University of Rhode Island discussed how fraternity brothers referred to little sisters as “freshmeat” and held parties where some female students were denied entry because their breasts were too small.
But experts told me that these organizations continue to exist, both openly and underground, even though neither the National Panhellenic
The SMU sex scandal, which the media dubbed “Ponytail Gate,” seemed to involve consenting sorority sisters who were willing to sell sex as something of a fund-raiser (as an alternative to, say, bake sales). But other sorority women have stepped forward since then to claim that they were expected to provide similar services despite their unwillingness to participate. One evening in 1988, a sorority girl who was a little sister to the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity at Florida’s Stetson University attended a punk-themed mixer. At the “Pike” house, the little sister, wearing a denim miniskirt, black stockings, and black shoes, went to the bar area and drank a couple of rum runners. She went into another room where she had an “upside-down margarita”: she lay down with her mouth open while three brothers poured three kinds of alcohol down her throat. Eventually she passed out on the dance floor. When she came to, she was being gang-raped by fraternity brothers, who scattered when she started to scream. “How could they do this to me?” she shouted. “I’ve done so much for them.” The next day, the little sister returned to the Pike house and resigned. She later found out that while she lay semiconscious and stripped of her skirt, stockings, and shoes, several of the brothers poked and slapped her and poured shampoo over her body as they laughed and pointed. She also learned that the event had been a “spectrum”—a fraternity term for sex as spectator sport; while some brothers raped her, others stood outside on top of a bicycle rack to peer through a window at the scene. A former Pike later admitted that the house held spectrums twice a month. The little sister dropped out of school.
Fraternity chapters started the little sister programs (a different group from the Little Sisters within sororities) in the 1960s, but by the late 1980s universities had begun to abolish fraternity little sisters because of claims that the fraternities were sexually exploiting the girls. In 1988, the Association of Fraternity Advisers resolved that the program treated the women as “subservient or ‘second-class’ status.” At the University of Missouri-Columbia, which suspended its little sisters program after a spate of sexual assaults in 1989, some of the girls were forced to drink alcohol and read sexually explicit material before meeting their “big brothers.” The University of South Florida terminated its program in 1990 because of complaints of sexual harassment. And a 1994 report from the University of Rhode Island discussed how fraternity brothers referred to little sisters as “freshmeat” and held parties where some female students were denied entry because their breasts were too small.
But experts told me that these organizations continue to exist, both openly and underground, even though neither the National Panhellenic
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