Urban Legends -- Sorority Prostitution (All Lies)

The Legend

Found on the Internet in September 1998

A friend of mine attends the University of Georgia and when he was looking for a good place to live he was surprised to find that there are no sororities on campus. It turns out that sororities are illegal there because an old town law defines any home in which more than eight unmarried, unrelated women live as a brothel.

Submitted April 2005

I just moved with my family to Denver. I met a nice guy here and he asked me out. Then on our first date he told me that I had to pay for my own dinner and stuff because a local law defines any unmarried woman who takes "money or real goods or services" from a man "in exchange for her company" as a prostitute.

Behind the Legend

There are thousands of old, outdated laws still on the books in towns and cities across the United States. Most of them are ignored, but many still cause problems, as with the lack of sororities noted above.

It was not unusual, particularly in the 19th century, for lawmakers to circuitously define distasteful subjects in order not to have to put "offensive" terms in the law books. Hence "sex" is referred to as "keeping company with," indecent exposure is "showing off," an orgy is "living free and easy," and a brothel is a house filled with single women. Such vague definitions led to San Francisco University's 1982 closing of an all-Asian fraternity as an opium den. They are also responsible for occasional roundups of women found jogging because their sports bras and physical activity legally define them as streetwalkers, despite the fact that they are running.

Laws intended to stop the establishment of organized prostitution by making mass female cohabitation illegal are quite wide spread in the United States. In fact, before corrective measures were rushed through by the governor, Vassar was once shut down by police as a bordello.

Though these laws are difficult to get off the books, they are generally rather easy to circumvent. The most common solution is for a sorority to allow a single man to move into the building so that they don't fall under the "all women" clause of the law. Many sororities have even found that college men are willing to pay enough for the privilege that their rent will cover the sorority house's mortgage, utilities, and grocery bills, with enough left over to give each girl a generous lingerie allowance and replace all those pillows that get damaged during frequent half-naked pillow fights.

As for the woman who wrote to us about prostitution laws in Denver -- lady, the guy's a cheapskate. Dump him.

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