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What does an Alabama Sorority Sister Consider an Ordered Sexuality?
My wife recently got into Substack and sent me this series covering Alabama Greek Life, particularly the famous #RushTok phenomenon of girls at the University of Alabama on tiktok. My wife followed #rushtok for a while, it’s a popular story among women. The substack piece is great, I highly recommend the whole series for a view of things we, uh, don’t get around here. I'm probably putting together a whole-'nother top level post about the other major thread in the series later. Some highlights working towards a core question I'm left with:
What is Rush and RushTok?
I’m sure most people here are familiar with the concept of Rushing and Pledging a fraternity or sorority, I myself have a family tradition of pledging a frat freshman year and getting in and then quitting immediately because it sucks (or because the men in my family are congenitally weird). The University of Alabama is a school with a very high development and prominence of Greek Life in the classical sense, which has become a national symbol for a kind of throwback Greek Life nationally.
My wife and her friends love it. You get this look into the cool girls, and they have this guide aspect to it, very The Official Preppy Handbook for Gen Z. There’s always been an appeal to media that offers a direct guide to how a subculture works. Especially a subculture it is easy to fantasize about; women fantasize about being the hot sorority girl the same way men will fantasize about joining the Rangers. There’s something fascinating about the social Hell Week of getting a bid, the same way there is a fascination to the Seals Hell Week workouts. If you want to get a bid from the good sororities, you wear these sneakers and you buy this bag and you do your hair like this, and you never say that. There’s an entire culture to it, and you can see the impact it has in fashion trends:
What do you need to fit in?
I’ve seen the Golden Goose store at the KoP mall, and holy shit I felt old finding out those were a trend for rich sorority girls, and watching the storefront crawl with ABG shoppers coming out with bags of multiple pairs. What the fuck man? They look like converse purchased by some artsy middle schooler and painted with Sharpies for fun. It’s a pure Veblen good. Obviously it indicates that you’re spending Daddy’s money to fit in, that being one of the prime values of any Sorority...
Can’t emphasize enough how smart it is to literally dedicate effort to recruiting professionally hot teenage girls to come to your school, in the process producing a viral online content farm, which recruits more students. Alabama is going to be a top university within a generation just by being less aggressively abnormal than the old Ivy adjacents. I’m always amazed that Jeep has never built a more practical Wrangler clone, like the old Jeepster, the Wrangler has been perpetually popular as an SUV that is also a fun convertible, but it has wildly bad ergonomics, handling, and efficiency as a result of building it for off-road chops that the majority of buyers don’t need. The styling and the convertible top could easily be put in a smaller, unibody-AWD, practical package for the mall crawler crowd, sold at a lower but still premium price, and clean up. Ok, you’ve piled your Sororstitute outfits into your Jeep Wrangler and arrive on campus, what next?
Trust the Process
A consultant? To help your daughter get in? More of daddy’s money, but why on earth does daddy agree?
This a carefully planned process. The ignorant might not realize it, but the in crowd knows it. Before you arrive they know who you are and what they want from you. And this is where the Sorority vision of femininity becomes so interesting to me:
What is the Sorority view of Ordered Human Sexuality?
So don’t be too slutty. You must be hot, but don’t be provocative. Traditional femininity, but you have to be sexy. Not too sexy though. And for gooness sake, you can't be sexually available, forget it then. But you have to be friendly to the right guys or you're useless to us, we need you to turn it on for them to preserve our status. Ok, we’ve got it down, but then later in the series when discussing fraternities we see:
And the girls report:
Now it should be noted here that while there’s a constant panic about college sexual assault, women who are in college are less likely to be sexually assaulted than women the same age who aren’t in college. This does not mean that sexual assault isn’t a problem, but it does mean that we need to question the degree of causation between the circumstances of colleges and frat parties and sexual assault. To some extent our panic over frat party assaults is classist: an assumption that the "good girls" shouldn't be subject to this kind of treatment.
But still, the questions rise in my mind. The core values of UA trad families that want to put their girls in a sorority are conservative in the Country Music sense of conservative, and one of the things you see over and over in country music is being terrified of your daughter’s sexuality. (The offensively, vomit-inducing, treacly modern version which I truly can’t stand on the radio) But these sororities are family traditions, and as everyone emphasizes over and over most of their families were involved with Alabama Greek Life. I’d expect most of them to agree with my father, who advised my sister that who she married would be the most important decision she ever made in her life. I’d expect an outwardly patriarchal organization like Alabama Greek Life to agree broadly that women will ultimately be going to UA as much for an MrS as a BA degree, and that the former is as or more important than the latter to a woman’s life. How does joining a sorority help the modal sorority achieve that goal in a fulfilling way? I strongly suspect that the moms and the executive board would say that the ideal Alpha Chi girl should be modest and chaste, meet a nice high quality guy (presumably in a top frat at UA), and marry him. Certainly shouldn’t be having sex outside of a “committed relationship” monogamously, certainly never hook up. But then the dissonance with the party attitude of the sororities, and their subservient role to the fraternities, which is a kind of deranged and degenerate form of patriarchy by which the highest quality women are treated the worst. Why is some Alabama dad paying thousands of dollars to a consultant to help his daughter get assaulted at a frat party?
So I would love to see an interview with the kinds of moms that are still involved in alumni orgs, that encourage their own daughters to join these orgs, or with the social chairs of the current Sororities, about what they view as the optimal romantic life of an Alpha Chi girl. And how is what they do helping the girls to achieve that? Because you look at all their public marketing, and then you look at what they do, and it doesn’t line up. It’s not like their moms or aunts went to school in 1908, even a mother who had her now-UA-frosh daughter at 30 would have herself been at UA in the mid-90s, hardly a time of strict morality. It’s not like the parents are under the impression that their girls are going to a Christian summer camp here.
Now possibly the blackpill answer is that the risk is inevitable, so it washes out. The baseline risk at a frat party isn’t any higher, and may be lower, than it would be if she didn’t join greek life, or even if she didn’t go to college or went to LIberty. So the other aspects and appeals of Greek Life are worth more in the balance. But nonetheless, Sororities and Frats are constantly cited as conservative, and self consciously present themselves as such. Why don’t they organize their lives in conservative ways? Certainly I’m not expecting college students to live as monks regardless of their outward commitments, but why aren’t those outward commitments more in line with their stated values? And maybe their stated values themselves are a reflection of a more nuanced view of morality they hold in an interior way. Maybe the sorority moms would say, hey, girls are gonna have fun, we’d rather they have fun with the “right” kind of guy and hope for the best, and the structure of the system will protect her as much as she can be protected.
I’m not sure what the answer is. But I’m curious to see an intelligent, sympathetic breakdown of how these people think. The series is interesting to me, but the author is ultimately too liberal-blinkered to ask the most interesting anthropology questions about what these people believe. What do these girls (and the families funding their project) seek out of the experience of being part of this social circle, in terms of what they themselves would say is the most important decision in their lives?
I will read the full linked set of Substacks because I am fascinated by elite formation and think it is an underrated factor in the success or failure of societies, but some quick comments from a British perspective - I live in the UK on the fringes of the "traditional-elite" upper and upper-middle class culture that is our equivalent of the culture Bama Rush is part of.
On the central question of "What is the sexual morality of Bama Rush?" I see three things going on.
That is something we need.
Do you have a link to a blog post?
I wondered about that, to what extent that is its own hierarchy, but all I had was speculation and anecdote, no evidence. It was more observable in high school than college for me, but I didn't go to school in the south.
Further cementing my belief that Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the only LLM that can write worth a damn:
Pride and Rush
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single freshman in possession of a good wardrobe must be in want of a bid. However little known the feelings or views of such a young woman may be on her first entering campus, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding sororities, that she is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their houses.
"My dear Elizabeth," said Mrs. Bennet to her daughter one morning in their Tuscaloosa hotel room, "have you selected your rush week outfits? You know the first round begins tomorrow."
Elizabeth Bennet, who had been arranging her perfectly pressed blouses by shade of white, merely nodded. She had heard quite enough about rush from her mother since their arrival from Longbourn, Georgia, three days prior.
"Lady Catherine de Bourgh's niece, Anne, is legacy at Delta Nu," continued Mrs. Bennet, fanning herself with a recruitment pamphlet. "Such connections! And to think, if only my own dear sisters had attended Alabama, you might have been legacy somewhere yourself."
"I assure you, Mama, I am quite content to make my own way," said Elizabeth, though she knew this would bring little comfort to her mother's anxious spirits. The whole business of formal recruitment struck her as rather ridiculous – all these elaborate social niceties, performed with precision timing under the sweltering Alabama sun.
"Jane has already made such an impression at orientation," Mrs. Bennet continued, speaking of Elizabeth's elder sister. "That Caroline Bingley, the Recruitment Chair at Kappa, absolutely doted on her. Such refinement! Such grace!"
Elizabeth smiled, for she could not disagree about Jane's natural elegance. Her sister possessed exactly the sort of gentle manner that seemed calculated to win over even the most discriminating of sorority women. Elizabeth, on the other hand, found she could not help but view the whole proceedings with a degree of bemused skepticism.
"And have you heard?" Mrs. Bennet lowered her voice conspiratorially. "Mr. Bingley's friend, that Darcy fellow – the one from the old Mountain Brook family – is serving as a recruitment advisor to his sister's house. They say he's terribly proud, but with five generations at Alabama, I suppose one might be."
Elizabeth raised an eyebrow. She had glimpsed this Mr. Darcy during orientation, standing aloof from the cheerful chaos of move-in day, his crimson tie perfectly knotted despite the August heat. She had thought him handsome, to be sure, but his expression of general disdain for all around him had rather diminished the effect.
The afternoon wore on, Mrs. Bennet fluttering between her daughters' rooms, dispensing advice about conversation topics and the proper way to cross one's ankles. Elizabeth found her thoughts returning to the week ahead – the houses she would visit, the conversations she would have, and yes, even that proud Mr. Darcy, who seemed to embody everything both magnificent and ridiculous about this peculiar Southern institution she was about to enter.
Little did she know how significantly these next few days would alter the course of her freshman year – and indeed, her life.
Pride and Rush
[Previous chapter remains the same...]
Chapter 2
The first morning of recruitment dawned bright and merciless, the Alabama sun already asserting its dominance over the manicured lawns of Sorority Row. Elizabeth, dressed in a carefully selected sundress that her mother had deemed "not quite the thing, but it will have to do," found herself assembled with hundreds of other young women in the grand ballroom of the student center.
"Potential New Members," announced Charlotte Lucas, a sophomore Rho Gamma who had been assigned to Elizabeth's recruitment group, "remember to smile, be yourself, and trust the process." Charlotte, who had temporarily denounced her own sorority affiliation to serve as an impartial guide, delivered these platitudes with what Elizabeth detected as the slightest hint of irony.
Jane, naturally, looked perfectly composed despite the early hour. Her blonde hair fell in elegant waves, and her white dress seemed to repel both wrinkles and nervous perspiration. "Lizzy," she whispered, "do try to keep an open mind. Everyone says these houses have such different personalities."
"Oh yes," Elizabeth replied with a arch smile, "I'm particularly looking forward to discovering the subtle distinctions between the thirty different versions of 'Sweet Home Alabama' we'll hear today."
Their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Caroline Bingley, resplendent in her Kappa leadership polo, her auburn hair arranged in the sort of casual updo that required no less than forty-five minutes to achieve. She was accompanied by none other than Mr. Darcy himself, who appeared to be inspecting the recruitment arrangements with all the enthusiasm of a man attending his own funeral.
"Jane, darling!" Caroline trilled, skillfully ignoring Elizabeth's existence. "You must be so excited. First rounds are such fun – though of course, some houses are more... selective about their future sisters than others."
"I'm sure every house has its own wonderful qualities," Jane replied diplomatically.
Mr. Darcy's expression suggested he strongly disagreed with this generous assessment, though he said nothing. His eyes swept the room with what Elizabeth could only interpret as disapproval, lingering briefly on her own decidedly unfashionable hometown boutique dress.
"I suppose some of us must content ourselves with whatever bids we receive," Elizabeth said sweetly, meeting Darcy's gaze with deliberate challenge. "We can't all have five generations of legacy to recommend us."
A flash of something – surprise, perhaps, or irritation – crossed Darcy's features before he resumed his mask of indifference. "Legacy status means little without the proper... qualities to maintain our standards."
"And what qualities might those be, Mr. Darcy? The ability to look down one's nose at perfect strangers?"
Caroline Bingley's carefully penciled eyebrows shot up towards her hairline. Jane looked mortified. But before Darcy could respond, a chime sounded through the ballroom, signaling the start of first rounds.
"All PNMs to your groups!" Charlotte called out, saving Elizabeth from whatever cutting response Darcy might have formulated. As she took her place in line, Elizabeth couldn't help but notice Darcy watching her retreat, his expression unreadable.
The day stretched before them: twelve houses to visit, each for precisely twenty minutes, with three minutes between to hurry down the row to the next destination. Elizabeth steeled herself for what promised to be an exhausting parade of identical conversations about her potential major (English literature, to her mother's despair) and her high school activities (debate club captain, which had already earned her several concerned looks from the more traditional Southern belles in her group).
As she climbed the pristine white steps of the first house, already echoing with synchronized clapping and singing, Elizabeth reflected that Mr. Darcy's disdain might not be entirely misplaced – though she would rather die than admit it. Still, she was here now, and she intended to make the best of it, if only to prove to certain parties that a girl from small-town Georgia could navigate these rarefied social waters with as much grace as any Mountain Brook debutante.
The massive door swung open, releasing a blast of air conditioning and the perfectly harmonized strains of what was, indeed, "Sweet Home Alabama."
This is actually good. I may die laughing when Clippy comes for my haemoglobin.
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Dalrock deleted his blog, IIRC, so unless he's saved excerpts, it's not really an option to go read it.
It is archived at Redpill Archive
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Tide and Prejudice
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