I had something else planned this week, something a little off the beaten path for Almost Sated, but then I read this exposé in the Cut earlier this week about the “Secret ‘Ozempidemic’ on Sorority Row,” and I couldn’t let it go.
Of course, the headline stopped me in my tracks. And then the first few paragraphs were just so juicy and confessional that I couldn’t stop myself from devouring the whole thing. It was like I was being let in on something only the kids talk about among themselves. As the parent of a high schooler who’ll soon be college-bound, I had to know everything.
And as a parent, there’s all kinds of disturbing in this piece. It’s not just the rampant GLP-1 use among girls trying to make themselves skinny enough for the top sorority houses in the SEC, though school outside the conference are mentioned too. There are also multiple references to heavy drug use (ketamine and cocaine) and heavy drinking. One of the girls profiled in the piece used to be able to handle eight shots of Fireball and half a pitcher of beer. Now she gets sick after a few drinks.
Okay, can someone tell me when ketamine and cocaine became standard fare for college students?
I get the GLP-1 use. It makes sense in this hypervigilant body culture we’re in. Layer in the 24/7 social media documentation that goes along with rush life, the intense competition, and the pressure to have the best college experience, and it all makes sense.
Writer Angelina Chapin lays out the stakes in stark detail. At the University of Alabama, for example, 2,500 girls could be vying for just 250 spots in just one top house. Per a source in the story, roughly a fifth of those spots go to the “star girls,” basically those with major connections or money. That leaves the vast majority scrambling to distinguish themselves. Only it’s a weird kind of competition that rewards sameness. Standing out means adhering as closely as possible to a very narrow standard.
Per Chapin, it’s one that’s “almost uniformly white, blonde, and very, very skinny.”
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What quickly becomes clear is that appearance is one of the few variables these girls can control. Of course, they want to be super skinny, and now they have easy access to medications that can help them get there, never mind whether they actually need them. Of course, no one’s openly using GLP-1s. They’re injecting themselves behind closed dorm room doors, with only their closest confidants in the know.
Chapin writes:
“In dorm rooms and sorority houses across the country, women are stashing Wegovy pills under their twin beds and sharing vials of compounded retatrutide they ordered from China with their roommates, hoping if they shrink down enough they will get into the sisterhood of their dreams. Students told me there’s an ‘Ozempidemic’ on campuses in which everyone is taking it but nobody is talking about it. When someone comes back from vacation 20 pounds lighter, rumors start flying that they’re ‘on the Big O.’ But many would rather risk being discovered than stand out in a house full of double zeros.”
It was the moms that got to me.
Of the three girls Chapin follows through rush season, dormmates all trying to get into the top houses, all of them went to their mothers for help getting on the GLP-1s. And it turns out their moms were already on them.
“Now that you know I’m on it, would you feel a little better about doing it as well?” one of the girls remembers her mom saying.
Our relationships with food and weight are often shaped by our mothers, sometimes starting from an early age. There are complicated reasons behind it; they often mean well. They want to protect us. They want us to fit in, not stick out, not be the subject of someone else’s cruelty. They think being thin will make our lives not just easier, but better.
I was guilty of this. I made those same kinds of comments to my own kids before I knew better. And knowing better now doesn’t erase what I’ve said in the past, but I’ve had a chance to repair some of that damage. Still, it was especially hard to hear when one of the girls shared that her mom had encouraged her to start losing weight in high school ahead of rush.
“Sororities are going to look at your size. Wouldn’t you rather start now?”
She was a size 8 at the time.
Chapin spends a lot of time talking about size and the unspoken expectations for these girls. One former recruiter told her that no girl above a size 4 made it to the in-person round the year she recruited. Another alum at a different university said that most girls who got in were a size 2, 0 or 00.
There’s an anecdote from a fellow University of Texas at Austin alum who wasn’t allowed to be in any of her sorority’s photos because she was a size 8. “If I was in them, they’d never get posted to the account,” she says matter-of-factly.
If that’s not enough to cause body image issues, I’m not sure what is.
It was hard to read about all this focus on size, something I’ve spent the last few years trying to unlearn in my own life, but, of course, I found it fascinating all the same. It drove home just how narrow the ideal these girls are trying to achieve is.
It also worried me. Because in all this talk about size and shrinking, eating disorders were barely mentioned. I get that this is a culture piece, not one about medical risk-taking, but the first reference didn’t come until almost three-fourths of the way in. There were two brief quotes from experts about how losing 20 pounds in a month is a risk factor for developing one, and how GLP-1 use for casual weight loss might be its own form of disordered eating.
Nowhere in the piece did it acknowledge what I believe is likely true: that many of these girls, in their quest to meet these stringent size standards, are probably secretly suffering with eating disorders. And the only girl mentioned in the piece with a history of anorexia, an online influencer who got on a GLP-1 after failing to get into her top sorority, described the meds as “a better alternative than starving herself.”
Let that sink in. This girl has a history of anorexia, is taking a GLP-1, and somehow doesn’t see it as just another form of restriction.
But there’s a bigger contradiction at the heart of all of this. These girls are doing everything within their power to look the part, and then when they get rejected, they talk about the unfairness of being judged for their appearance.
“Like, really? We’re going to shut somebody out just based on how they look?” one of them says.
I wanted to shake her and say: Ummm, yeah. This is how this works. And you know that. It’s why you’re putting yourself through these crazy extreme measures.
But I’m not sure 18-year-old me understood the contradiction either. As a freshman, I was so self-righteous. So smug. I didn’t need to join a sorority to validate my worth. Meanwhile, I was constantly dieting and exercising, doing everything within my power to drop the “extra” weight.
As much as I wanted to look down on them, when I thought about my own past, I realized I wasn’t so different from the girls in this story. Or their moms. That’s when it hit me: this wasn’t just a piece about sorority culture. It’s about all of us.
As much as we talk about the current regression in body positivity, there’s a hard truth that comes through in the piece: plenty of women never really accepted the idea that bodies should come in all shapes and sizes. They may have understood on some level that diet culture was toxic, but it didn’t stop them from playing the shrinking game. For many of them, it must feel like these meds have finally leveled the playing field.
The desire to be thinner, the social rewards attached to thinness, and now the widespread use of a tool that makes thinness more attainable (for some, though not everyone) are hardly confined to Sorority Row.
The sororities are just more honest about it.
And at least none of these girls are claiming to be doing it for health reasons.
I love that you write about body image and it’s ever-present impact on most women. Sadly, it’s nothing new- I was in college more than 40 years ago when cigarettes, coffee, cocaine, and various forms of speed were used to curb the appetite to stay thin. “Nice” girls in the “top” sororities did lots of coke.
I’m not surprised that some moms encourage the prescription weight loss solutions, seeing it as safer than some alternatives that they may have used when on their own quest to be accepted into a looks-focused group.
What makes me the saddest is that it seems to get linked to self worth. And since I’m almost 62 years old I can tell you that while it is possible to overcome this, there are still things that will trigger the desire to be thinner for the rest of your life. I wish I could have back the years I spent hating my body and looking for external validation in all the wrong ways. I would love to tell the young people just how beautiful they are and how much more they are than a size or number on a scale. And how much food they need and muscle and how to protect their bones. And to enjoy life and school and sports and to fuel themselves and nourish their bodies and souls.