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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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