For most of us, it’s the hazy last hurrah for summer. For the French, it’s a time to skive off work. But if you’re a young woman at the University of Alabama, August is the most important month of your life. That’s when the college’s sorority girls congregate on pristine lawns to leap and cartwheel in matching outfits to herald the beginning of “Bama Rush”, the recruitment drive for the new academic year. One such chapter is Kappa Alpha Theta, which this year chose a Western theme — jeans, denim waistcoats, cowboy hats — set to Miley Cyrus’s Hoedown Throwdown. Their TikTok dance videos are intended to impress potential recruits and rival chapters — and be a bit of fun — but they’ve broken containment in recent years, ending up as delectable morsels of soft porn for basement-dwelling fans of leggy college girls.
An X account called The Patriot Oasis, which specialises in viral culture-war ragebait clips, salivated: “Sydney Sweeney has opened the door for Woman across America to celebrate Pure American Beauty.” Of course, the post was referring to the storm in a teacup over Sweeney’s cornball American Eagle jeans ad (“my eyes are up here!”). Like Sweeney, who has become a symbol of MAGA’s red-blooded sexual power, sorority girls across America have had social media in a chokehold this month. With their clean-cut hotness, their smiley edgelessness, their blonde and white and slim uniformity, these women are considered dreamgirls by the men rejecting woke aesthetics in disgruntled corners of Reddit and X.
The irony is that no self-respecting sorority girl would so much as glance at one of her neck-bearded fanboys. But no matter: she is the gleaming symbol of defiant conservatism for men fed up with being rejected and outcompeted by women in their own lives. A retreat to the safe symbolism of Greek life — which is nationwide but highly concentrated in the more conservative South — is the antidote to their hairy-armpitted tormenters, a bucket of water to melt the feminist witch. “No blue hair in sight,” reads a comment under one Rush post. “America is officially back,” goes another. But perhaps the most revealing comment is this: “Being a 21-year-old woman must feel like having a million dollars in your pocket.”
And yet the online Right’s dream of sorority houses bursting with fancy-free girls hardly reflects the reality. The giggly hot-girl reputation is in fact carefully curated, built on years of stringent selection processes and internal policing. On TikTok, one former sorority girl recalls a chapter-wide email mandating that sisters drink and flirt with frat boys in order to maintain their party invitations. And as with many a Bechdel-flopping male fantasy, what goes on between women behind closed doors is not all pillow fights. In fact, sororities can be vicious and prejudiced — for some girls, it’s a four-year psychological war.
The system is openly discriminatory in a way that would horrify most British graduates, but these intricate snobberies are key to a sorority’s success. Each sorority has a national headquarters and distinctive prestige that must be upheld at any cost; for example, Kappa Kappa Gamma and Chi Omega are among the most competitive for recruits. With reputation comes high standards: one Chi-O chapter apparently had the slogan “skinny, pretty, fun”. It should probably have added “rich” too: sorority membership can cost thousands of dollars per year, plus room and board in plush campus housing, often with private chefs.
Conducting a deep dive into the confessions of current and former sorority girls on TikTok this week, I have found myself wondering that we don’t hear of blood-spattered Greek mutinies every term. I’ve read accounts of girls being kicked out for having had an abortion, speaking about domestic violence, or wearing the wrong jeans; one chapter would apparently “fat shame sorority girls by making them sit on a turned-on washing machine and point out any fat they have”. Every year at one college, girls are said to lie about having had childhood cancer in order to ace a chapter’s philanthropic mission for the charity St Jude’s (of course, when discovered they are dutifully booted out). Other sackable offences included posting pictures with red cups in the background, hinting at alcohol — jeopardising the chapter’s clean-cut image — and failing the “zip code” test (being from a rough neighbourhood). Many claim non-whites are lumped together in activities and dorms if they make it in at all.
There is an atmosphere of mindless zealotry with a dash of body-horror: “We had to yell rush chants for hours until a girl threw up,” writes one woman. The tales, like all yawn-worthy university anecdotes, contain a predictable amount of vomit, tears, alcohol and piss; unlike other universities, they also involve Botox and lip filler: “They brought in a representative from a plastic surgery/beauty clinic to give us discounts,” confesses one presumably wrinkle-free alumna. And, to confirm less charitable stereotypes about the intellectual talents of sorority girls, here is the best story of all: “I had a PNM [potential new member] tell me during the philanthropy round that she connected with our philanthropy (helping the blind/visually impaired) because her shih tzu got glaucoma and had its eyes removed.”
Of course, none of this is mentioned over on RushTok, the TikTok tradition which sees a handful of girls go megaviral each year for vlogging their attempt to join the top-tier houses in their college. The breakout star of 2025 is Izzy Darnell, the younger sister of Kylan, the “Queen of Rush”, who secured her own Bama bid in 2022. Izzy’s TikTok is chock-full of “fit checks” for each day of Rush week: in one, she wears a puffy pink dress with a big bow, golden stilettos and a matching handbag, hair in loose waves and face contoured to the nines. Yet on Saturday, she shocked her fans by dropping out of the recruitment process; an article in People magazine, with quotes from her mother, suggests that she couldn’t hack the mean-girl atmosphere of Bama Rush.
Izzy and her ilk attest to an eerie new consumerism-obsessed chapter in Greek life, in which potential recruits are judged by supermodel standards. Their outfits must be elaborate, pristine and designer. Their hair is piled Southern high, their tans are glowy and even. They start their day not by nursing well-earned hangovers but by rolling ice over their faces to depuff themselves before a full face of slap. And, of course, they never seem to do any work. Is this what being a student is all about?
The truth is sororities are high-surveillance statelets organised around the bizarre directives of mean girls. But for their new admirers, alt-Right blokes on social media, this is all gravy: the values these houses purport to reflect — charity, propriety, tradition — are clearly compatible with a traditional idea of conservatism, but the values which actually seem to lurk beneath — being hot, rich and sexually available — make up the wet dreams of the embittered incel types who slobber over these videos. That sorority girls tend to sport the “MAGA Barbie” look only adds to their appeal. Meanwhile, MAGA hatreds are mirrored in the soft prejudices which power Rush weeks across America: is she fat, is she poor, black, a lesbian — or one of us? Best of all for the internet weirdos, the sorority house is a potent symbol of what, in their parlance, “they took from us” — a vision of an older and more brutal America which whittled its wives into shape at any cost.
The online-Right fantasy of the sorority is as a dreamwife finishing school; the reality seems to be a toxic beauty pageant where the awkward but necessary experiments of university — the bad haircuts, the messy nights out — will get you kicked out. Welcome, ladies, to the best years of your lives.
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Author: Poppy Sowerby
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