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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).
If you're dead, what use is the species to you? Sex to straight [men] is not only a scarce resource, but is fundamentally a self-enriching endeavor ('selfish' is not a good word for it; this is a neutral to positive thing, not malicious).
Again, women seeking sex as self-enriching is a malfunction (where the self-enrichment they're supposed to get is the resources and exclusive supply agreement on the man), because sex damages their ability to do that according to straight men (who have to be forced to pay that as a cost- since if they're straight, those things are contrary to their biological interest).
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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.
This entire part of my comment (which you failed to address):
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!"
I have a genuine, heartfelt conviction that divorce is bad disproportionately to younger children.
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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.
I was providing an example of someone with the following view:
That's all.
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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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