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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?
The actions and revealed preferences of college girls and their parents corroborate that the risks of date rape drugs or sexual assault at frat parties or college parties as a whole are far overblown. Akin to UFOs, date rape drugs—despite their supposed ubiquity—are sorely lacking in documentation.
Date rape drugs are mostly a cover story for overdrinking or doing other drugs, blaming men to absolve young women of their accountability when it comes to their coffee moments while/from partying, a plausibly undeniable mechanism for enabling young women to make retroactive accusations of rape (are you going to deny a young woman’s Lived Experience and Emotional Truth that she was drugged?). Like with performative hysterics when it comes to fears of sexual assault in general, voicing fears of date rape drugs can be a form of humble-brag: “Look how desirable I am that I’m at constant risk of my drink being drugged.”
Who? Whom? Frat guys are just a politically correct target for slander. We’re not supposed to Notice which segments of the population are actually disproportionate offenders of sexual assault.
So alternate question, why is some Alabama dad paying thousands of dollars for his daughter to thotmaxx in determining which fuck-pool-for-frat-guys she gets to join? And this is on top of paying tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to send his daughter away to do what college girls do. The thought of doing so is incredibly humiliating to me.
Especially if the fathers of would-be sorority-girl daughters are disproportionately likely to be former frat guys themselves. Sometimes I wonder if having a daughter causes a man to develop retrograde amnesia of all the fatherless things he’s witnessed teenage girls and young women do as a teenaged boy and young man, otherwise the cosmic horror and existential dread would be overwhelming. Kind of like Leonardo DiCaprio’s character inShutter Island and his delusions to cope with what happened to his family.
Or fathers cope by thinking his daughter’s Not that Kind of Girl, and that only someone else’s daughter would do such things. But it must be Someone’s Daughters doing such things (a la the Netflix meme), so many—perhaps most—of the aforementioned fathers would be wrong, if not in kind at least in degree.
It could be a twist on the question “who would you rather babysit your kid, Hitler or a randomly selected person from the Bronx?”: Who would you rather your daughter party with, five randomly selected frat guys or five randomly selected young men from the Bronx?
Likely the defeated, subconscious resignation for #SororDads as well. Under the current cultural regime, it’s impossible to thot-patrol one’s daughter. Conservatives are just progressives driving the speed limit. If it’s inevitable that your daughter’s going to Have Her Fun and do fatherless things, you pay up so at least she does them for higher socioeconomic status guys. So not only is having a daughter perhaps the ultimate and final cuck, it’s like a recurring form of blackmail too.
Granted, I've never been a father, but I don't see why it's supposed to be automatically humiliating or horrible in some other way for a father to know that his daughter is having sex with dozens of guys. Seems strange to me. As a father, as long as she's safe while doing it, why should I care? I like promiscuous girls, they're usually more interesting to talk to than non-promiscuous girls, and it's easier to get laid with them. I don't look down on them compared to non-promiscuous girls. It would be hypocritical for me to judge my daughter's promiscuity based on different standards than I use with women whom I want to fuck.
Please locate me in the world someday when you are a dad to a daughter and let's revisit this topic.
Clearly there are fathers who don't care enough, so this isn't as self-evident "just try it bro" as you think. Why don't you try to put it in words?
From observation it looks like a mix of "I remember her as a little kid so it's forever icky to think of her having sex, but I can abstract it away if it's marriage" and "mildly incestuous possessiveness".
Because it's as fundamental to each person as one's personality is?
If you're capable of thinking of it in those terms you might just be asexual.
From observation, it's normal to think of your kids as never having grown past the age of 13 (and thus it be forever icky to think of them as having adult desires), and every parent I've ever known does this (except for one, maybe two). [The Jewish rite of adulthood doesn't happen at 13 for no reason.] It changes when you get married because the opposite-sex parent becomes permanently subordinate at that point (and also your kid has backup when dealing with you). I'm not sure how they see grandkids.
It's normal to think that sex with men is dangerous and bad, and that women desire nothing else but to have a marriage without any sex whatsoever if they can get away with it. Which is in their finely-honed evolutionary biological interests to do for obvious reasons; note that lesbians aren't immune to this reflex, which is why the majority of definitionally lesbian sex that has ever happened has been in front of a camera, not in committed lesbian relationships.
There are memes about this from the distaff side as well- give seldom, and above all, give grudgingly. Straights unironically and fully believe that "while sex is at best revolting and at worse rather painful, it has to be endured, and has been by women since the beginning of time, and is compensated for by the monogamous home and by the children produced through it." Men and women deal with this differently, and take advantage of this differently, but they both agree on this fundamental point. And now you know why
women/bottoms/betasconservatives are justmen/tops/alphasprogressives driving the speed limit in sexual matters; the only reason it's through a progressive lens these days is because women have more socioeconomic power than men do for other reasons, so the power politics are a lot more naked from the male perspective now where it's usually the women staring down the barrel [which is why when that wasn't the case, the average woman was more traditionalist than the average man, even in cultural milieus where wife-beating was the norm].Again, this has strong and extremely important biological underpinnings- humanity hasn't had enough time to evolve to deal with the fact that women can just have sex without any major consequence at their leisure. We solved this with technology in the '50s and what we got was a 20-year-long society-wide orgy... until AIDS [and Boomer women hitting the wall] killed that society dead. Women were screaming and throwing their panties at Elvis because it turns out that, shock of shocks, some women actually like having sex- this continues to baffle straights to this day because casual sex is literally the most counterintuitive and physically dangerous thing you can do as a woman!
And now you know why some people who can't deal with this make themselves eunuchs (Skoptskyists, modern transgender movement, etc.): for a straight man looking through the lens of how a straight man sees straight women, it's the ultimate gift to a woman [to have a relationship but never have to have sex- this is "respects women" to a pathological degree, and now you know why the most visible ex-men are usually autistic, and also Like That more generally] and for a straight woman it's the ultimate safety blanket [ruining their body's sex appeal as the price for joining a religious community frees them from the need to sell their body for sex- which is the definition of a straight marriage per the above- and from the perspective of an ex-woman seeing that, because she's already in such a community, that mutilating herself has no downsides].
Christianity is appealing to men and women who find that resisting ancient instincts is very hard, and so you'll find a disproportionate amount of men who do consciously want to resist them are Christian, because it's a cultural milieu where they will be praised for doing so (it's also a place for people who aren't getting any, because that's also virtuous)- so naturally, you'll find them to be a lot weirder about sex than the general population. Their complaints about "oversexualization" and "promiscuity bad" are best viewed through the lens of how alcoholics who consciously need to resist relapse would see constant ads for beer- why the absolute fuck should a Healthy Society not only tolerate that, but encourage it (in the "silence is violence" way), given how many alcoholics [they believe there to be, and not without reason] are out there, even if they're aware they're in a filter bubble that consists solely of alcoholics?
More generally, this is where the "I don't want a woman that had forty penises in her- that's as many as four tens, and that's terrible" disgust reflex comes from. Excessively promiscuous women have something fundamentally wrong with them as they're not performing their gender role properly- they're not gatekeeping sex- in the same way that multiply-divorced men have fundamental problems with commitment. And we should expect that to be extremely visceral for straights (in a way that it isn't for gays/lesbians/asexuals, who have different problems).
So, straights/traditionalist-progressives can't fully understand
free loveAce Pride because their mental model of it is "first, be very aware that sex with men is bad and has immediate life-ending consequences for women, then act as selfishly as you possibly can under those circumstances", which you can see an excellent example of as a related comments to this one. And it's not like Free Love didn't have elements of that, because it couldn't really reject straights poking their... noses where they shouldn't have and took the claimed Psychic damage (or purposefully inflicted status effects on others out of selfishness, like certain gay men with AIDS and monkeypox).The reason Aces don't take Psychic type damage is because they're Dark type, and while Dark types might not take Psychic damage they're not immune to status effects [like 'disease' or 'pregnant']. Even if it's permissible, it's not really beneficial (and 'but don't you have anything better to do?' is the argument I never see Christians make, even though it doesn't depend on first-century sexual morality to be valid, but I think the reason why they don't feel the need to is explained sufficiently above).
Also, conversely, asexuals don't usually try to understand straights (or are blinded by Pride, just like how straight women are now, and how straight men used to be) so they tend to propose solutions like "maybe we can do some conversion therapy by encouraging little kids to fuck, if they grow up thinking casual sex is normal then so much the better" [which I'll point out is the exact same thing that Proud straight women do to little boys/girls where they encourage them to be the opposite instead, for the same reasons, coming from the same sexual place as I explained above, and it is just as Psychically harmful to them- victims of both cases appear to develop hypersexuality as a coping mechanism and so I think it hurts the same place in the same way] and "if we plaster sex everywhere, we drive the marginal value of sex down to zero; when sex is so ordinary as to be trivial there will be no more sex abuse, and there are very definitely no knock-on effects from this whatsoever" [as a response to straight sexuality's natural impulse to drive the marginal value of sex infinitely high that nobody will pursue sex any more].
This is a very fascinating post and I'll probably ask more questions later, but for now I have one.
Am I understanding you correctly that straight sexual people want there to be no sex and asexual people want there to be as much sex as possible?
Yes. Or rather, that if you're straight, your interests converge on nobody but you having/accessing sex (your ideal society is that you're the only one of your sex present, male or female- since if you're male you can demand an infinitely high price for commitment under those circumstances, and if you're female you can demand an infinitely high price for sex in the same way), and if you're ace, as a property of not having that drive, it wouldn't matter if everyone but you was having sex [at least, not for reasons that directly have to do with sex for the sake of sex- this would/could still be existentially crushing for other reasons, but not in the same way it would be for straights].
I think a lot of people have a hard time processing/coping with the reality of sex; the meme about "I was forever traumatized by seeing this" is too common to all be lie and I've heard enough "I wasn't ready to do it then and regret the sex", "getting laid changes you", "too many penises", "don't you regret that/wasn't that a stereotypical grooming relationship?", and "you did this mostly for self-gratification, right?" (a question I'm still not allowed to answer, because it would reveal this kind of orientation mismatch to someone I don't want to reveal that to) to think the people who say those things must be telling the truth and not faking
their orgasms.Obviously that has to come from somewhere, should be taken seriously, and starting from initial biological conditions seems to make the most sense. But I think there's a big gaping hole (one held open by 2 hands, with a gold ring on one of the fingers) in the understanding of what the sexual politics of the last 60-100 years were really caused by, I think that what caused it wasn't fully understood in that time (and is now misunderstood on purpose by different people, in different ways, for different reasons), and I intend to discover a reasonable way to explain what it is and why.
On the most literal reading possible, I don't see how this can be true. If you're the only one having sex, then the species will die out and your bloodline along with it. You can't make enough people on your own (and even if you could, there's inbreeding to worry about).
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