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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?
Dammit.
Every time I want to take a break from motteposting, something interesting and topical rears up.
My initial reaction is "THANKS, I hate it." The social environment you're describing sounds like my personal nightmare. And the rules, to the extent they're legible, seem so ARBITRARY. Whether a given sorority picks Jaylynn or Bria or whatever seems to come down to where she parted her hair that day as much as any other qualifications. Barely better than pure random selection. Its filtering for social conformity, and that is pretty much it.
BUT, I did date a girl who was the "fun police" (i.e. the "Wellness and Safety Chair" or something similar) of a particular sorority who had the unenviable job of enforcing the moral code of the chapter, which meant snooping on girls' social media and bringing violations to the attention of the leadership. Now, this was NOT a large, popular school so the overall pressures were much lesser. And that's probably why the girls felt they could get away with a lot more. Alcohol and drunkenness, drug use, and such were pretty common issues that they posted on social media (normally a secondary account they made explicitly to post debauchery). And it was hard to bring them to heel because the sorority wasn't so critical to campus social life and status that getting kicked out would be a social death sentence. Also the Treasurer for the chapter embezzled a few thousand dollars of Sorority funds during her term so its not like the leaders were paragons of virtue either.
Of course, the things this girl and I got up to would also have posed issues to the moral code of the chapter, and I liked to remind her sometimes of the 'hypocricy,' but she was smart and discreet enough not to post anything publicly, and maintained her reputation quite clean, which I wasn't going to disrupt (like that one ex boyfriend the article mentions leaking nudes as revenge? Ugh).
Perhaps THAT is what these sororities try to filter for? Discretion? Like can you maintain public appearances and not hurt your sorority's social standing by, say, making your bad behavior obvious and obnoxious, can you conform well enough that nobody would single you out as a 'bad' girl or a goody two-shoes? Well you might be marriage material!
Because even a Frat bro is probably not going to wife up a girl who acquires the reputation of being a drunken, druggie slut, even if "Drunken druggie slut" is exactly his preference in women. He needs/wants a girl who will consider his social standing, as well, at his side if he's eventually going into politics or banking or some other important career where 'moral uprightness' is a critical variable. Maybe she really is that bad girl, but she isn't one to make it known, and so he can be confident she won't embarrass him with her behavior later.
And I shouldn't complain too much, Frats and Sororities at least offer some kind of Basic Life Script that make it more likely that somebody will make a few right decisions early in life that are more likely to pay off for them later. Rush for a good sorority, maintain your membership in good standing, hang out with Frat Bros and hopefully lock one down, and graduate with a MrS degree and you're probably golden! At least for a while.
We can admit that there's a toxic side to this where Frat guys use their dad's money and their connections to get away with actively criminal behavior because an arrest and criminal record might derail their life, but I would NOT admit that Frat Culture is the proximate cause of the behavior itself.
I bask in your praise. Stay tuned for part II, tomorrow, which is the coverage of Race in the series.
You may be right, the purpose of private nominally secret societies may be that one can maintain a veneer of respectability outwardly while behaving badly in private.
I mean, that is what separates us from the animals, right?
Folsom Street Fair attendees doing it in the open vs. Eyes Wide Shut-style sex parties where most everyone has plausible deniability.
A friend of mine often points out that a fundamental sign of society degenerating is that most people now seem to lack 'discretion.' Virtually everyone is tempted to bad behavior on occasion. But it seemingly used to be that one would go to the local brothel, drug den, underground casino, whatever, to indulge if they ever did. It was shameful and they knew not to endorse it and certainly to keep it away from kids.
Now, well, almost all bets are off, the only people who keep things discreet are consciously choosing to do so.
Are there statistics out there on how common brothels have been over time in the USA? It seems intuitive to me that it's become a less accepted part of life in the past decades.
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