After a week of sorority recruitment filled with sugar and spice and everything nice, I had almost forgotten what boys even looked like. Going out for the first time was like discovering a whole new species with muscles and chest hair. As the familiar scent of Axe and beer filled my nostrils, I realized that while I may not have actually seen any guys during Rush Week, they had played an integral role in the recruitment process. Despite the Panhellenic Association’s desperate efforts to hide pictures of boys and censor discussions involving them during Rush, the males of Cornell had, as usual, crept their way into the reluctant minds of its lovely ladies.

For girls, choosing the right sorority isn’t just about finding a place to feel comfortable. It seems that a major part of choosing the right sorority is finding the right fraternity to go with it. During Rush, a particularly adorable freshman girl, who happened to fit in particularly well at my house, told me that all of her friends in a certain fraternity had encouraged her to join a different house because that was the one they mixed with the most.

At first, I asked myself how such a confident, independent girl could even consider joining a house based on the opinions of a bunch of frattastic meatheads. On second thought, though, I empathized and remembered how the reputations of both sororities and fraternities had influenced my Rushing decisions.

Despite the variety of personalities within each house, stereotypes still influence us at Cornell. While some fraternities’ brothers have acquired reputations for smooth talking and fast walking, others have become known for having glasses and wearing white socks with black shoes. Similarly, some sororities are thought to mandate popped collars and pearl necklaces while others are rumored to … um … not require clothing at all.

True or not, these reputations can have a huge impact on our assessments of others’ desirability as well as our own self-perceptions. For example, after his first semester at Cornell, a friend of mine — a self-proclaimed high-school loser whose social life once consisted solely of practicing with the marching band — overcame his fear of girls and found himself a beautiful one to call his girlfriend. Not long after the happy couple celebrated their sixth-month anniversary, however, he joined a fraternity and decided that he just “wasn’t a one-girl kind of guy.” While I was tempted to remind him of what his life was like before meeting her, the long list of girls with hot Facebook pictures who had suddenly friended and/or poked him seemed to indicate that he wouldn’t be returning to that life any time soon.

As much as we may complain about it, the change in attitudes of these Greek Cornellians is largely due to the change in the way they are treated by us after they join a house. It is not uncommon for girls to hook up with guys they had rejected in the past because they have pledged popular fraternities.

And who can blame them? The idea of being taken to extravagant formals at really nice houses or going on wine tours with large groups of guys is undoubtedly appealing.

After watching movies like Animal House or Old School, it’s logical to associate being in a fraternity with being attractive. It’s easy to blame the frat guys for changing, but, really, all they’re doing is recognizing the change in other people — or, rather, other girls’ willingness to have sex with them — and taking advantage of it.

So, who do we blame for the morphing personalities of our sweet, Playstation-3-playing freshman boys into beer-guzzling, girl-chasing jerks? And who do we blame for the shifting ways of our shy, self-conscious freshman girls into miniskirt-wearing, frat-guy-swooning sorostitutes?

Of course, we can blame them in part. If they weren’t insecure to begin with, no house could make them change their sense of identity. But, then again, who could expect freshman boys or girls to be completely secure?

No, we must blame the people who confirm their illusions of self-transformation: ourselves. Since we are the ones who behave differently towards boys and girls once they become brothers and sisters, we are the ones perpetuating their changes in behavior. And thus we are the prime culprits.

Pointed fingers aside, we must realize that if we wish to maintain the relationships we have with even the geeky pre-frat boys and the innocent pre-sorority girls, we must not determine their romantic value based on their belonging (or not belonging) to a fraternity.

While being in fraternities and sororities can instill confidence in some, it cannot change who they truly are. Hard as it may be, we shouldn’t base our judgments about anyone based on what house they belong to, and we should know that being cool is about being yourself and treating others with respect.

Once we realize that, we won’t have to worry about our freshman girls or boys making their journeys from Cornell geeks to Cornell Greeks.