Tomorrow night the sorority girls of the future will be out in packs, roving from house to house to watch dance routines overly choreographed to mockups of sort-of-popular songs. The whole thing is a ludicrous and outdated process that treats potential new members with patronizing condescension. That formal sorority recruitment can exist in 2007 when fraternity rush offers so much freedom is proof of how far the women’s liberation movement still has to go.

To join a house, a young woman must schlep to 20 houses during a 12-hour period on Friday and Saturday nights, at each one watching an overly choreographed dance routine set to a lame parody of a once-popular song. (“Our humps, our humps our humps our humps, our lovely sisterhood lumps.”) Sorority sisters waste an obscene amount of time during the first few weeks of the school year perfecting dance steps and rhyme schemes.

During the week and a half following this first round, rushes will spend more than 17 hours revisiting fewer and fewer sororities until “Bid Day,” which falls on Sunday, Sept. 9.

My little sister, a senior who went through sorority recruitment, defends the system. Hey sis, shouldn’t male and female rushes be treated the same? “Boys and girls are different,” she told me, probably referring to the emotional chasm that divides the sexes beyond that whole “penis/no penis” dichotomy.

But if my sister is right and the gender gap is the reason, it would make more sense to have young men, who are far more immature than young ladies, go through a formal recruitment process. After all, which sex is more likely to urinate out a third-floor window after a particularly intense rush event? Shepherding 18-year-old women around campus like second graders on a field trip demonstrates a level of respect usually reserved for cattle.

Can you imagine thousands of male freshmen heading from fraternity to fraternity, at each one watching the brothers singing and dancing about how much they all love each other? (“Our humps, our humps our humps our humps, our lovely brotherhood lumps.”) The houses would seem even more identical than they already do.

The Interfraternity Council has found a rush system that works. Men on campus rush fraternities by showing up, drinking refreshing nonalcoholic beverages (I have no reason to doubt this assertion), and listening to promises that this house absolutely, without a doubt, will not haze anybody. This procedure produces positive results – it gives the rush lots of freedom, it lets the fraternity rush in a manner appropriate to the composition of the house, and it ends with arrogant pledges doing elephant walks at 3 a.m. the day of major midterm examinations.

By not letting sororities host independent rush events, the Panhellenic Council denies rushes from seeing what a house is really like outside of a highly pressurized formal recruitment procedure. It also wastes time – a Jewish freshman, for example, might have her mind made up and her heart set on joining one of the Jewish houses, Alpha Epsilon Phi or Sigma Delta Tau, where she may be a legacy or have close friendships with some of the sisters. Where is the need for that girl to check out 18 superfluous houses she’ll never consider joining in Round One of rush, and then eight, four and one in the subsequent three rounds?

I discussed formal recruitment with a number of sophomore, junior and senior sorority members, and almost all of them despise the system. They were also terrified that I would identify them or their houses, lest Panhellenic Council seek some sort of retribution against their houses.

They told me that during formal recruitment, sorority members are forbidden from entering residence halls or explaining (outside of formal recruitment events) what makes their house special. If a sorority member rushed into a burning residence hall, she’d better be careful not to accidentally carry a potential new member to safety over her shoulder.

Sorority rush will be unpleasant for all the young ladies involved until the system is overhauled. It’s time for the Panhellenic Council to treat the girls it ostensibly serves with the same respect shown (deservedly or not) to fraternities by IFC. The no-penises deserve the same system as their penised brothers.