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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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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.

In short: Rushtok is a genre of TikTok videos that includes women who are going through rush (also known as PNMs, or Potential New Members) and videos made by the sorority members themselves. Rushtok first took off in 2020, which is why people refer to this iteration as “Season Three.” Since that first year, the organization that governs rush (Panhellenic, or Panhell) has issued guidelines on the type of videos that PNMs can make (#OOTDs, aka Outfits Of The Day, and commentary that says nothing about the houses themselves or their specific experiences with them).

Why do they want to do this, this sounds horrible? The first and most obvious reason — even to the women themselves — is social structure and friendship. A lot of them talk about their desire for “sisters” in their videos in ways that sound pretty hollow, but friendship is what they’re grasping for: a network of friends and community and a path forward through the maze of college. That’s why I was convinced to rush as a Greek-system-resistant freshman at a liberal arts college, and I’ve long heard the advice to undergraduates (particularly at big state schools) that joining the Greek system is your way to get “plugged in” at school (as opposed to finding yourself lonely and lost in a faraway dorm or apartment off-campus). Obviously there are SO MANY ways to get “plugged in” to college life, but the Greek system is the cheat code. Before school even starts, you have somewhere between 100 and 400 “friends,” or at least people who will do things with you, tell you where the parties are and what time you should show up to them — and orient you to the campus, class, help figure out study groups, have people who can talk to you about what professors to seek out or avoid, etc. etc.

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?

Like so many processes that determine social order, there are written and unwritten rules — and various means that people pass down the knowledge that make it easier to abide by both. The most obvious is a handy guide published by the university every year called “Greek Chic,” which walks girls through the intricate Rush process. The Table of Contents spans everything from “Summer Dos and Don’ts” to a day-by-day breakdown of how Rush unfolds.

The aspirational standards at BamaRush this year are pretty similar to what they’ve been for the last few years: white (we’ll get to that); tan; long, straightened hair with waves; thin; significant amounts of makeup; short dresses with overly feminine features (big ruffles, structured poof sleeves ); and extensive jewelry, including multiple bracelets and rings. The deviations from that norm (in size, in skin color, in dress choice, in hair texture) are so remarkable as to single the girls out for Tiktok stardom. See: the two ‘stars’ of this year’s rush, Bama Morgan and Bella Grace. Both are aspiring for the norm in different ways (Morgan straightening her hair, Bella Grace’s dresses) but can’t quite fit in (for reasons of personality and perceived class). They mirror what so many of us, particularly those of us many years distant from our 17 and 18-year-old selves, understand as the building blocks of a good person and good human: individuality, personality, kindness, and humor….instead of looks, body size, wealth. (More on Morgan and her rush experience below)

And for girls outside of Alabama, there are two primary resources: TikTok and The Pants Store. If you drive from Birmingham to Tuscaloosa, you’ll first encounter the Pants Store via a massive billboard. Originally the pants store sold, well, pants. Mostly men’s. But now it’s an Alabama institution, and it specializes in whatever the college kids want: Hokas, Yeti mini-coolers, and walls upon walls of whatever’s the “right” thing to wear for Rush that year. The manager at the Pants Store told me that so many girls from out of state would come in before Rush asking questions about what they should buy that the company decided to come up with a full-color cheat sheet to help them shop...this place is basically the “Rush uniform store” — lots of “ruffles and flouncy stuff and bright pink and bubblegum pastel colors and sparkles,” which is exactly what the sororities are looking for. (And relatively modest: another sorority member told me the best look is your absolute cutest dress you’d still wear to Easter Sunday)

“I feel like there are definitely Bama/Southern trends observed in Rushtok, but there are Gen-Z trends that get characterized as Bama/Southern because they are different from what millennials and older expect,” they told me. “The commentary skews towards characterizing certain shows of wealth as inherently southern when I can name six girls between DC, NYC, an MN that are wearing fake designer or Cartier bracelets right now. Things are happening on a different scale for sure, but so much of it is the consumerism inherent to growing up with a curated profile. Every girl I know is performing femininity or consciously Not Performing (which is to perform) on IG/Tiktok and — and Tumblr when we were younger still. Like I have been visible on some scale since I was 13 and I will continue to be so and so everyone who meets me can see who I was and who I am and who I will be, which leads to such unique image curation on social media culminating in very performative ‘I own this’ signaling item…..and then boom, Golden Gooses for the South.” (Golden Gooses, by the way, are shoes that are $600-900+ and look like purposefully dirtied up Converse — and a current staple of RushTok)

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...

While lots of people who attend the University of Alabama don’t come from money, most people in the Greek System do — some from regular upper middle-class money, some come from “American Gentry”-style small town families (think: Dad owns the biggest car dealer) and some come from the Chicago suburbs, Orange County, and New Jersey. One day on Greek Row I counted at least eight Jeep Wranglers just from where I was standing. One student told me the real car of choice amongst the Zetas is the Mercedes Benz G Wagon, which run upwards of $140,000. Driving those cars doesn’t necessarily mean you’re filthy rich, but it does mean you want to convey a certain level of wealth.

Kylan came to Bama for the same reason so many beauty queens do: because they match pageant scholarship dollars, and over her decade plus of competing in pageants, Kylan had amassed a sizable fund. Alabama is one of the only major universities that offers this match, but it’s honestly a brilliant recruiting strategy. How do you get more traditionally beautiful, academically invested, proficient public speakers to come to your school? Recruit them where (many) of them gather: on the pageant circuit.

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

On a very basic level: Alabama’s sorority Rush is broken into multiple rounds over nine (very long) days. At the end of each day, students rank the sororities they’ve seen, and the sororities rank the students. The next day, you spend time at the houses you picked that also picked you. The process is repeated after each round, getting more and more exclusive, with fewer and fewer people invited back. Once you’re out — meaning, you have no matches — you’re out, with no recourse and no do-overs. As a result, each of these nine days — and each interaction with each sorority girl at each of these houses — is crucial. Until finally, at the end of it all, if you’ve made it that far, you find out which (if any) sorority has offered you a “bid” to join.

In practice, that means that a whole bunch of prospective new members have “recommendations” written by the friend of a friend who works with their dad. They’re not recommendations so much as evidence of social capital: that your parents are connected to people who were in Greek organizations, which is to say, that they occupy a certain place within the social hierarchy. And if you didn’t grow up in one of those places, and realize that you have absolutely no idea how to play this game with all these unwritten rules, but you really, really still want to….well, then you hire a Rush consultant.

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?

[K]now that by this point (if not before!) all your social media profiles should be totally scrubbed of anything even resembling “bad” behavior. No visible drunkenness, no red solo cups, no cigarettes, no super revealing outfits, no thirst traps, maybe not even any bikinis, depending on the sorority you’re looking for. Oh, and probably no political content — although a little Jesus never hurt. One woman told me that she’d be advised to scrub her Venmo. (And if you think that you can just set your profile to private, wrong again: active members will start friend requesting you… and screenshots of locked accounts circulate freely.)

Why do they call their dresses “cute little dresses? Diminutive is feminine — and also the opposite of sexy, which is not the image you’re trying to exude during rush. (There’s a bit of a virgin/whore dynamic going on — rush dresses are, in many ways, “church dresses,” which are a contrast to the “going out” dress you wear when interacting with fraternities and under the male gaze)

My understanding is that there are queer out women in a lot of the sororities at Bama, and, well, there’s a lot of gay sex in the fraternities. A cis-gendered femme queer person would theoretically do just fine in rush if they had a hetero-seeming social presence, since discussion of the three Bs (booze, bars, boys) is strictly forbidden (and, by extension, any discussion of romantic relationships). For instance, as a PNM (Potential New Member), it seemed like people were just randomly approaching her and starting conversations when she visited the houses. “Once I was on the other side,” she explained, “I realized how strategic this meeting of people was.” Strategic is an understatement here. It's maybe more like... a very precisely choreographed and potentially creepy performance. She was now judging strangers on whether or not they had some magical combination of Alpha Chi traits: A smart girl, a Christian girl, a pretty but not in a slutty way girl, a girl who gives back.

But not all of the other actives approached ratings the same way. One moment really stuck with her: a girl was dropped from Alpha Chi because of nude photos — which had almost certainly been leaked by an ex-boyfriend. “I remember being appalled by that,” Emie said. “To write off a teenage girl for sending a picture to someone she obviously trusted, who then shared it was so awful to me. And it was just common practice.”

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:

Step three is attending a “swap” party with a sorority, where the super drunk pledges are paired with sorority pledges. “In some cases,” Luke said, “a pledge might be like implored” (not forced, Luke clarified for me, but implored) “to like slap a girl on the ass or motor boat her.” That amount of alcohol over such a short period of time is a disaster waiting to happen — for the guys, but also for the women. They’re not allowed to bring alcohol on sorority premises. But they, too, often join the Greek system for the party life, which means that they’re left trying to circumvent these rules, either by sneaking in liquor and taking a whole bunch of shots in quick succession before heading to an event. Or, in order to drink, they have to depend entirely on the fraternities to supply it. Which means that they’re drunk on guys’ home turf, in cavernous fraternity houses that are unfamiliar to them — spaces where the guys are treated like unaccountable monarchs. And if you’ve just done some shots before walking out the door, the effects are probably kicking in just as you arrive at the party.

And the girls report:

“Fraternity boys in general scared me,” said Emie Garrett, who we heard from back in the first article. Before attending her first fraternity party, Emie had it drilled into her: Never leave your drink with anybody. Watch the bartender make it. Emie says girls were taught to keep their hand over the top of their drinks at parties. Of course, a lot of this advice goes out the window once you show up to a party, a little tipsy, with a bunch of jacked dudes shouting at you to do shots. “I just had so many friends who were roofied by guys that they trusted,” Emie said. It never happened to her. But other girls told her about experiences where they blacked out on a night when they didn't drink much or woke up somewhere with no memory of getting there. They’d make excuses for the guys: I'm the one that went there. I’m the one that drank it or did whatever drugs. They’d brush it off, make a joke of it. Reporting it never even entered the conversation.

Most of the sorority women I spoke to voiced something similar. They’d sat in their houses and watched the presentations on how to report a sexual assault, and how to get someone out of a vulnerable situation — as if they were soldiers, readying for war. Then there were the meetings after the parties — the ones where Emie saw sisters get dragged into hearings over pictures they posted online where they looked too drunk or were too provocative. “It’s like female sexuality that they were policing,” she said. So many women have internalized the idea that if something happened at a fraternity house, it was their fault for putting themselves in the situation. And they knew — by watching others — what usually happened when you tried to speak out about it. And it was usually nothing but embarrassment and shame.

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.

  1. The underlying dynamic of Bama recruiting out-of-state students who can't get into Vanderbilt any more definitely exists. Most Oxbridge rejects go to other academically elite universities that are almost but not quite as selective (UCL, LSE, Imperial, Warwick for maths, etc.) but there is a group of universities (Bristol, Durham, Exeter, St Andrew's) which have a reputation for attracting the kind of student who was looking forward to the social aspects of Oxbridge but didn't meet the academic standards. As late as 2000, Bristol was actively recruiting Oxbridge rejects. In the current year, all these universities insist that they aren't, but I don't believe them.
  2. The level of "hooray Henryism" (our equivalent of fratty behaviour) at Bristol/Exeter/St Andrew's is noticeably higher than Oxbridge, where most of the students are genuine bookworms. This is less true of Durham, possibly because Durham was historically a mining town and the threat of being beaten up by locals moderates behaviour.
  3. Selective-membership elite social clubs exist at Oxbridge, but are very much on the downlow. Doing that kind of thing as publicly as US Greek life violates the first rule of British traditional-elite culture which is that those who matter don't mind and those who mind don't matter.
  4. Everything is confounded by the impact of Harry Potter fandom. Someone who enthusiastically participates in academic-social traditions like formal dining in the College Hall might be trad, or they might just be a Potterhead. For Americans who are not aware of this, Harry Potter is inspired by a tradition of English boarding school stories whose memes probably trace back to the Billy Bunter stories in the cheap early 20th century boy's papers (see this critical appraisal by Orwell) and which had ceased to be written unironically around the time Enid Blyton died in 1968. The traditions of these boarding schools were themselves based on university traditions, and in any case JK Rowling was Scottish, and therefore more familiar with ancient universities than with English boarding schools, so Hogwarts looks more like an Oxbridge College than like a real Public (i.e. posh private) School.

On the central question of "What is the sexual morality of Bama Rush?" I see three things going on.

  1. This is, at least publically, traditional-elite sexual morality. Marriage market value is determined by coming from a good family, being hot, and being socially adept (roughly in that order). Young traditional-elite women are socialised to think about marriage market value to the exclusion of sexual market value or labour market value. Jane Austen would understand, to the point where "Elizabeth Bennet rushes Bama" is a crossover fic I would consider reading. Anyone want to take the over on what % of these girls will outearn their husbands in 20 years' time? A sorority preserves its prestige over time by recruiting high MMV girls, policing their behaviour to maintain their MMV, and encouraging them to marry future bankers and captains of industry of the type who will bankroll their wives' alumnae donations (i.e. guys from top frats).
  2. The hypocrisy is exactly the sort of thing that Dalrock used to talk about on his blog, and which leads to the standard Blue joke about Red Tribers marrying early and often have a point. Dalrock's thesis was that American meritocratic elites had a sexual morality where sex and marriage were separated - when seeking sex you do whatever it takes to compete for attention from the top 20% SMV guys, but when seeking marriage you should be as practical as a Jane Austen character. In this model both tribes have the same sexual morality, but the Blue Tribe are more honest about what they are doing.
  3. There are strong vibes of high-status sorority sisters (upperclasswomen, chapter officers, big-name legacies) pimping out lower-status girls (underclasswomen, girls from lower-middle-class families) at their own sororities to the frats in order to build useful social connections.

Jane Austen would understand, to the point where "Elizabeth Bennet rushes Bama" is a crossover fic I would consider reading.

That is something we need.

The hypocrisy is exactly the sort of thing that Dalrock used to talk about on his blog, and which leads to the standard Blue joke about Red Tribers marrying early and often have a point. Dalrock's thesis was that American meritocratic elites had a sexual morality where sex and marriage were separated - when seeking sex you do whatever it takes to compete for attention from the top 20% SMV guys, but when seeking marriage you should be as practical as a Jane Austen character. In this model both tribes have the same sexual morality, but the Blue Tribe are more honest about what they are doing.

Do you have a link to a blog post?

There are strong vibes of high-status sorority sisters (upperclasswomen, chapter officers, big-name legacies) pimping out lower-status girls (underclasswomen, girls from lower-middle-class families) at their own sororities to the frats in order to build useful social connections.

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.

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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