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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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Why is some Alabama dad paying thousands of dollars to a consultant to help his daughter get assaulted at a frat party?

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.

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