Hypocrisy prevails following Alabama Sorority video

There has been a recent controversy surrounding the sorority promotional video made by the Alpha Phi chapter at the University of Alabama. For those of you unfamiliar with the video, there’s not a whole lot to it. Seriously. A bunch of flirty young women dance around for a few minutes in various outfits (or lack thereof) trying to promote their sorority to potential recruits. In a few appalling instances, one of the girls even blows glitter out of her hand into the camera. The audacity.

For those of you without your fingers on the pulse of the sorority-recruitment video market, videos like this are apparently quite common. So why is this one a huge deal? The short answer: it’s not.

The controversy started when online writer and editor A.L. Bailey criticized the portrayal of women in the video as, in her own words, “hyper-feminine” and “unempowering” among other things.

After receiving increasingly negative feedback, the unempowered, hyper-feminine members of Alpha Phi removed the video from YouTube.

While this kind of video by no means deserves praise for any sort of merit (after all, the most creative part was the twerking mascot), do these women really deserve to be vilified by the media? For whatever reason, some people believe that because this particular group of women doesn’t fit their specific idea of how women ought to act, then at some level, they must be trying to sabotage the efforts of women everywhere. As if some sort of silly sorority video could take away from the progress made by women.

These people advocate for empowering women to be the individuals they want to be: “You can be whoever you want to be and do whatever you want to do.” An admirable pursuit. Hypocritically, these are the same individuals who are, in the same breath, condemning those women for portraying themselves exactly how they wanted to be portrayed: “Well, actually, don’t be a stereotypical sorority member. That doesn’t fit into my pseudo-reality about how women ought to be.”

Ridiculous.