Hollywood, Stop Hazing Sorority Girls

You won't recognize most of the cleavage-baring cast of Sorority Row. Maybe you've seen Rumer Willis, the famous daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore. Or Audrina Patridge, that girl from The Hills. The others? Solidly unknown.

But you're probably familiar with the most important supporting cast member: squishy, gel-filled bra inserts.

"I'm only A, so I'm, like, super-tiny, so you put some A-[cup] chicken cutlets in and a padded, B bra, and you're set. You've got, like, Ds," says actress Briana Evigan of her boob-boosting costume requirements for the role, in a video-taped junket for the horror film. Willis, meanwhile, talks at length about her fear of the padded inserts falling out.

Even the male director, Stewart Hendler, weighs in. "[The studio] wanted as much skin as possible, 'cause it's an R-rated movie, and you want to deliver to the audience that signs up for that," Hendler says in the junket video. "I definitely didn't want to make a movie that was exploitative and misogynistic ... but I definitely had pressure, like, 'Why don't you have a girl just pull off her top?'" (Hendler did not respond to NEWSWEEK's request for comment through the movie's studio, Summit Entertainment).

You're probably not surprised—and why would you be? If there is a shop-worn template for any character in movies and television, it's the sorority girl. She's blonde, busty, and artificially tan. Her daywear involves a lot of mix-and-match pink—plus Greek letters, of course. Her major is incidental, but her weekend plans are not: there's the mall, then the bars, then the bedroom of some fraternity guy who doesn't know her last name.

Who could defend her?

Well, me. I was in a sorority. I don't know anyone who fits the cliche described above, and I know a lot of sorority girls: my sister, mother, aunts, grandmother and grand-aunts were all in them. Most of my female relatives attended college before campuses were co-ed, and sororities were one of few extracurricular options for women. "There was cheerleading, and a few girls on the tennis or swimming team, but not much else," my mom recalls of her years in school. To her and the rest of my family, going Greek wasn't a willing submission to objectification and tanning beds—it was more like attending all-girls summer camp, minus the mosquito bites.

Not that a movie about playing kickball and brushing each other's hair would get the studio greenlight. Better to watch Barbie bend over: In MTV's reality series Sorority Life, recruitment of new members is something akin to a low-rent beauty pageant, for which a potential member might hire a "rush consultant" to pre-select outfits. In The House Bunny, a flagging sorority saves itself and its social standing by wearing more makeup and fewer clothes, thanks to instructional tips from a former Playboy bunny. In slasher sequel Scream 2, CiCi (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is stabbed to death in her pink cardigan, then dumped over the balcony of her Omega Beta Zeta house. Hey, she was an elitist sorority snob. It's not murder—it's poetic justice.