#sororities

Madeline Peltz at Number Two Pencil:

Last year, I went down the #RushTok rabbit hole, the social media phenomenon documenting the sorority rush process when veteran sisters and hopeful freshmen network during a series of high stakes events to determine who’s in and who’s out of the house. Every late summer, collegiate newcomers take to the internet to post their #OOTDs from pref night or to share short videos of themselves hugging their new sisters when they get accepted on bid day. In my reality I was anxiously waiting to hear back from publishers about whether anyone wanted to buy my book proposal, but my digital self was totally preoccupied with who would get into Alpha Phi at Arizona State University, a sorority that as of this writing has a whopping 150,000 followers on Instagram, a statistic I am deeply disturbed by and partially responsible for.2 One afternoon I was showing a friend the Arizona girly pops in my phone. “I was never like this,” I said hopefully. “We didn’t have fraternities and sororities.” She paused, looking at me like I was insane. “I know.” A big part of modern sorority rush, a topic that — again — I have no first-hand experience with, is advertising your house on social media. This commonly takes the form of short clips featuring a few girls performing attractive and thrashing choreography in front of a crowd of a hundred or more girls bopping in the background. These videos usually have fun themes, like sleepover, football, airplane, jeans, candy, heaven, and so on. [...]

I wasn’t paying attention this year until MAGA started breathlessly circulating videos of dancing sorority sisters.

MAGA Resource, which is apparently an outpost of the conspiracy site Western Journal, has been posting these dance videos nonstop for days. “Woke and DEI are officially dead,” Mr. Resource declared over a video of collegiates shaking pom poms in the good old red, white, and blue. The videos featured by MAGA accounts generally involve young women dressed up in Americana flair. It kind of seems like there’s an uptick in the incidence of nationalist milieus in sorority recruitment this year, which would make sense given … everything, but hard to say for sure. “I will keep posting these awesome videos every day as long as they keep making them,” the account promised. “They just get better and better. God bless America!” Another account, The Patriot Oasis, tweeted out a video of young women at the University of Oklahoma dancing to Miley Cyrus’s “Hoedown Throwdown” in cowboy boots and red checkered gingham. “BREAKING -Sorority at the University of Oklahoma wearing “Good Genes” is going VIRAL showcasing pure American beauty. Liberals are OUTRAGED online.” This is a reference to a controversy over some advertisement for jeans featuring Sydney Sweeney that I decided to skip paying attention to.

[...] There is historical precedent in the right-wing media for this unbridled horniness. Back in the day, Sean Hannity of Fox News used to host a spring break special every year, running b-roll of young co-eds in their bathing suits and wagging his finger over their love of sand, sun, and beer bongs. [...]

Great to see that we’re still living in the “Girls Gone Wild” era of Republican politics.

So much of MAGA right now breaks down to a negotiation over who qualifies as a “good girl” and who is bad. A quick rundown on

Good girls:

The videos being circulated by MAGA accounts are overwhelmingly from southern states with extreme abortion bans. Good girls don’t get abortions, and they don’t demand the option.

Good girls blend in with the other good girls. They wear matching outfits because all girls are the same. They only gather in numbers to remind you how pretty they are and that their collective power is innocent fun, not a political threat.

Good girls are, as Turning Point USA’s Alex Clark puts it, “Thin, fertile, and conservative.” They are white and feminine.

But be careful, because these traits make you one of the

Bad girls:

First and foremost, any indication that a girl may be unruly or uppity in her physical appearance gets you labeled right away. No fat people, no queer people, no one who offends the strict beauty standards of patriarchal white supremacy.

Girls who argue with Charlie Kirk when he shows up to their campus for open-air debates are the quintessential bad girls of higher education. When young women speak up for themselves, their right to an education, to the vote, to an abortion, to freedom from sexual harassment, or anything else, they are cast out.

Being a liberal, which makes you a leftist, which makes you a communist, which makes you a justifiable target for state violence.

The women in these videos did not ask for this particular strain of bullshit. There is no evidence that a majority of them voted for Trump, even if they are wearing denim short shorts. College-educated young women overwhelmingly favored Harris and hold liberal social views. Regardless, MAGA has their Looney-Tune heart eyes popping out, screaming awooga and barking like a dog for the glory of the nation.

This season’s sorority rush videos have been amplified by MAGA influencers, all in a bid to scream “liberals are triggered”… except that many liberals don’t give a hoot about it either way.

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