Dean Munsch: Now, Dean Reynolds' oversight of Greek life at this school was so negligent that it bordered on criminal. And Kappa is the source of rampant reports of alcoholism, prescription drug abuse, racism, as well as allegations of bestiality...
Chanel #1: No one forced that goat to get as drunk as it got.
College Is "High School, Part 2". With this in mind, it probably shouldn't be a surprise that sororities are frequently depicted as the worst places for women to be at college, in everything from petty bitching and backstabbing to institutionalized sexual assault and murder, just like the "popular" cliques in high school. At least, in fiction.
Because All Guys Want Sorority Women, sororities are Serious Business in personal and professional life. But also because Popular Is Evil, it's not a fun environment. Naturally, All Women Hate Each Other, and they're going to make sure everybody knows it. There will be an Alpha Bitch and a Beta Bitch, and though they'll both be equally beautiful and vain, they will seek to make other girls' lives a misery whether or not they're in the Girl Posse. The Initiation Ceremony will be a particular hotbed for cruelty, especially the Deadly Prank, the Prank Gone Too Far, or some Deadly Hazing. Though Snipe Hunt is mostly associated with fraternities, it may occasionally arise here. See also the subgenre of sorority horror
, where murderers strike attractive, sexually-active young women.
As both a morality trope and a stereotype trope, no real-life examples please!
Examples
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Film — Live-Action
- 21 & Over. Played with. Miller and Casey find an initiation going on at the sorority house, in which Miller participates. Upon discovering this, the vengeful Latina sisters track him down and kidnap him and Casey, humiliating them in a drawn-out ritual.
- Happy Death Day: Tree's fellow sorority sisters, especially Danielle, are shown to be vindictive and bitchy, with Danielle shaming them all for being "fat" and bullying the others. Tree herself is shown to be bitchy and unpleasant before she Took a Level in Kindness throughout the movie. Even the Token Good Teammate, Tree's roommate, Lori, is working with the Serial Killer to kill Tree.
Danielle: Lori's little plot was super lame. Poisoning a cupcake? Really? We're Kappas. We don't eat cupcakes.
- The House on Sorority Row: Though house mother Mrs Slater is a jerkass, the girls still accidentally kill her and cover it up, and a sizeable majority of them don't want to come clean about it. A lot of them are also very bitchy and unpleasant to each other.
- Alpha Nu Gamma is a sorority that is also an evil coven of serial killing witches in The Initiation of Sarah. Alpha Nu Gamma's head Corrine sacrifices goats and virgins, and every member are also her minions in pursuit of youth.
- Jurassic City: Downplayed. Stephanie is an Alpha Bitch pledge master who is responsible for getting the girls arrested in the first place.
- Neighbors (2014): In the sequel, Kappa Nu are idiotic straw feminists, who kick out Teddy, who helped them to start the sorority, because "guys are idiots". They're pretty dumb themselves, and when they need money, they become drug dealers, sending all their competition on campus to prison. Even then, they don't do their own dirty work, but get minions to do it for them.
- The Row: Downplayed in that they do regret it (and, while their other initiations are shown to be humiliating, such as stripping down to their underwear), Phi Lambda's old prank involved letting a girl think she had been raped. This caused her suicide and her brother comes to seek revenge.
- Sisters of Death: The sorority has witnessed the accidental death of a girl during a hazing ritual gone wrong, and one of the sisters, Judy is revealed to be the real killer hunting them down.
- A popular Lifetime Movie of the Week premise, with the trope image source Sorority Secrets being an exceptional example, in which Naïve Everygirl Cassie joins Kappa Eta Lambda, unaware that wealthy male alums are using it as a source for young, hot mistresses, and then Lambda sisters start getting murdered.
- Lifetime's most sordid example may be Sorority Murder: Beta Sigma Eta is headed by Alpha Bitch bully, Breanne, who is murdered by Carly, Alex, Natalie, and Gabrielle after video evidence is discovered of her severely look-shaming and weight-shaming the other girls, paying particular disrespect to her deputy Carly. As if that wasn't bad enough, the apparently "nice" sisters only invited Jen to the sorority to exploit the tensions between her and Breanne, and then frame her for murder. When Alex feels bad and tries to confess to Jen, the other sisters murder her.
- Sorority Row: The sisters participate in a prank to scare Garrett for cheating on Megan by faking her death and convincing Garrett it was all his fault. This is in spite of the fact that Megan cheated on him first, and the prank goes wrong, killing Megan. When Cassidy tries to object, the other girls (who are mainly assholes) threaten to pin the murder on her if she doesn't comply.
- Sydney White: Sydney initially wants to join Kappa Phi Nu, which her mother was president of. However, she finds that the sorority is now run by Rich Bitch Rachel Witchburn. Rachel enjoys abusing her power over her fellow sisters and blocks Sydney from joining the sorority for fear that she would outshine her. Rachel is also head of the student council and uses her power to ensure that the Greek organizations get preferential treatment. When her power is threatened, she isn't afraid to use underhanded tactics to get what she wants.
- V/H/S/99: In Suicide Bid, Lily is a sweet young woman who only wants to have friends. She joins a sorority to try and make friends, with the warning that she's going to be a complete pariah if she doesn't make it in. They pull a cruel Initiation Ceremony for the sorority, burying her alive in a graveyard. When the coffin floods due to heavy rain, the other sisters abandon her to a slow and protracted death and don't alert the campus police, who are searching. As if that wasn't bad enough, they also encourage her to open a box when she gets most terrified, telling her that it will comfort her. It turns out to be full of spiders. Lily then gets visited by a demon and, as part of the pact, she kills the sorority sisters.
Live-Action TV
- Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Parodied in "Ticking Clocks." The Nine-Nine have a whole sorority in lockup due to being drunk and disorderly. They are famed for their cutting, vicious putdowns to anyone who gets close. The Nine-Nine are afraid to walk past them because they're so mean. They put Knox - who's a corrupt murderer - in a holding cell with them at the end, which is presented as a fitting punishment.
- Diagnosis: Murder: In "Reunion with Murder", the murder victim brings up a cruel prank where Amanda and her fellow sorority sisters teased a girl for being overweight, and plans to put it in her book. This is suggested to be Amanda's motive for murder. It's also revealed that the ultimate motive for murder was that her book would've exposed that another sorority sister, Bobbi Burton, had murdered her professor, with whom she was having an affair. So Bobbi killed her, too.
- Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
- In the episode "Consent", a college student is drugged and raped. It is discovered that this was masterminded by two sorority sisters who wanted revenge after she unknowingly flirted with one of their boyfriends. They pretended to be her friends and then drugged her. The other sisters are also aware of the revenge plot but are scared into not saying anything.
- The episode "Girl Dishonored" begins with new pledges of a sorority being stripped down to their underwear, having the word "fat" written on their bodies in Sharpie, and being forced to eat cat food as part of a hazing ritual while the sisters laugh at them.
- Orange Is the New Black: In "Pissters", it's revealed that Linda was responsible for her tyrannical sorority sister Megan's death. Megan was an Alpha Bitch who demanded that Linda go with her because she wanted to pee outside. Despite Megan being clearly intoxicated, Linda ditched her, and she froze to death outside in the snow. When the cops come, Linda immediately cries Crocodile Tears, gets let go, and becomes just as much of a tyrant as Megan.
- Psych: In "Scary Sherry: Bianca's Toast", Doreen's death is a genuine accident because of a Deadly Prank during an Initiation Ceremony. However, all of the sorority sisters are portrayed as extremely dumb, except the Alpha Bitch Betty, who is also portrayed as the meanest and most cunning. None of them seem to feel bad for Doreen's death, with Betty and Bianca mocking Doreen's adopted sister Alice for having unwashed hair days after her sister and best friend died. Juliet is shown to be the nicest sister, which also tracks because she's not actually a member.
- Scream Queens (2015): Kappa Kappa Tau is a sorority mentioned to have a long history of "mean girl" behavior, and at the start of the show, it is run by the heinous and misanthropic queen bee Chanel #1. Chanel is so self-centred she forces her sisters to also rename themselves Chanel, and she is too blase about her sorority sisters and pledges getting offed by a serial killer, and one of the killers is her new recruit.
- Smallville: The villains of "Thirst" are a sorority of vampires. They turn Lana into a vampire as part of her initiation which involves draining Clark but she turns on them and is cured by Clark.
- Sweet/Vicious: In "Tragic Kingdom", the Kappa Kappa Phi sorority initially seems like another exclusive and elitist house on Darlington University's campus. However, it turns out their actual behaviour is much darker. With them regularly subjecting dozens of poor pledges to incredibly cruel and sadistic hazing rituals on a weekly basis, and has been doing so for decades. Said rituals include forcibly stripping, being forced to consume massive amounts of cigars and alcohol, extreme verbal and physical abuse, and even sexual assault. To top it all off it's revealed their leader Chloe Freeman secretly films all their abuses and sells it to a torture porn website for profit, and is likewise perfectly happy to use violence and intimidation on anyone who gets in their way.
- Tales from the Crypt: The episode "House of Horror" features the Delta Omega Alpha sorority. There's a reason their initials spell "D.O.A.". They're an all-ghoul sorority!
- Veronica Mars: Lilith House is a Straw Feminist sorority that pretends to be feminist and open-minded but is in fact trying to frame the fraternity of Hearst College for a series of brutal rapes happening on campus, by shaving their members' heads, which stops the actual rapist from getting caught. They also perform an Ass Shove on Chip Diller, the fraternity's head, hide weed for their sorority mother, and run scams to get free food from campus.
Visual Novels
- Being A ΔΙΚ: Eta Omicron Tau, primarily due to Quinn's influence. At the start of the game, when Sage has essentially handed over most of her presidential responsibilities to Quinn due to her senior year responsibilities, Quinn has been running prostitution (and, as Mona's involvement in the Stephen Burke fiasco shows, Unproblematic Prostitution is subverted) and drugs from the HOTs, and Quinn often indulges her more sadistic impulses on pledges she doesn't like, as seen when Maya is trying to join the HOTs: Quinn spreads the rumour of free tuition for HOTs sisters, enticing Maya and Mona, exploiting Maya's desperation by ordering her (and later Josy) to record sexual acts for the scavenger hunt. That said, the trope is zigzagged somewhat: when Sage takes a more active role in the sorority's activities, the sorority is not as bad.
Webcomics
- Implied and Played for Laughs in Girl Genius. Lucrezia Mongfish and Francisia Mohanan are two Mad Scientists who happened to be sorority sisters in the past. Francisia mentioned that she tested highly dangerous chemicals on human subjects, and Lucrezia's immediate response was: "Oooh! Just like our sorority initiation!"
