Rushed, Pledged, and Spackled

In response to Daniel Balserak’s review, reader Sheila Gastiger writes in with some dope on Alexandra Robbins’s Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities:

The “sorority girls do not have sex” and other “rules” that Robbins cited are not from any national sorority’s materials. Rather, they are from Rush: A Girl’s Guide to Social Success, a book written in 1984 by a former sorority rush chair at the University of Texas. Much of it was tongue-in-cheek and certainly not to be taken seriously by anyone outside the state. For context, there were also rather long sections devoted to the importance of properly starching and creasing one’s jeans.

Her repeated citing of a book that is prehistoric in college terms only shows how ridiculous her research methods were.