First things first: No, liberals aren’t mad that sorority girls post dancing videos online for rush season.
There have been a lot of MAGA influencers reposting videos with false accusations like “You know the LIBS are seething over this” and “BREAKING: Liberals are furious.” But as Kaitlyn Tiffany at the Atlantic wrote, “The only thing that is missing is evidence of seething libs.” Despite her best search efforts, Tiffany added, “I couldn’t find a single one.” When she asked one MAGA influencer to produce the evidence of outraged feminists, “He noted that many people replied to his posts saying that they weren’t mad about the TikTok dances. But, he said, ‘I don’t believe that.’”
It’s not mysterious what’s happening here. Republican pundits found a massive success distracting the MAGA base from Donald Trump‘s Jeffrey Epstein scandal by pretending there was some major progressive outcry against a sexy ad featuring Sydney Sweeney. (Liberal didn’t really care, and right-wingers were forced to create AI videos to manufacture “evidence” for this non-existent outrage.) Eager to keep distracting the public from Trump’s myriad of scandals and failures — while also having an excuse for public horniness —MAGA influencers tried to cook up a similar fake controversy about sorority dances. But what makes this all especially pathetic is that, as usual, MAGA social media prefers to throw a screeching fit about the loose morals of women who dance in online videos.
Last summer, MAGA posters rage-stroked over a video deemed “Gen Z boss and a mini,” which featured women in an office dancing and chanting about how they see themselves in the world. Right-wingers fumed, “This is cancer. No wonder modern women can’t get anyone to date them,” insisting it was proof that women should not be allowed to work outside the home. Conservatives hated the video so much that X users recirculated it in March with language about the “ruins of bastions of masculinity” and cast blame on the women for everything bad that men have experienced. This followed a similar freakout during Mardi Gras last year, when X users melted down over a video of a group of college-aged girls dancing to hip-hop at a gas station in Louisiana. This, in turn, followed another MAGA tantrum over a college-era video of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., dancing with friends, which was held out as proof that she was a “clueless nitwit.”
After years of dancing videos being wielded as a rhetorical weapon against women’s rights, we’re now expected to believe, as right-wing pundit Megyn Kelly declared, that MAGA wants young women to be “hot and together and free and unmasked in every way.”
After years of dancing videos being wielded as a rhetorical weapon against women’s rights, we’re now expected to believe, as right-wing pundit Megyn Kelly declared, that MAGA wants young women to be “hot and together and free and unmasked in every way.” This was self-evidently dumb, and not just because of the obsessive relitigation of a pandemic that ended when all these sorority girls were barely out of junior high. Thanks to Republicans overturning Roe v. Wade, young women aren’t as free as they were before. It’s a reminder of how depraved right-wing attitudes are around sex that they expect young women to be “hot,” but to not have sexual desire of their own — much less act on it.
Unfortunately, closer examination reveals that these seeming contradictions make a sick sort of sense in the MAGA imagination. Girls, in this mindset, are allowed to dance and be sexy — but only for a very short time in their youth, and only to attract a husband. The expectation is that the dancing shoes will soon be put away, as these hot-and-free young women prepare to fulfill their God-given destiny as trapped helpmeets to the men they are expected to quickly marry. Sorority girls are indulged a brief moment of feeling alive, but only because, in this right-wing narrative, white sorority girls are supposedly all conservative and will soon submit to their lives of servitude.
This is no exaggeration. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was one of the right-wingers celebrating the imaginary liberal-triggering powers of the sorority dancing videos. He also recently spoke at a young conservative women’s event, where he argued that the only reason for women to go to college is to get the “MRS degree” — that is, to find a husband and then become a housewife. The narrative of most far-right “tradwife” influencers is similar: They once believed in education and work, but they have now found their true calling in a submissive role. (Ignore the fact that they are professional content creators who often make more money than their husbands.) The most famous tradwife online, Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, was a ballet dancer before she got married, which makes the “put away your dancing shoes” metaphor quite literal.
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We see similar attitudes on the right with women and sports. In high school and even in college, there’s a fairly broad acceptance of female athleticism among conservatives. Some even have taken up watching women’s college basketball teams during March Madness. Adult women who make sports a career, however, are loathed on the right. There’s been a scourge of MAGA types showing up at WNBA games and throwing dildos at the players, which Donald Trump Jr. celebrated on X. As Brandy Jensen of the Defector wrote, the message is, “Stop thinking you can play this game without any d**ks involved.”
Girls are allotted a certain amount of freedom when their youth prevents them from being a real threat to male dominance. Adult women, however, can compete with and challenge men — and because of this, the right needs to see them pushed out of public life and into kitchen. With that in mind, it becomes clearer which dancing videos will gain conservative approval or condemnation. The “Gen Z boss” and AOC videos angered them because they featured women who have professional careers and power. The outrage at the Louisiana gas station video was largely racist — they were mad that white girls were dancing to a Black hip-hop artist’s song — but MAGA was also triggered because of the context. The girls in that video were on a road trip, a symbol of American freedom that was once reserved for men. When women do it, as in “Thelma and Louise,” it signifies feminism.
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The college sorority, though, has remained frozen in the right-wing imagination as a holding pen for future wives. That’s not true, of course: Many young women, if not most, join sororities to make friends, and to develop skills and connections they can use in a future career. Meeting men is nice, but that is eclipsed by these other concerns and ambitions, as many former sorority girls have pointed out in the recent social media melee. Sororities advertise to potential members by highlighting career and academic benefits — not husband-hunting. But in the MAGA fantasy life, sororities aren’t a haven for true female freedom. They are just a sequestered space for girls to act out a little under tight supervision before they are transferred to the control of their husband. The power of this fantasy is such that few MAGA influencers felt the need to ask if it’s really true that sorority sisters are uniformly conservative, much less that they’re all interested in getting the ring by spring.
Cyndi Lauper called out this dynamic over 40 years ago in her iconic recording of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” “Some boys take a beautiful girl and hide her away from the rest of the world,” she trilled. And then her voice turned forceful: “I wanna be the one who walks in the sun.”
Despite the sorority-to-tradwife dreams of the online right, there is not much evidence that young women today are any more keen on leaving girlhood for a lifetime of thankless drudgery than they were in years gone by. As I wrote last year, the actual data shows that women are increasingly independent. More women than ever are working full-time and holding out for an equal partnership rather than diving into a dependent relationship with a man. That’s especially true of college-educated women.
Kirk’s “advice” to use college only as a marriage match service is nonsensical. Girls aren’t going to work hard to get into school and pay huge sums of money just to meet boys, especially when you have low-cost dating apps available. They want an education so they can use it.
Yes, even the sorority girls.
