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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.
Yet it's a constant theme of country music, like Cleaning This Gun, linked above. These men are highly aware of this! And, of course, there are arguably better options in the college education game: Messiah, Wheaton, Liberty, etc.
These families are not the church crowd, and they’re listening to Kenny Chesney and Morgan Wallen more than Rodney Akin.
The ‘country music crowd’ and the ‘church crowd’ are two different groups in the red tribe with differing cultural sensibilities.
This is what I'm interested in splitting.
Trad or church crowd ideas of ordered sexuality are self consistent and stable: Virginity until marriage, ideally no real romantic attachments before marriage, monogamous marriage for life. Their ideal college girl, if she even goes to college, goes to Messiah, meets the guy she marries, loses her virginity to him, and stays with him forever.
At the opposite extreme, you have someone like Dan Savage who has a self consistent if not stable view of an ordered sexuality: mutual consent is all that matters, do whatever you want with whoever you want. Monogamous commitments, when entered into, can be defined by the consent of the people in them to include or exclude anything, and can end at any time by mutual consent. Their ideal college student hooks up with whoever she wants whenever she wants however she wants or doesn't want to, she can get married later or not at her option.
Either of those two extremes are philosophically consistent. Taking their initial premises and values ad arguendo they can justify themselves.
I'm curious what the values are that underlie the trad Alabama sorority girl family. Why don't they collapse to either extreme of sending her to a religious school, or hookup culture? What do they picture as the ideal path.
Secular and suburban or exurban-ish red tribers seem like they mostly have the following view- Males are suspect if they aren't seeking sex with women. It is a good thing when they succeed, for them. Girls shouldn't have sex until they're ready to start looking for a husband and promiscuity is a bad thing all around, but you can't necessarily expect that they'll marry their first boyfriend, or their first serious boyfriend, or whatever. Of course, to get married requires good social skills so as to date properly, and developing those social skills is probably impossible while staying a virgin to your wedding night. It's much more important to a woman's well being that she marries well. Thus we should be protective of our high school daughters- while still letting them date a bit, they need the practice for social skills- but should take a more hear no evil, see no evil attitude in college, as long as the guys are willing to have a serious enough relationship. But it's important that it's a see no evil, hear no evil, not permission- if he gets caught(like if she's pregnant) he'd better be willing to marry her, because a woman who's known to be promiscuous is hard to marry. When her boyfriend visits they have to sleep in separate bedrooms so as to reinforce the idea. Basically it seems to boil down to the idea that having multiple partners is taking damage, but it's a manageable level of damage in service of a more important goal. Ideally I think they hope that their daughter meets a guy, hits it off with him, they move in together shortly after he takes her virginity and get engaged in about a year(my extended family is not poor- well, the secular parts at least- but is not old money either, so there might be a class difference to allow for finishing college in the sorority house or whatever), and if it isn't her first boyfriend the second or third would be acceptable.
Boys, on the other hand, it's ok if they're having sex. There's more drive, it prevents homosexuality and weirdness. But he shouldn't treat a respectable woman badly for the sake of fun.
Now I should note I do not agree with that view. I think women shouldn't go to college unless they want to be nurses or something else specific and appropriately feminine and should have more direct involvement from their parents in finding a husband so that the dating phase doesn't take so long, or need to involve cohabiting. And young men aren't ready for marriage if they aren't willing to wait. But it is an attempt at distilling the view I see out in the wild a bit more exposed to the position than the typical motteizean.
Sure, I can posit or imagine all that. But I wish I could find someone who actually thinks that. It seems philosophically unstable. It's internally inconsistent, and violates the first categorically imperative.
Though I suppose it's the formulation of conservatism by which there must be a class that the law protects but does not bind, and a class that the law binds but does not protect.
There was indeed such a class in Alabama and the rest of the South for several centuries. The framework you're struggling to come to terms with just works so much smoother when there's a large number of completely unprotected women in your midst.
This mentality and philosophy is a holdover from that time. The problem for those who hold it is that it's hard if not impossible to reconcile it with modern America.
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