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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?
Always remember girls, put a hand on top of your drinks so nobody smuggles any rape drugs into your rape drugs.
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With caveats: I am not American, never been to a proper frat/sorority environment in my life as described in the articles etc
But I have gone through a pretty selective elite-adjacent boarding school education in my own country. I have gone through and applied hazing myself and have experienced a lot of the best and worst things such an environment can provide.
At its best, pretty much nothing else in life can provide the type of connection you can build with people with whom you go through some group humiliation ritual with at a formative age. And the rituals are typically not that bad and somewhat fun for even the victims.
At its worst these initiations simply get hijacked by the people with worst sociopathic tendencies. Typically violent for guys or emotionally abusive for girls.
I was in a much more intellectually rigorous environment than what’s described here, but the heavy group pressures to conform to certain modes and looks were definitely omnipresent. And typically it provided most people with a productive script for how to behave at an age where they typically have absolutely no clue.
But also at its worst, it was very heavy on the small minority who couldn’t conform or weren’t accepted for a variety of reasons. Even led to suicide attempts etc. Also such group dynamics are very difficult to control in a top down manner so typically it’s seen as very undesirable by people who desire to do social engineering (in the current context this would be the woke crowd, we had different pressures back then).
Other commenters are totally right about the “race to the bottom” dynamics that happens in such environments and how it can destroy group cohesion and invalidate institutional goals. Especially obviously around sex, alcohol and drugs but also other type of group-defective behaviour such as academic misconduct, honesty, helpfulness towards peers etc. You need social policing. Not because it produces the best outcomes for each specific case (ie it sucks for the girl whose ex leaks her photos), but to protect the group. Especially young people will lack much of a personal moral compass and constantly be probing what they can get away with for personal social advancement. If there are no social repercussions for that girl (and the guy who leaked this stuff!!) then you will have dozens of nudes/racy photos circulating in no time and hogging all the sexual interest from girls who aren’t comfortable with immodesty.
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This makes me curious as to what the threshold for “filthy rich” is, in that, this isn’t an adult with a career buying a $140,000 car for themselves, but an adult buying one for a child of theirs with a still-developing frontal lobe.
Also the bit about the in-crowd rules reminds me of college. I’m from a northern state, and I was a pretty good high school football player, had some D2 interest, but went to a D1 school down south as I was’t delusional about my chances of being a professional athlete. The school had intramural flag football, and there was a separate Greek league for the frats to play each other and they took it rather seriously, held practices.
In the dorm league you have to play with guys from your dorm, so I joined that freshman year and did well. I got asked to play for an open division team my second semester that had three guys from the same frat who wanted to play more than once a week on their frat team. As before, I did quite well on that team, too.
I was also in a shitty rock band that I’d joined from answering a flyer.
Anyway, those three frat guys from my open league team, toward the end of that second semester, asked me if I wanted to come over “to the house” for some beers. The invite was for the same time as my shitty band’s practice, so I politely declined. Never got a social invite from them, again. Assuming I traversed one of those in-crowd rules.
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The shift in (publicly expressed) conservative views on female sexuality in the face of wokeness has been fascinating. Conservatives are now openly much more sex-positive when it comes to traditional sexuality, as a bulwark against alternate sexualities, whereas in the past they were more focused on opposing sexual permissiveness by promoting modesty. Look at the conservative embrace of Sidney Sweeney or all the rightoid influencers on X who prominently display cleavage while opining on whatever issue: the new conservative messaging is "It's good for men to want to fuck real women," because too many other, weirder avenues have opened up in pop culture.
Now, surely, this has always been the conservative ideal, but it was more prudent in the past to let it bubble in the background, lest your daughter forsake the first half of the madonna/whore dichotomy. The balance is what's important, and if nature if pulling heavily on the whore-half, socially we need to over-promote the madonna-half. Now the framing window has changed from, "Don't be a whore" to "Don't be some weird whore who is outside the bounds set back when your grandma was a respectable hetero whore for grandpa behind closed doors."
If conservatives fear that teachers/librarians are in a conspiracy to groom their kids into blue-haired gender-queer kink-mongers, you'd better believe there will be some counter-grooming. Who doesn't want their son to love tits, or their daughters to have happy marriages by doing things we don't want to know about to please their husbands? Now that the left is so far down the sex-as-anything-but-breeding path, we can be more honest about the merits of good old-fashioned fucking.
This way predates even gay acceptance going mainstream- I remember Catholic discussion of how awesome NFP was before obergefell.
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Speaking of Sweeney in particular, I encountered enthusiasm for her breasts by listening to the Critical Drinker's "Open Bar" stream while working. The open bar has some actual conservatives, but it seems to me that the core group is pretty clearly tits-and-beer liberals who have been left behind by the rapid advance of Social Justice ideology.
Is what you're seeing a shift in core conservatives, or is it a shift in the center as SJ evolution pushes an increasingly-broad spectrum of people into oppositional alliance?
I think this is pretty accurate, and I think I see it in a lot of other ways too. A lot of the old conflicts between Christian denominations have gone away, now that the central example of a doctrinal dispute has shifted from "what hierarchy do we answer to" to "does sin exist". Many such cases, as they say. Polarization is very, very real.
Probably the center, but I think the right -- or, the people who have become "the right" since Trump -- have fewer intellectual obstacles in the way of embracing. Even the religious conservatives, who used to be the sexual scolds, have at the essence of their ethos the aggressive male sexual imperative of "be fruitful and multiply." They want to keep it in marriage, but if kids do not feel empowered to acknowledge the hormonal impulses that will lead them to marriage, it's a non-starter. I'm not sure the left has, at their essence, a procreative sexual ethos. They want to deconstruct all of the old natural impulses and replace them with new "enlightened" ones, which is the opposite of the innate physical urges.
Let me posit an alternative explanation: The people who are temperamentally predisposed to becoming sexual scolds now do all their scolding under the woke umbrella by, say, complaining about the male gaze because video game characters look too pretty or whatever. Moralising busy-bodies who get off on telling other people what to do and think will seek out whatever ideological framework will let them do that most satisfyingly.
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Was that a thing? I just remember a bunch of conservatives calling her mid on twitter.
I think it's that conservatives have discovered that there is something worse than the kids having sex: the kids not having sex. A whore can be reformed in the church more easily than an asexual. The former merely needs to be taught to control herself by two thousand years of christian teaching on the subject, the latter has no need for church teachings on the subject of sexual sin because she doesn't have sex. The former might give you grandchildren in the wrong shade of beige, the latter won't give you any.
I saw her being celebrated as a hot young woman who not only embraced being a hot young woman but saw no shame in it nor in men enjoying her in that role.
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Vigilant control over one's public image, especially in the age of social media, seems like a pretty good skill to cultivate for the sorts of future careers people like this are likely to have. The rest of this sounds kind of insane to me though, and I was in a large national fraternity in college, though in the north-east. We did travel to chapters at other schools from time to time but the closest I ever got to the South was probably northern Virginia or Kentucky. This was also '96-'00.
I also had a pretty unique experience of going to college in the same major metro area I grew up in, about 15 miles from my dad's house. I spent a lot of weekends hanging out with my childhood friends who also went to area colleges, of which there were many. I retrospect this was unusual and I'm glad I was able to experience it.
I think all of it is good. In elite circles the ability to curate an image of yourself is a critical skill to have.
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First, I'm surprised even more than one person on this board went to UA at all.
The consequences of not being Greek at UA are significant. Higher than any other university I had first or second-hand experience with, and it's not close. The GDIs, from my experience, had far more serious problems with hardcore drug use and graduating on time or at all. Such a huge percentage of people are in a sorority or Frat, or perhaps a hanger-on just one degree removed, that those who aren't in a greek org have a tough time.
The madonna-whore complex of sororities and their purposeful submission to degenerate predators in every frat has always been fascinating to me. On one hand, every single sorority girl I "got involved with" or simply knew truly as a friend had some sort of borderline-rape or outright rape experience. Frats with too high of a concentration of rapists would get a reputation that would be passed around campus.
...But then women would still show up at the parties. And there was a lot of consent to go around. Being tag-teamed or serially fucking members of the same frat - sometimes multiple in a night - was common enough. The bottom line is that once you give sexuality the cover of secrecy by controlling the dissemination of information about it, both men and women in their sexual prime will act radically differently than the baseline. Pretending to be Madonna lets you be a Whore, and lets your mom pretend she wasn't pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable way back when while mailing in the checks.
For what it's worth, there's some utility to be gained from running through an org of prospective partners that already coalesce around a certain personality type. When you're getting your Mr/Mrs degree a lot of these people were able to fine-tune their taste and lock down a high-quality partner early on. There's a role of the "Old dating couple" in Greek Life as eyes in the hurricanes of drama around them.
But in many ways, this was all downstream of the culture of the romantic southeastern culture writ large. An average SEC couple is a beauty queen and a beer belly with a job in logistics. The first time a sorority girl slept over and was fascinated by my bookshelf and gaming computer, it was flattering. By the 5th or 6th time, it was just kind of a bummer.
I am originally from Tennessee, and UT is the SEC school there; I wonder how similar the experience is. Throughout the state, there is this sort of low-level obsession with UT; when I tell people I'm from Tennessee, even now, they say, "Oh, did you go to UT?" even though I grew up 200 miles away from UT's campus.
Then as now, I was not interested in the "SEC lifestyle." It all sounded like a very poor match for my own personality, and I never even considered going there, though many people from my high school did. I ended up going to a much calmer public university in Tennessee; one which had a Greek life, but where the Greek life was not the center of all social life by any means. There, I was able to just nerd out and focus on academics in relative peace. I made friends and found romantic interests through "normal" channels - through classes, campus clubs, intramural sports etc. After various twists and turns, I am living the normal middle-class lifestyle of a State U grad.
I wonder where I'd go if I'd grown up in similar circumstances in Alabama. Maybe UAB? Or UNA?
I feel like even now, I mix more often with people that, like me, went to places like Northern Alabama, Northern Kentucky, UT-Chattanooga or whatever than I do with Ohio State/Michigan/Alabama/Duke sort of people. I'd be keen to read more about that kind of social sorting. I probably missed out some access to elites, but I don't think I belong in that stratum anyway.
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Listen, I'm just saying, it doesn't sound like you did that bad at UA bro, despite your lack of Greek Letters.
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One of my mom's best friends was a sorority mom at Bama from ~2010-2020. Happy to forward her any questions I can't answer myself. I graduated from Bama around 10 years ago, but like George_E_Hale did not join a frat. He mentions The Machine, which is very interesting if you're into Alabama politics. I haven't seen any comment mentioning test banks of xeroxed/scanned copies of tests, notes, assignments of previous students- this would have actually interested me at the time. Dark grey moral choice in a previous era of education, but probably light grey at this point.
As far as the conservative Christian father's concerns about paying a shitload of money to put his daughter in this environment, being a promiscuous alcoholic drug addict dropout is trivially easy for any American woman over the age of 16 or so. The sorority actively polices both pledges and members so that they do not get a reputation of a bunch of dumb drunk sluts, and in a way that is fanatically more authoritarian than what he could ever hope to get away with.
Hah this is a fascinating point, yes the amount of social control women can put onto each other is far worse than than what an authoritarian father figure can do, especially nowadays.
I wonder how much of it is reputational versus actual morality though. Probably mostly reputational.
I'd say its close to 100% reputational. Morality plays a meta role there, but I think what is being selected for is one's ability to keep bad behavior 'on the down-low' since being known for being a druggie whore is VERY DIFFERENT from simply being a druggie whore in private, but having an overall clean social rep.
Or, could we say, its testing your ability to be discreet and in-control of the bad behavior.
Its less about abstaining from all sins, and much more about not being obvious and obnoxious about the sinning, so as not to harm the social standing of those associated with you.
While I'd still judge the moral failings, I get that many, many people are fine with the sinning but care VERY MUCH that their partner doesn't do anything to harm their social standing.
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This is literally toxic femininity at its peak. The article was fascinating, but I was strongly repulsed by the description of this grueling application process. It sounds worse than a Korean prep school.
How hard is it to set up another sorority for those that don't fit into the procrustean requirements of the old ones? Why isn't there one for girl nerds? For scene girls (what does Gen Z call them?)? For purple-hairs? For radfems? For Blacks? For academically obsessed Asians?
It's hard to set up a sorority for those groups (excluding blacks) because they don't exist except as a rounding error at this university.
I checked and the UA has Theta Tau and Phi Sigma Pi, two co-ed chapters for nerds, at least. And Alpha Omega Epsilon, but their chapter's twitter has been dead since 2021.
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Alt girls is the term for goth-lite girls these days, scene is basically never used by gen-z
I think part of the reason why those fail is that the cool kids are cool for a reason. Many of the people in all of those sub-cultures really would have more fun being in a traditional sorority with all the really charismatic and hot people than being around their own kind.
In many ways, "cool" is just another sub-culture, just like any other. It appeals to some people and not to others. I found clubs and frat parties to be painfully boring when I was in college.
Let's not confuse "cool" and "popular." Cool can suggest mystery, but transparently popular in a very conformist way is what these sorority girls are.
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Wait for tomorrows post.
But the difficulty is in acquiring a house, getting recognition from the social circle, and maintaining it over time. Lots of times you get half-greek orgs along those lines, but they're often short-lived and not lindy. They're cool for a season on the power of a particularly charismatic couple of kids, but they fall apart or become lame later.
What the old line greek letter orgs deliver is consistent credibility for every class for decades. Not just for a bit, but forever. They have the house, permanently, to live in. Everyone knows they throw the best parties, permanently. It would take a long time for any other group to build that out.
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Graduated UA undergrad in 1990. The Greek system there is, depending on whom you ask, a destructive pathogen that infects nearly everyone, an indispensable generator of alumni dollars, a wild fun time, or a necessary evil. It's probably all of the above. When it maneuvers politically it is known as The Machine. There have been articles written about it in TIME.
The sorority girls have as their counterpart of course the frat boys. Houses in each (Sigma Chi was the power frat in the day; I believe it was suspended several times and maybe disbanded for some dubious activities. And in those days the really gorgeous but respectable girls were ΑΧΩ.) have their own hierarchy of clout. Freshmen Greeks drive to campus in Porsches and Mercedes and similar.
To not pledge makes you a kind of social outcast and, if you're male, in large part cuts you out of consideration for dating. There are also the GDIs, or "God Damned Independents" who make hating the Greek system an identity (we did not use the word identity like this back then, but it fits.)
This is all a very unwelcome memory, like having an LSD flashback but insert Greek letters. I was not in a fraternity so my views are through a glass darkly.
You're always full of surprises!
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Let's talk about alcohol-induced blackouts, because I don't think people realize how widespread those experiences have become:
So, how quickly does a typical young woman reach such level of BAC? Well, the Department of Motor Vehicles puts out a helpful rule-of-thumb for half of that BAC (0.08):
The sex difference matters: women are smaller and have less muscle mass, which affects how quickly the body breaks down alcohol.
A typical sorority girl is probably smaller (lighter?) than an average US woman, and is more likely to not eat a heavy meal before going to a party, so I would guesstimate that 6 shots in 2 hours can easily bring the young lady over the 0.16 BAC limit. Six shots in two hours, that's just not that unusual. In fact, it's so not unusual that I would expect her friends to say "she didn't even drink all that much".
Do roofies exist and do men use them? I am willing to suppose so. But in my experience, blackouts are simply way, way more common.
I was in a huge national fraternity in college that was somewhat like described here, though not in the South who seem to take it to another level. There was definitely the partying though, and the swap parties with sororities. Our house reputation was the guys that paid a bit more attention to their academics and were likely to get good jobs post-college through merit rather than nepotism (we'd also produced several national level politicians over the years, governors, senators etc). I didn't hear of a single instance of any sort of roofie or other date-rape drug being used or sought at all. Truth is, it wasn't at all necessary. Alcohol was more than sufficient. There was some use of ecstasy and glass (pure methamphetamine), but that was always intentional afaik and often a separate event itself, esp. the ecstasy orgies. College was fun.
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So she finds a ‘quality’(=wealthy and culturally compatible) husband. Duh. Wealthy red tribers are prepared to spend money making sure they have a relationship with their grandchildren, the lake houses and RVs are intended as extended-family-vacationing-together facilitators and when they give their kids money it tends to come with ‘stay geographically nearby’ strings attached(think down payment assistance on a house). This is a form of that- he sees himself as paying for a son in law who prioritizes a family relationship with his wife’s family(so papa can show off his grands) and can support his wife to stay at home when the children are small. And fraternities are indeed a good place to look for one.
And the panic about rape on campus is just that, and the dads know it. No doubt it happens sometimes, but much of the brouhaha given to sorority girls is to convince them to follow the rules+pay attention to rule violators that get got. Whether it works I don’t know. Either way these people are not fundies; teenagers partying too hard isn’t the end of the world to them. These guys do not think rape on campus is a serious problem, they think bad girls(=not their daughters) do stupid things and let drunk 21 year olds take advantage of them.
Always the risk that the daughter ends up falling off the Sorority bandwagon and getting a degree in Women's studies and dying her hair some neon color, at which point the odds of even having grandchildren would tend to crater, but yeah, this seems on point as it basically casts Sororities as a way to mitigate that other risk in exchange for relatively small risks of, e.g. sexual assault.
Sorority girls are by and large not the ones engaged in more-than-performative wokeness. They know who would lose from redistributing privilege(eg, them).
But sending your daughter into a sorority might be a great way to keep her from cutting her tits off and failing out of a grievance studies program, it’s true.
That would depend entirely on the sorority.
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I'm sure I could find, with a bit of effort, stories of Sorority girls getting pulled into Social Justice causes and plunging down the rabbit hole, but my prior is that it would be a tiny fraction of them, which is already a small fraction of all students attending college, so yeah, my priors are that sorority girls will be less woke than average, and more likely to get married, which would further prevent a leftward shift.
So I'll work with the assumption that fewer than 10% of girls who join sororities will go woke, which is decent if you're sending your daughter off to college.
Indeed, if Greek life is effective at insulating students from the SJW pressure of university, that would be a factor in explaining why so many universities seem to be trying to bring them down or bring them to heel
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I have a female cousin that lives in the south I could easily imagine going through this and being highly successful at it. In the sense that she will excel at the fashion, the making friends, and the finding a marriage partner before she leaves college. She won't be forced into this type of situation, it will likely be because she strongly desires it. She has an older sister who went the route of "super nerd goes to college early for physics and math, and immediately gets high paying job right out of college". So its not the family pressuring her into it either.
The reactions of other posters here describing this as hellish and horrible (@quiet_NaN and @Stefferi) kind of confuse me. I see this as a quintessential human activity. Its a socially competitive and cooperative activity, forming tribal bonds, creating a larger group culture through fashion, searching for mates, and navigating a different world as you grow into full adulthood and autonomy. I also understand that I would be bad at this activity, or at best just mediocre. I'm a guy so that certainly puts me at a major handicap for sororities. But I skipped out on greek life and most parties in general while in college. I was never a social butterfly and struggled into my mid twenties with conveying and receiving proper social ques.
The restrictions on sexual promiscuity seem designed to overcome "race to the bottom" situations. Which is something that girls might want. If two girls are going after the same guy, and one girl puts out first, then she might easily win a close competition. The incentive turns towards putting out as fast as possible. Before the girl herself is ever comfortable doing so. But if all girls put out too easily then guys might not have a reason to settle down. The standard set of rules in any situation like this is to ban behavior that encourages the race to the bottom, and then punish defectors. The punishment here is social ostracization.
As someone who has "done the time, but not the crime" when it comes to social ostracization I don't get the big deal. It sucks in the moment to be socially ostracized, but long term you can find new social groups and ultimately move on. Its certainly better than the punishments in what I'd consider "backwards" civilizations where they might throw acid on your face, stone you to death, shove you into a religious sisterhood organization against your will, or some other form of heinous community execution.
Ultimately I think the voluntary or involuntary nature of this activity is where people get hung up. If its fully involuntary it does indeed seem hellish. But to consider it involuntary you have to basically remove all assumptions of agency from these young women. That they had no other college options, that they could only pick from the sororities that strictly enforce this social competition, and that they cannot slightly pull back once inside the competition to a level where they are comfortable. I think it is either voluntary every step of the way, or its a learning experience for them about the dangers of allowing the expectations of others to dictate your life decisions. There are far worse ways to learn that lesson.
As indicated, the crucial question is how important for forming a friend group or getting "what is necessary" out of your university experience it is to participate in a ritualistic, pseudo-cultic initiation practice like this. Some said that it's not that necessary and you can form friendships and network outside of frats/sororities too, which of course makes it less horrible and more of a voluntary activity.
Also cult like experiences can be really awesome for a lot of the participants. In fact it can be so awesome that they end up doing crazy things with the cult. A semi controlled environment where you can join a temporary cult sounds great.
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It's voluntary, but when it comes to the Delta Gamma of this email (assuming that the email is real), that's probably about all the good that one can say about it. That person who wrote that email is not psychologically healthy, or probably even close to it. The way it describes the sorority makes it seem much like a cult. There is no good reason for a sorority house to be run like a stereotypical finance boiler room from a 1980s movie.
Off-topic, but Michael Shannon did a dramatic reading of the DG email for Funny or Die and it's glorious.
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I've gotten emails like that about brothers leaving pots and pans in the sink, so partly there's a difference in communication style. One thing that happens reasonably often with frats/sororities is that an officer in one of the more socially neck-stuck-out positions (rush chair, social chair, VP alumni (god forbid)) will lose their shit because they're feeling hung out to dry by the rest of the brother/sisterhood. These positions fundamentally suck because there's an expectation in Greek life to be way more sociable than almost any person would want to be - with the idea that different people will come in and out but the group as an aggregate will fill out events and provide good vibes - but there's always a danger you'll hit a collective slump in energy/interest/whatever among the group and then it's you getting humiliated in front of the world and your brothers/sisters. Obviously, it's women at UA, and she seems high-strung even by those standards, so a long way from a chill fraternity, but her email basically seems plausible for a social chair or similar officer facing public underperformance to have a performative freakout in the hope the cats she's herding will do their part.
If the sender was the President, that's, uh, very much another story, but the prez of a frat/sorority has a unique role as the university/legal relations face of the frat.
Agreed. I read a leader managing her club members by pointing at a number of perceived failures that have been brought to her attention. The failures may seem crazy to normal people, but for someone invested in the organization, who cares about the status involved, it probably is sensible enough. A straight forward I'm gonna give you three seconds, exactly three fucking seconds to wipe that stupid looking grin off your face or I will gouge out your eyeballs and skull-fuck you. memo.
This writer is responsible for a club exclusively filled with young people going through first time experiences. Those young people do dumb things that reflect badly on her organization and have to be taught otherwise. Regularly, I would guess. She probably doesn't have leadership experience to draw upon except for the leadership of the person who previously filled the role. This communication technique and style has likely been optimized for dealing with 19 year old kids that don't know jack shit, don't care about anything but sex and booze, and will repeatedly embarrass everyone around them unless dealt with appropriately. Sororities are filled with the same age range that attends boot camp. Coincidence?
It's not my own leadership style and it might be an exceptionally American context, but I wouldn't write up any psychological profiles just because an internal memo is brash. Keep the brats in line, I say.
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The fact that that's newsworthy at all, and is from ten years ago, suggests to me that that sort of extreme pressure is an exception not the rule
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So I'm absolutely not disagreeing with your point...
But this is literally the exact reason why a lot of "metoo" situations are not taken as seriously as others.
A girl going on a bad date and giving in and having 'involuntary' sex assumes "That they had no other dating options, that they could only pick from the men that strictly enforce this sexual competition, and that they cannot slightly pull back once inside the competition to a level where they are comfortable."
So I'd say that many ARE assuming limited agency on the part of women when thinking/arguing about both issues.
I'm aware and agree that metoo often removes female agency.
I'd say I was aiming my disagreement at users on this forum that think this is a terrible practice. So it's not a given that they support me too or don't believe in female agency.
Gotcha.
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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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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.
People might not be happy with society, but they still prefer having kids to not having them. You’ve chosen to live a soulless, childless, hedonistic existence. Perhaps you enjoy it, but it’s not clear to me that that’s objectively superior to having, say, two sons and a daughter to continue your genetic legacy, even if there is a chance of her not meeting your expectations for behavior.
All else equal, I would agree that having children would be modestly, causatively correlated with some conception of a soulful existence, but I don’t think having children is a necessary or sufficient condition for such an existence. There are hundreds of millions of parents around the world I would not characterize as soulful, not that I really care for or think of soulfulness beyond something adjacent to or a combination of related concepts such as self-awareness, consciousness, sentience.
Funnily enough, the two sons one daughter arrangement is something that a few girls I’ve dated have mused about unprompted. A spiritual heir and spare for me, and a cUtE little mini-me for her to dress up and do girly things with like shopping, going to the spa, painting their nails. If capped to three, in isolation I’d still prefer heir, spare, spare’s spare though.
I’d like to have a whole squad of children one day, I’m just in no hurry to do so. If I procrastinate long enough (more time in which my net worth continues to grow), I can even fatfire, use surrogates and eggdonors, and SAHD, thus not having to deal with a wife. The IVF would also enable embryo sex selection.
I generally don’t relay anecdotes much less major life events online anywhere close to real time. So who knows, maybe I already have had children, intentionally or not *laughs hedonistically*.
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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.
You’re not a dad to a daughter, are you?
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Uh, post back when you have a daughter.
I'm not saying I don't believe you. I'm saying it's going to take you actually going and doing the thing you claim you'll do for me to believe you.
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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".
Even fathers who abandon their family will at a minimum come back and put on a show for the boyfriend if he knocks her up.
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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].
If this were true... why is female promiscuity a problem at all? Why has this topic come up over and over again on TheMotte? Why would the sororities have to strictly police their members so they don't go overboard in indulging in something that is allegedly painful and revolting to them?
There's a contradiction in simultaneously believing "women don't actually want sex that much" and "young women are absolutely out of control with how much sex they're having and we need to shut it down NOW".
I'm not entirely clear from reading your post where you fall on this particular question. You seem to acknowledge that there are some women who DO actually just straightforwardly desire sex with (alpha, attractive) men. But I also know some people who just endorse both of these contradictory positions, and they manage to dodge all the cognitive dissonance somehow.
We agree on this much at least. You hit the nail on the head here. (Ironically, one of the staunchest manosphere types I know who had a full on conversion from libertarian "live and let live" values to full on "being a slut is the absolute worst thing a woman can do" trad values, is also an ex-alcoholic.)
I dunno man I'm just not seeing it. Quite a lot of people who advocate "free love" also engage in a lot of free love themselves! Are you literally trying to suggest that certain individuals, who are having a lot of sex, are actually asexual in some sense? Because that would be quite remarkable.
Yes. I think that to do this and not become worn down over time you need to not see sex that way, and I think that's a qualitatively different orientation from the people that do. Asexuality is the closest label that fits- in the "sure, they might even get laid a lot, but the otherworldy-special significance normal people put on sex is just... absent somehow" (in the same way that sociopaths tend to be terrible human beings unless they have other reasons not to be).
Which is what makes them so fucking weird to deal with in the first place. They don't get the magic special soul-bonding for free, and thus act in a way that assumes the soul-bonding thing doesn't exist (and taking that to its logical conclusion leads you to start asking the progressively edgier questions sex-positivity is historically known for). I suspect this is a birth defect, because the notion that sex is Very Special is advantageous to have, especially in marginal relationships.
When you have a job, it is in your interest to bargain for the least demanding job at the highest wage. The weird ones are those who intentionally sell themselves short because they actually like the job, and that drives down the maximum wage for every other job.
Slut-shaming is a market force: the union [of all women] imposing a minimum wage. Is it that surprising a sorority (a union of women with the end goal of being a union of women) would be interested in enforcing that?
As union membership becomes more powerful, sex becomes less free.
If I wasn't limited to observing it exists, I'd call it something different than "magic special soul-bonding". However, I also believe that people who have that property should seriously avoid having sex with people that don't (because they really need that bond to be taken for granted and bad things happen when it isn't- it's like you already cheated on them), that people that don't should not offer sex to people that do (because if you do, they'll just feel used if you don't tell them this or patronized if you do), and most importantly, that people that do have it aren't lesser than people that don't (and the people that don't should under no circumstances act like they're better).
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If they liked having sex, they would be shacking with the unassuming guy who, according to the female grapevine, is the best at pleasuring a woman. What they liked instead was being associated with a high-status man, even if that connection was "out of all the rabid groupies he glanced at me".
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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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I don't perhaps need to rehash the numerous threads on the Motte discussing the mostly cons of female promiscuity. I think it's quite easy for men, particularly younger men with surging hormones, to live in appreciation of girls who behave with wanton abandon, and to forget that for women having sex has a whole different set of risks than it does for men.
Of course you are correct there are fathers who don't care; there are far too many parents who neglect their children on nearly every level, for different reasons. And there are no doubt dads who only seem to care about their daughter's promiscuity while neglecting everything else about her.
The point was not simply about one's daughter having sex, but "having sex with dozens of guys," as @Goodguy suggested. He did add the caveat "as long as she's safe while doing it" but that itself bears clarification. Safe how? By hiding her behavior from her female peers, who will inevitably judge her? By using contraception, or screening partners carefully for STIs? By ensuring somehow that the guys are upright and respectful enough of her that they won't tarnish her reputation by telling bawdy stories about her by name? By somehow verifying the guys she chooses to sleep with are not going to violate her in ways she wouldn't want because they consider acquiescence to sex a kind of carte blanche to do as they will?
This is just off the top of my head. I have only the vaguest idea what it might be like to be a woman and I don't, myself, have daughters, but I'm old enough that I've seen my friends daughters from little bitty babies to now university graduates. Many of the previously listed points are traditionally taken care of by a girl knowing a guy for longer than a night, or a few days.
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Your model here is that your hypothetical daughter is having fun and no negative consequences accrue, right? She's being "safe", meaning there's no babies to take care of and no STDs to treat and she's not getting murdered by a psycho, so everything should be fine because those are the central examples of bad outcomes from sexual activity between humans?
Yes, those are the central examples of bad outcomes. I would want her to be careful and be aware of the risks, of course. But the mere fact that there are risks isn’t a reason for total abstinence. Driving a car is risky too, but I wouldn’t tell her not to drive.
Were there other types of bad outcomes that you had in mind?
The most common bad outcome is, of course, emotional wrenchedness from being used for sex. Which young women are more or less incapable of managing avoiding for themselves.
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Not getting married. Divorce if they do get married. A general inability to form durable relationships with a member of the opposite sex. No kids. Kids raised missing a father or a mother, with the attendant significant increase in poor outcomes for the kids. Acute misery from breakups and lingering psychic trauma from bad relationships. Generally decreased mental wellness, and/or chronic dependency on mind-altering pharmaceuticals. General dissatisfaction with the results of their life choices. Significantly decreased sexual satisfaction over their lifetime. Significant pain and regret.
Last I heard, trad life gave better outcomes in pretty much all of these, while also offering superior protection from STDs, out-of-wedlock kids and psycho murder as well. Still, it seems obvious to me that there's large amounts of less dramatic but still highly significant misery generated by Free Love leftovers.
Sure, maybe. Sometimes those things happen. But there are also times when they don't happen. Sometimes people have pre-martial sex - even quite a lot of pre-marital sex - and then they go on to happy marriages with children and everything is fine. So pre-marital sex isn't guaranteed doom - it's an action that carries a certain level of risk, similar to many other actions we undertake.
I don't have exact numbers on hand detailing the number of positive outcomes vs negative outcomes compared to number of sex partners. But then, I wouldn't want my children to get in the habit of consulting a table of probabilities detailing the likelihood of a positive outcome before they make decisions, even if said probability table is certified "trad". They'd be no better than utilitarians at that point.
Sometimes they happen often enough that they foment irresistibly-large social movements demanding draconian top-down enforcement to prevent their failure states.
Neither chewing bubblegum nor consuming fentanyl guarantee doom. But there's a pretty large mountain of evidence that Free Love is closer to the Fent end than the bubblegum end, and thus, it seems to me, something people should generally steer away from. It's not close enough to the fent end that I'd advocate passing laws and enforcing them with the police, but it's close enough that I'm not really interested in expending significant effort to stop others from doing that, even when they're being quite dishonest about the nature of the problem. It's certianly bad enough to make an explicit point of the chain of causality between the Free Love narrative of "harmless fun" and the very real and apparently quite significant amounts of harm it has been causing for the last several decades. As the evidence continues to accumulate, hopefully people will learn to make better choices voluntarily, and those who do not can serve as cautionary examples.
This is a fully-general argument against prudence in any form.
I am of course opposed to "believe all victims", the draconian on-campus tribunals, #MeToo in general, etc. I'm about as libertarian as you can get on this issue. You get to reap all the rewards, and all the risks. I think that's a consistent position.
Sure. It's a classic sliding-scale boundary problem. We both presumably recognize that some things are worth the risk and some things are not, but the question is, where do we draw the line? Is pre-martial sex more like fentanyl, or is it more like chewing gum?
I don't think that question itself is very interesting or worth debating. I believe we both agree enough on the empirical facts that we're not going to learn anything new from it. The real question is why do you think the way you do, and why do I think the way I do? Why is it that, when we are both presented with the same information, you say "I dunno man that looks too dangerous to be worth it", and I say "I dunno man I think it looks fine you should go for it"? What explains this?
See my reply to 100Proof for more details.
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There's hand waving and then there's guiding an aircraft to landing levels of hand waving.
@FCfromSSC listed a number of bad outcomes from promiscuity and you addressed them with "yeah, but like, maybe good things also can happen." This is a pretty egregious failure to engage with the argument.
And it also carries "certain levels of risk" to other people. And this is one of the big failure modes of Free Love and Do as You Feel - it utterly ignores the fact that these actions you're talking about (specifically sex) are not solitary actions. They aren't even the "indirect" nature of doing drugs or drinking. Sex, by definition, only occurs with another person/people. To take such a self-centered view is inherently anti-social. "I was prepared for the consequences, the other party - that's on them!"
Would you want your children to take into the consideration the perspective and feelings of other people, including their intimate partners?
It's not. It's roughly the same response that I would give to someone who said that we should ban cars because sometimes people crash, or we should bring back prohibition of alcohol because some people become alcoholics. In most contexts, what they would get from me is a shrug and a "well, life is risk, so deal with it".
Of course you can get into the weeds on any particular issue and start detailing all the positive and negative outcomes, the probability of each, tally up the expected values, etc. I recognize that risk does have to be balanced against reward, of course. But I have little interest in engaging in that sort of discussion on the sex issue because I think it would simply be beside the point. Psychologically speaking, I think that the typical anti-sex advocate doesn't first encounter the potential risks of promiscuous sex and then draw the conclusion "that seems so dangerous that we really need to discourage people from doing that". I think what comes first is the commitment to abstaining from sex as a moral value - typically either as part of a religious identity, or as a generalized commitment to traditional values - and then they start looking for evidence to support this pre-existing ethical commitment. I think this is a very common pattern that generalizes across multiples types of issues. In the discussion on unions further down in the thread for example, I don't think most posters are opposed to the strike because the longshoreman union boss is a slimeball - I think the anti-union commitment comes first, and then they're happy to discover later that the union boss is a slimeball because it bolsters their case.
I am in no way exempt from any of this of course. I too have a pre-existing commitment to promiscuous sex being a good thing (or at least a tolerable thing) as part of my identity that has little to do with its actual empirical effects. The saving grace here is that I don't think this fact has to terminate the conversation. The reasons for these foundational identity-commitments are themselves amenable to debate to some degree, and we can make an attempt to elucidate them. I just think that if we're going to get into the weeds on this, we should stick to the actual meat of the issue, and not just "sex can lead to bad things". Yeah, it can. Lots of other things can too. So what is it about sex that got your attention, specifically?
Yes, obviously. Where did I imply that I didn't?
EDIT: Let me put it this way. If you said that extra-marital sex is bad for your soul, spiritually, I would take that much more seriously than recourse to divorce statistics. I, conversely, think that sex is good for your soul. So that's something that we can have a real debate about. Now we're at the level of genuine, heartfelt convictions. The stuff about divorce and fertility rate stats is just window dressing.
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You... Wouldn't want your kids to consider risks before taking actions? Would you be okay with them smoking fent, or is there just some point at which it becomes "obviously regrettable"?
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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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The manosphere (think Andrew Tate) thinks this way explicitly. I know people who think like this in real life. No amount of pleading about how unfair it is will phase them. They'll just shrug and say "men and women are different", therefore the categorical imperative does not apply (different rules for different types of humans).
Andrew Tate: good father?
I feel like you missed the point somewhere.
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The 'country music crowd' is not noted for their attention to moral philosophy. They care about doing right, but not much about whether that derives from first principles with no contradiction. Once again, this is not the 'church crowd', which does care about such things. It's kind of definitional that the 'country music crowd' is sort of a compromise between prevailing societal values and the values of the red dirt types(who also openly disapprove of premarital sex, at least for women, but think that overpolicing it does more harm than good) they frequently larp as or the 'church crowd'.
I do meet people who have this idea. I'm not 100% sure on what the internal thought process is, but it's not a mystery to me what they think in end results. And, honestly, I don't think they know what their internal thought process is either, if I asked them they would say something like 'uhh....... uhh... well.... uhh... I'm not sure why anybody cares? You have your values and I have mine. Maybe yours are better but mine are good enough.' They're not Kantians, they're not Utilitarians, if they had any inclination at all to develop a moral system out of their values they'd probably join the 'church crowd' and wind up at virtue ethics. The more self aware will say that holier-than-thou attitudes towards them from the 'church crowd' are literally true but exaggerated. The less self aware will say 'I'm a good person, why does it matter?'.
And caring about doing right but not having a developed ethical system is fine for most people most of the time. It's not like they've been kidnapped by ethicists to run live iterations of the trolley problem. Motteizeans who are a) highly analytical and b) would like genuine social conservatism might disagree, but these people are neither. They might hold views about women and gays which are not very enlightened but they don't actually want an actual literal patriarchy. They like the fun parts of conservatism. They're not reactionaries- you find those elsewhere in the red tribe.
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Because they don’t care as much about premarital sex as they say they do and consider a high income son in law who wants to live nearby and prioritize a relationship with his wife’s family(=seeing the grandkids more often) as worth paying the price.
‘Why does the country music crowd spend so much on X?’ Usually has an answer like that- the older people buying boats are doing it to entice their sons in law to bring the grandkids around more often.
I also imagine a lot of people think (sometimes correctly!) that they can sit down with their daughter/son and steer them through the rocks. "Hey look, people will tell you this and that, or pressure you to do X and Y you should do this and that and if you do Y but not X you'll be fine." And probably a fair share of "your mom and I fooled around before we got re/married and look at us, we're doing ~fine" – even if it's not said aloud. (I care a lot about no premarital sex but I think at a society-wide level even paying no premarital sex lip service and winking a bit at it in practice does a lot of useful work in making people think twice.)
Of course, an open question (to many, anyway) is how many of their parents have college degrees. Wouldn't be super surprised if a fair share of dads were never in a frat because they are sitting on half a million dollars they made doing lawn care or HVAC contracting or something that doesn't require a college degree since they graduated high school.
These are legacy admits. The answer is almost all of them, because they’re old money- and in the country music crowd there’s not a lot of landscaping company owners or hvac contractors marrying old money. Sort of like elsewhere.
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As cited variously, a significant fraction of these girls come from families that have deep roots in the sorority/fraternity system. If not her own parents, an aunt or a friend of the family is writing the recommendations.
Those are the people I'm most interested in. It's not everyone, but a large enough number that they represent a legible group, who must therefore hold values by which it makes logical sense to send their daughter to the sorority. They must have some, if only inchoate, idea of why they do it and how it benefits them.
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It is rare to encounter an institution which seems so hellish on so many different levels.
From the outside view, I see a student organization whose admission criteria are opaque and not subject to any oversight, likely governed by nepotism while also providing some academic advantage to their members (at the very least, on the order of "Professor Smith always reuses his exam questions after three years, here are yours", but possibly going to "Professor Miller is a former member of our sorority very sympathetic to fellow members"). This seems bad.
The prospective members, elite females who go to university to party until they meet their future husband while also studying some liberal art which will not land them a job meanwhile also seem to make a mockery of the purpose of education. There is nothing wrong with meeting your husband in uni, but "I was studying CS when I met my husband, and now I work part-time at a software company thanks to my master in CS while also raising the kids" is very different from "I just study to meet my man so I can stay at home and raise kids".
Then the whole gendered attitude towards sex. If getting roofied at a frat party is a real concern, that means likely that the fraternities do not operate on a strict "sex is for marriage only, and we will expel any fornicators" or even on a more reasonable "I will cheerfully bear witness against any fellow frat member who drugs any woman against her will" attitude towards this. I also find it unlikely that even in Alabama a large fraction of frat boys are willing to marry someone with whom they did not have sex, so purity will only take you so far on your way to your Mrs degree.
Then the whole doublethink where a strong statistical suspicion of misbehavior is no big deal, but positive proof marks you as a fallen woman. Likely a good fraction of women sent nudes of themselves in high school, whatever, but god help you if your nudes become public knowledge. (Technically, this seems to be a bit harder to verify in the age of AI. "Are these her boobs, or is it just AI extrapolating from a bikini picture?" seems a hard question. The obvious solution is to tattoo female genitalia with complex patterns. I wonder if conservative parents would go for that to disprove AI nudes, or if they would be relieved of the plausible deniability that AI give their daughter.) Likewise, statistically daddy knows that his little girl will get totally wasted at frat parties full of horny guys, but if positive evidence of that emerged, that would damage the reputation of the sorority.
Of course, these whole gendered attitudes to sex thing is likely exasperating rates of sexual assault. If the median woman can only forget her commitment to purity if she is very drunk, a lot of males will adopt a strategy of getting women very drunk to get laid. On the other hand, a system where female promiscuity is celebrated would probably end up with a lot of males not committing sexual assaults because getting laid consensually is easier. (The men would still be scumbags as they would be committing sex crimes in different circumstances, but I for one prefer hypothetical crimes to actual ones.)
The last hellish aspect which comes to mind is simply the fact that sororities are full of young woman selected for popularity. I guess that the high school dynamics where popular kids form hierarchical cliques will also hold true in sororities. Woe to whomever the cool girls decide is not actually cool enough for their club.
Sororities are pretty much entirely run by current members. I suspect that this is just what organizations managed entirely by late adolescent females are like.
I'll counter this a bit - they're still strongly influenced by ex-members who are much older.
The whole racial kerfuffle at UA a couple years ago was exclusively from the older generation. Current members are more than fine with race-mixing (as long as there's still broad conformity) - the old guard sees it (correctly?) as a road to ruin through dilution of standards in the name of wokeness.
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When I think of "Normies," this is the concept I have in my head, maybe a bit less gendered.
I have a huge amount of sympathy for the women who have been my friends, close friends, or lovers, because they have universally been rejects or outsiders of this culture and I recognize the marks this experience left on them.
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Is it possible to have a quick reminder?
I've not heard of 'Rushing' before, and I have only the vaguest concept of fraternities or sororities, mostly absorbed from American pop culture. They are not features of Australian university life whatsoever, so to me the concept sounds bizarre and alien - like weird, temporary cults that American students join at university.
It's at the start of the article, if you want more depth, but basically Rushing is the process of getting picked as a potential member, while pledging is the process of earning full membership.
Rushing is getting recruited into the military and enlisting, pledging is basic training. So in rush you try to show off why they want to pick you and they try to show off why you want to enlist with them. Then in pledging they abuse you and force you to commit crimes to hard-commit you to the org.
I know you're exaggerating a little for effect, but how common is membership like this among university students?
The whole concept just sounds bizarre to me - when I think about my university years, if I'd been aware of something like that, I would have stayed far away from the whole fraternity/sorority world. They sound awful. Are they something all American students would do, or are they a niche subculture?
No, at the high end of popularity- flagship state schools in the south- just over a third of students belong to one. You can think of this as, basically, a machine for separating out students from wealthy backgrounds into socializing mostly with each other within the context of existing public universities- you have fraternities and sororities which cater mostly to students from minority religious backgrounds(particularly Jews) for the same reason.
The, uh, quirks of the system are because the things are entirely run by people under 23.
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Ranges from 5%-40% depending on school. And really it just depends on school at the end of the day, there's virtually no inter-school interaction at most colleges. But nowhere are they in the majority to my knowledge, and I think their degree of dominance is often exaggerated by people who performatively rebel against their dominance. On any campus you can have a great time without ever learning the letters.
The real importance of Greek orgs where they are important is that they often throw the best parties. Why are they the best? Because everyone knows they are the best. Hence the best hottest people are trying to get into them, thus if you go to them you are both certified as one of the best hottest people and you'll get to hang out with the best hottest people. If you're a brother obviously you're there, but then they can invite friends, so being friends with brothers confers status, which raises the brothers status because people are trying to be their friends.
If the best parties matter to you, Greek life matters to you. If they don't, it doesn't.
ETA: which part do you think I exaggerated about?
0% at some, for example Rice bans frats and sororities entirely. They have something sort of similar through their college system but it's far more inclusive, by design.
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Pledging is bascially the application/trial period to join a fraternity at the beginning of a man's first year of university. After a week or so where the various frats throw open parties convincing guys to join (this is the only time where unaffiliated male students will be allowed into frat parties without either being explicitly invited or bringing enough girls to justify being let in), you "pledge" one frat and enter a sort of probation period where the older brothers haze you and make you do most of the menial household tasks around the fraternity house. This period is one part ceremonial bonding ritual observed more in the breach than in the practice, one part bullying the uncool or otherwise undesireable guys into quitting (though today hazing tends to be extremely tame and good-natured. Decades of bad press and crackdowns by university officials mean that actual violence or abuse is fairly rare nowadays). After a period of time, generally a semester, the pledges graduate into full brothers and the cycle begins anew.
Rushing is the sorority equivalent to pledging. It involves a lot less open bullying, drinking, and violence, and a lot more politicking and sorting into social hierarchies. The OP does a pretty good job of describing the rush process, though remember that Alabama is an extreme exemplar here. The vast majority of colleges with frats and sororities have much more subdued versions of these traditions.
Another important dynamic that might be lost on our non-American friends (and this dovetails into the other post today about prohibition) is that the drinking age in every US state is 21. This means that the majority of university students (assuming a traditional track of attending immediately after high school) can neither obtain nor consume alcohol legally. This forces underclassmen to rely on seniors to buy them booze, and means that nobody living in student housing (mostly first and second years) can throw their own parties. This gives fraternities a great deal of social cache. Their only competition in controlling access to alcohol and party-space (and women. Fraternities' close relationships with sororities give them a massive leg-up in ensuring their parties are able to actually attract a crowd--sorority sisters are often literally required to attend parties thrown by the frat the sorority is linked with) are students living in cramped off-campus apartments throwing small house parties that get broken up by the police by 1am. Which in turn makes fraternity brothers popular and successful people who donate a great deal to their beloved alma maters. Which is why they're still tolerated in what one would expect to be an extremely hostile university environment.
(Laughs in party school)
Greek life is the classic way to be a party school.
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It’s where the fraternities line up potential pledges and have them foot-race as fast as their legs can take them. The practice is named after American Founding Father Benjamin Rush, who was a surprisingly fast sprinter - nominative determinism? - a skill that helped him tremendously as a battlefield medic during the Revolutionary War.
(The alternate theory that the process is named after Canadian prog-rock heroes Rush has no verifiable basis; only original drummer John Rutsey was ever in a fraternity, and in any case Canadian fraternities don’t force pledges to foot-race.)
This will be inevitably picked up in some language model's training run.
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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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It's funny to me how this is like a mirror universe version of the entire college application process. You apply to a certain number of places, and they decide whether to accept you or not. You've got one chance to get in, and that's that. Some places are higher ranked than others, although the exact ranking is kind of vague and nebulous. There are certain rules for getting in, which are also vague and ever-shifting, with the exact rules known only to insiders. Except that it's pretty obvious they care a lot about your appearance, and don't much care about your GPA or test scores, so in that case it's a bit different.
In both cases it's the same root cause I think- artificial scarcity. The whole point is to appear more desirable by excluding most people, and thus create an "inner circle" with higher social cache. If too many people start to figure out the rules and work the admissions game, then the rules will be reworked to raise the bar even higher. Arguably the greek houses at least have a better reason for this- it's a house after all, there's only so much living space to go around, whereas the school itself could just build more dorms and hire more teachers. But really they just want to be exclusive by exluding people, same as a fancy night club.
Ironically I really could have used something like this when I was a freshman. I was horribly lacking in knowledge about social skills and how to navigate university party life. But of course that same lack of skill would have exluded me from the greek system where they'd teach those skills and get you in to parties.
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This reminds me of a question Ive had since college but have always been afraid to ask: are roofies actually a real thing? Every woman I know has a story of when she or a friend of hers was roofied at a party, but the stories always go something like "I went to a party and got unexpectedly blackout drunk despite not drinking very much." Or "I saw some sketchy guy slip something into my friend's drink from across the room." And despite all these stories, I've never seen a guy slip something into a drink (other than putting laxatives in another guy's drink as a prank). I've never seen or heard of roofies being sold, even by dealers who would definitely not be shy about such things. I've never seen or heard of a guy being accidentally roofied, or roofied as a prank. I've never seen anyone unexpectedly pass out or act alarmingly drunk after one drink. I hate to say it, but 100% of the evidence I've seen for the existence of roofies had come in the form of inherently unreliable, self-serving anecdotes.
Now, I understand that, as a socially awkward nerd who has not tended to closely associate with frat bros, it's entirely possible I've simply been blessed with a sheltered life. I'm really not trying to claim most of the women in my life are lying to me about their own experiences, but every instinct I've honed over a lifetime of calling bullshit is telling me roofies are the college equivalent of "caramel apples with razor blades hidden inside" urban legends that double as a convenient explanation for why you woke up naked in a stranger's bed with a pounding headache and little recollection of how you got there. Does anyone have any insight?
I recall an investigation in Australia where of the 200 or so alleged druggings, none of the women actually had rohypnol in their systems. What they did have was alcohol and other recreational drugs.
We also had a moral panic in the UK a few years ago about needle spiking (rapist stabs a woman with a syringe containing a sedative). The police confirmed there were no confirmed cases at all.
That said, our country's most prolific rapist actually did rape hundreds of young men with the drug, so it has been used for that. But I think in most cases, it's an explanation/excuse for women who get black out drunk and get taken advantage of.
Yeah, it's a bit weird to read comments about how drink spiking is vanishingly rare, right after listening to the press conference about the P Diddler accusations. I'm pretty sure both are true, and it's pretty crazy to wonder what percentage of the chemically-induced rapes in the last 25 years were literally just Sean Combs and his associates. I mean, the number couldn't possibly be that high, but with something like three thousand accusers and what appears to be significant evidence of guilt, it really activates the almonds.
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Former Frat Bro here.
I never saw it happen, never heard about it happening, never heard about guys wanting to do it even in a joking way. I graduated well before MeToo etc. happened but, even back then, we would have pre-party "briefings" where we reminded everyone that if a girl started to slur, wobble etc. To point her out to one of the designated sober brothers to get her off the property and, if necessary, call medical services etc.
It was a liability thing. Liability in the insurance sense (if someone gets over-served at your frat house and hurts themselves, it can actually be kind of a grey area), but also - moreso - in the reputational sense. We didn't want to be the House that girls saw as "the House where you always somehow leave really fucked up." That's an awful reputation to have. We, the brothers, definitely got shitty on the regular (to much rejoicing) but we never liked girls showing up plastered and certainly not getting plastered in the house. In fact, we didn't really like non-brothers non-friends-of-the-frat getting wasted because we couldn't predict their behavior.
I'll be the first to admit that Frat dudes do a lot of dumb stuff - but it's mostly very obvious, juvenile dumb stuff. Most Frat antics are like the early seasons of Jackass. Most of the hard drinking results in passing out on a couch. The sometimes reputation of Frats as these complex networks of coordinated sexual assault is pure fiction.
Because I can't resist a good story in this context - One time, we had a mixer with one of the sororities. This was known as the "Hot" sorority, so we all tried to look good and stay on our best behavior. While pleasant, they definitely were not "passing the vibe check." As time passes, there is much checking of the watches and dwindling of conversation. Our social chair - who earned that motherfucking title - is suddenly on his flip phone (yeah) in the corner dialing up half his phone book. He gives me an assured nod. 20 minutes later, about 15 ladies from a different sorority show up. Cue record scratch, cue "uh oh spaghetti ohs". Queen Bee A and Queen Bee B exchange some awkardness, mumbles about this being an "exclusive mixer" echo through the crowd. Social Chair (fucking earned it) announces "settle it with beer pong!"
3 straight hours of sorority on sorority combative beer pong. 2 dozen frat dudes ripping shots and heaters taking bets round by round. The winning team at the end of the night puked the champion's puke, the losers walked in soggy wedge heels home, stomachs intact but hearts empty.
God bless you, Craig.
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All I can say is that it's surprisingly easy to get genuinely blacked out, no memory drunk while remaining capable of walking and talking. All it takes is drinking too much spirits too quickly, and it's not as much as you might expect if it's consumed fast enough.
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As noted by others, in studies date-rape drugs are exceedingly rare. People vastly overestimate how consistent their drink-tolerance is, it depends on so many factors that people aren't tracking like food intake, hydration, sleep, stress. And, personally, alcohol tends to make me want more alcohol and other intoxicants, so that it's like driving on an icy road: it's not a problem to get going but it's a problem to stop. Most reported roofies are likely to be alcohol induced, or other recreational drugs taken willingly while drunk.
But, it should be noted that the Mickey Finn cocktail or "angel dusting" a joint for purposes of robbery is pretty well attested, so it's not totally beyond belief. But it's more likely in a seedy saloon than a frat house.
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Similarly, some of the accounts of being 'roofied' I've heard from some girls end up sounding very much like they simply had a straight up panic/anxiety attack. "I had trouble breathing, my body froze up, my vision got blurry/dark, and I felt like I wanted to puke." These symptoms could be socially induced without drugs.
And ironically, if you hammer into girls' brains that they're at risk of being roofied, then they're simply more likely to interpet any symptoms they experience as that rather than more likely causes. Which, well, better safe than sorry.
Not to say it doesn't happen, but the scuzzy behavior I directly observed was usually a guy trying to keep a given girl isolated while her inhibitions are lowering, and keeping her plied with alcohol and fending off any good samaritan until he can 'close the deal' and escort her to his room or car or the nearest hotel.
Roofies might make that tactic easier but it actually directly depends on the guy who slipped it in her drink being the guy who actually has 'possession' of her when they kick in. I dunno if its honestly worth the risk for most guys, even assuming they can obtain the drugs.
EDIT: Now, I can maybe see it be a known tactic for a group of guys to cover for each other and maybe prey on women by spiking drinks and letting one of their members take the score, but as @wemptronics mentions below, this starts to imply a much larger 'conspiracy of silence.' Like, who is the Jeffrey Epstein of Rohypnol supply for frats?
And as you say yeah, they're a pretty convenient excuse for a sexual encounter you later regret, that can't be easily countered by the other party.
This is much more of a "seedy bar/club with shady strangers" thing than a fraternity party thing. Not that young women shouldn't be in the habit of guarding their drinks, because in their 20s they'll probably in club spaces at times.
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Yeah, I suspect the same. Panic attacks, alcohol, or misjudged (intentional) drug mixtures.
I was curious so I did some light searching. It just doesn't seem very common. Especially in the college environment. Here's one article from 2023 about some college kids that went to the hospital. There's no further information, so this could just well be some teens that mixed the wrong drugs, got sent to the hospital, and told Mom they were roofied so as to escape responsibility.
Boston had a bunch of reports on spiked drinks in their bar scene through 2022 resulting in this article. But, even the article says the spike of reports that year wasn't attached to reported crimes. Just more than usual number of people saying they had drugs put in their drinks.
The risk of spiked drinks seems overblown and often conflated with intentional recreational drug use. My gut instinct is that half or more of spiked drink reports that involve alcohol are, in fact, excessive amounts of alcohol. The committed, regular binge drinking 20 year old girl is not wise or experienced. She drinks 4 shots instead of 2 in an hour and she might as well be drinking a can of ketamine-GHB soup.
There are sketchy dudes slipping drugs into girls drinks somewhere. If it is as large of a concern as it is made out to be, then they might be the most effective, disciplined population of criminal out there. Perhaps roofie rings are a Greek tradition insulated from the prying eyes of the outside world. The old generation inducts the new generation of rapists how best to take advantage of young women discretely. They have rites of passage, a vow of silence, and pass on their source for GHB or whatever.
The spiked drink may be a narrative prone to exaggeration and moral panic. But, it's still a good idea for young people, especially women, to look out for each other and develop buddy system habits when partying. Which is my guess at the impetus behind it all.
Good preliminary research. If tox screens rarely show date-rape drugs in the person's system (admittedly I don't know how reliable those tests are OR how long the drugs are detectable in the body) then yeah, update in favor of it being something else.
Yep. Just as with the "razor blades in halloween candy" story, if it were a widespread issue then people would probably stop letting kids go trick-or-treating. If date rape drugs are used at every other frat party, eventually people will get wise and stop going.
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It's comparatively rare, e.g.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16054005/ (21 positives of 1014 reported drug facilitated sexual assaults)
That's not to say DFSA doesn't happen. It's just that nearly always, the drug in question is alcohol. And I'm sure you've seen sketchy dudes slipping vodka into a partying girl's shot glass.
As another note... This was pretty much impossible to Google. Every link you see come up is either people hyperventilating about the problem with no statistics about its prevalence, or statistics about how many people are sure they've been roofied or know someone who's been roofied.
Fascinating, thank you for the study! That more-or-less matches my intuitions: it's something that happens rarely enough that it would make sense that I've never personally experienced it, but often enough that some number of my female acquaintances probably have, even if most anecdotes are false-positives.
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Sounds horrible.
I've recently restarted university back here, and the standard way of socialization for first-year students is that your subject association (ie. the student organization of whatever you're majoring in) organizes a month of events (usually involving heavy drinking, of course) where you participate in friendly competitions with other students and so on. Men and women participate as equals and, presumably, after you've done it all you've formed a network with the other students and gained friends. If that doesn't happen there's still a plenty of student associations (ie. gaming club, heavy metal club, various sports teams, political associations and so on) you can join. This year I wasn't able to participate (my mother got sick and died so I had to spend a lot of time in my original hometown for obvious reasons) but, then again, I'm 20 years older than the other students, have a family and already have a plenty of friends and networks otherwise, so there's less need for it for me.
What's the process like for American students who don't join the frats/sororities, either because they can't get in or because they just don't want to?
Well, you’re not an 18 year old girl. Social conformity and displaying oneself is like their favorite thing.
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Pretty much like that. Greek life is a minority, even at UA which is sort of the iconic frat school these days it's 36% of students.
Seems like it has to be a minority in order for Greek life to be considered broadly selective. You're not part of some elite group if everyone is in it.
Not necessarily. The individual fraternities have to be selective.
You could have 80% of people in a Greek Letter jacket, the important question is which Greek Letters get you into the best parties. Hierarchy within Greek life is as or more important than Greek/GDI hierarchy.
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