Sorority Row’s GLP-1 Secret
As the winter rush season got underway, Laura, Claire, and Marie jabbed themselves with a GLP-1 every week to try to lose the freshman 15. They all wanted bids from the top sororities at their prestigious southern school, where the girls looked not just skinny but “coke skinny.” They tucked their vials behind a Brita filter in a mini-fridge so none of their other friends would accidentally catch a glimpse while reaching for a can of Alani. At first, Claire felt weird giving herself an injection as her roommate put on eyeliner. It wasn’t exactly how she pictured her college experience. But soon, it became normal to casually poke herself in the stomach while they talked about their crushes. Sometimes, there were reminders that it wasn’t normal, as when one of their guy friends knocked on Claire and Marie’s door just as Laura was about to give herself the shot. She quickly pulled up her pants and shoved the syringe in a drawer. As he lingered on the couch, Laura became increasingly fidgety until Marie said, “We need 15 minutes of girl time. Can you go away?” “It almost became like a secret society,” Marie says now. “We wouldn’t tell our other friends about it.” They hoped to look effortlessly thin in bikini photos, surrounded by their sorority sisters on a beach during spring break.
The life of a sorority girl has never been more aspirational. In the years since #BamaRush and RushTok turned the recruitment process into a cultural phenomenon, teenagers’ feeds have been flooded with girls sharing their outfits of the day (“Skirt from Aritzia, stack from Amazon”) and doing elaborate choreographed dance routines in front of their sororities’ neoclassical mansions while lip-syncing to “Mambo No. 5.” Their outfits are always coordinated: matching extra-small Alo sets, LoveShackFancy florals, and so much butter yellow. They are almost uniformly white, blonde, and very, very skinny.
Every generation of college girls has been obsessed with being thin, but never before has there been such an effective, accessible way to lose weight. In dorm rooms and sorority houses across the country, women are stashing Wegovy pills under their twin beds and sharing vials of compounded retatrutide they ordered from China with their roommates, hoping if they shrink down enough they will get into the sisterhood of their dreams. Students told me there’s an “Ozempidemic” on campuses in which everyone is taking it but nobody is talking about it. When someone comes back from vacation 20 pounds lighter, rumors start flying that they’re “on the Big O.” But many would rather risk being discovered than stand out in a house full of double zeros.
