Some young women at Princeton University are so desperate to join a well known campus “eating club” that they’ll subject themselves to punishment that would make some fraternity guys cringe.

Caroline Kitchener of The Atlantic reports.

‘There Is No Pressure for a Girl to Be a Girl’

Walk down Prospect Avenue in Princeton, New Jersey on the first Sunday in February, and you’ll find a horde of shivering college sophomores huddled together on a front lawn, smeared in ketchup, maple syrup, and egg yolk. They’re organized into stations: one group choking down live goldfish, the other pounding out push-ups as senior members shovel dog food into their mouths.

These are the students trying to win membership at Tiger Inn (or TI), widely known as the frattiest and hardest-drinking of Princeton University’s 11 eating clubs — exclusive institutions similar to co-ed fraternities. This group is loud, unafraid, and endowed with a collectively remarkable gag reflex. But the most striking thing about the students standing on this lawn? Most of them are girls.

In 1991, the New Jersey Supreme Court forced Tiger Inn, the last of Princeton’s formerly all-male clubs holding out for brotherhood, to open its doors to women.  When the club admitted 27 female students a few weeks later, the Philadelphia Inquirer declared that the change yielded a “kinder, gentler” Tiger Inn–one with less nudity, more chivalry, and the freedom to drink root beer.

When the club first went co-ed, the story went, the men of TI were on their best behavior. And in 1991, maybe that’s what the new female members of the club wanted. But in 2012, when, for the first time, more women than men applied for a spot in Tiger Inn, they weren’t looking for politeness and well-groomed gentlemen in suits and ties. Now, women join for the debauchery, not in spite of it.