Viral Sorority Recruitment Video Pulled After Backlash. What Do You Think?
I'm really on the fence on this one. A sorority at the University of Alabama has pulled a viral recruitment video after complaints that it's sends the wrong message.
Alabama’s Alpha Phi sorority deleted the video, which had 500,000 views on YouTube before it was pulled.
The sorority claims it was fun and light-hearted. Critics, like this one on AL.com say it sends the wrong message.
Remember all those bikini-clad, sashaying, glitter-blowing, and spontaneous piggyback-riding days of college? Me either. But according to a new video, it's a whirlwind of glitter and girl-on-girl piggyback rides at the University of Alabama's Alpha Phi house.
No, it's not a slick Playboy Playmate or Girls Gone Wild video. It's a sorority recruiting tool gaining on 500,000 views in its first week on YouTube. It's a parade of white girls and blonde hair dye, coordinated clothing, bikinis and daisy dukes, glitter and kisses, bouncing bodies, euphoric hand-holding and hugging, gratuitous booty shots, and matching aviator sunglasses. It's all so racially and aesthetically homogeneous and forced, so hyper-feminine, so reductive and objectifying, so Stepford Wives: College Edition. It's all so ... unempowering.
I don't think the sorority meant anything malicious with the video, but the criticisms make a valid argument against it. Here we are in 2015, and this is something straight out of 1964. Beach Blanket Sorority.
What do you think? Fathers of daughters?