Shiny happy plastic people

If you follow IvyGate (not that you should), you're familiar with a recent minor scandal from the wonderful world of the Cornell Greek system. No, not the Pike house getting shut down (god, are all Pikes terrible, no good people? I thought it was only the chapter at my undergrad campus, but apparently, I was wrong). I'm talking about the Pi Phi Sorority Dress Guidelines Debacle of Twenty-Ten (parts 2, 3, and 4 also choice).

Cornell was my first and only experience with a real-live Greek scene. I'd always figured that the whole point of those frat party things was to provide alcohol to (i.e., not-so-subtly lubricate) pretty underage girls, and going to school in New Orleans made that moot for me. But when I first walked into a Cornell frat party, I realized there was something else I'd been missing -- a certain aesthetic of opulent, upper-class hedonism that I'm sure only the top soror/frats actually have and the rest shamelessly copy. Amid tables groaning under the weight of food, drink, and dripping candelabra, scores of beautiful girls in prom-worthy gowns draped themselves around guys whose three-piece suits made them look like 50-year-old mafiosos instead of pimply young adults. If I didn't know any better, I'd say it was just a bunch of kids playing dress-up ("Look, I'm Princess Di!" "I'm Diddy!" "I'm Paris Hilton!"). Except these kids were drunk, up way past their bedtime, and, most importantly, practicing skills that would be crucial in their future upper-middle-class social strata. Over the course of the party and the ride home (in a shiny Lexus, natch), I watched the boys network and the girls husband-hunt in a manner so scripted that it could've come straight out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. Business cards were exchanged and lewd overtures were made, and by the end of the night I learned more about the New York I-banking world and my roommate's methods of keeping warm in Ithaca winter than I'd ever cared to know.

But I digress. My favorite thing about the Pi Phi (famous alum: Valerie Plame -- I guess some girls network, too) dress-code is that it explains a mystery my naive, plebeian self had never quite been able to grasp; namely, why it is that when I show up to certain functions, I'm always an awkward drop in a sea of identically-dressed girls. This happened a lot when I started dating a law school student, of course, but it was also a sporadically occurring phenomenon at specific places in town. I once attended a downtown wine tasting gala where every (and I mean every) woman was wearing a three-quarter-length black dress. I'd chosen a bright red chinoiserie-print mini and got catty stares the whole night (though that may have been more the result of getting tipsy and inciting several men to passive-aggressively fight for my affection on the dance-floor). Where do they learn this stuff? I'd wonder, dreaming up all kinds of unlikely scenarios involving print media, signifiers, and social conditioning. Well, little did I know that there are literal memos passed out, and that I literally missed them.

Having recently mused on the still weirdly classist Brits, I guess I should also point out how bizarre the American instantiation of the class system is. Because, even after attending one of the most expensive private universities in the country, I'd never felt caste inferiority till I got to that frat party (and then, even more so, Ye Olde Ivy Bedecked Monstrosity where I'm currently enrolled). But the thing is, the classism here is so vestigial, so virtual, so... well, made up -- there's really no difference between being middle-class, upper-middle-class, and upper-upper-class in terms of what you can know, buy, or wear -- that, above a certain poverty level, you can choose to present yourself as anything whatsoever. And the fact that a quite sizable subset of society still chooses to present itself as some thrice-removed elitist fantasy from a blue-blood Stepford time that never was... is, well, kind of sick. It's sort of like that parable about the baby elephant that's trained to stay put by having a branch tied to its leg, and then when it gets older, all a trainer need do to immobilize it is tie a twig to its toe. Except instead of a twig, what we have here is top shelf liquors, mani/pedis, and boutique evening-wear.

Then again, this could all just be an East Coast/New England thing. In the South, the tendency is toward the exact opposite -- gleeful downwardly-mobile slumming. And maybe it's all equally dumb and just a matter of acclimation, but somehow, that feels so much more honest.