Just a moment about the corps

I am not a sorority girl. Never wanted to be and never have been. I really saw them, cycling through Utrecht. All in uniform, wearing the association sweater, Corel pants underneath, and talking loudly through the city. I don't come from an academic family, so that fraternity tradition was not instilled in me from a young age; moreover, I already had a fondness for creamy, buttery, preferably oak-aged Chardonnays, and something told me I could whistle for that in Utrecht's Woolloomooloo. And oh yes, I was also following a ballet course of twelve hours a week; not really a great combination with an active student life.

Not averse to a party, I occasionally joined in. The drinking and the differences between the girls and the boys caught my attention, but I didn't really worry about it. That's how my relationship with the fraternity has always been. I had nothing to do with it, I was amazed by the initiation rituals, but mainly thought that everyone should fill in their own life. A bit like the non-smoker who has never smoked among the smokers, that was me.

The fraternity could also have its advantages. My sorority-going friends possess a battalion of brilliant contacts. Always a top lawyer/surgeon or gynecologist nearby. Moreover, I understand the primal function of a student association well. You come new to a strange city, far from home. Probably your parents were also in that association, and there are many connections that form a safe net. That this comes with a beer or twenty, I can also understand. But when drinking became so serial that people died during the initiation, I could no longer respond enthusiastically when a mother proudly told that her child was accepted into the fraternity.

The fraternity promised improvement. On many fronts. That this has not entirely succeeded became clear the day before yesterday when footage leaked of a speech in which women were compared to sperm buckets, were labeled ‘whores’, and it was even agreed to break their necks to then use them as aforementioned sperm buckets.

When yesterday a ‘performance’ by two girls with bare upper bodies and torn tights who were ‘beheaded’ to the rhythm of the music by boys from the fraternity also leaked, I literally felt sick.

Meanwhile, rector Heleen Vos is busy with it. Confirming, apologizing, stating that this was an hired act (which only makes it worse in my opinion because this was consciously thought out) and asking if the trial by media can stop.

I hope that Heleen Vos and her team will now focus on returning to the values of the fraternity. Providing a safety net, friendships, a good network. That the fraternity becomes what it was originally intended to be. No breeding ground for poisoning in both physical and emotional sense.

So.