MAGA Frat Guys and Bitter Incels Agree: Sorority Girls Are Objects

Some right-wing influencers love sorority girls because they're hot. Others hate them...because they're hot.

It's August, which means the weather's hot, everyone in D.C. is on vacation, and people on X are having meltdowns about sorority recruitment TikTok videos. It seems that the right-wing internet can't decide whether the videos of attractive young women dancing to pop songs are a sign that President Donald Trump has indeed made America great again, or a harbinger of societal collapse.

"America is BACK and the Democrats hate it," reads a representative August 10 post from conservative commentator Brigitte Gabriel on X. The post, which includes a video of a crowd of young women dancing to Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal," has over 2.7 million views.

That same day, another conservative user shared a similar video, this time writing in a post with over 3.5 million views, "Why are so many conservatives celebrating the sorority recruitment videos, saying 'America Is Back!' Do people not realize all these girls are going to be passed around for four years by the football and basketball guys?"

This reaction—a divide between delight and disgust—reveals a cultural rift on the online right. On the one hand, many MAGA conservatives view the popularity of these videos as a sign that wokeness is dead. Body positivity, which held that all bodies are equally beautiful and beauty standards were essentially sexist and racist, has been discarded in favor of a resurgence of early-aughts fat shaming. Male horniness, too, has had a comeback. After a decade of male sexuality being treated as inherently lecherous and dangerous, raunch is once again tolerated in public life. One can practically hear the boioioioing sound effect from Looney Tunes leaping from posts bragging about "Amazing jeans," "America's Prettiest Sororities,"  and"Fit, attractive white women in sororities having fun."

Many of these X users are particularly fixated on the idea that these videos make liberals angry—despite essentially no evidence that the left is responding with outrage. In fact, many left-wing X users pointed out the apparent contradiction between recent right-wing outrage over similar videos of young women dancing. While plenty of these online commenters are opportunistic hypocrites, another explanation is that it is essentially different groups of people responding to these points of controversy. 

While the frat boy right loves these women because they make them horny, there's another segment of the right that hates these women…because they make them horny.

That's because there's an equal and opposite reaction from what can best be described as the incel right—men who, whether or not they are actually involuntarily celibate, buy into a series of distorted beliefs about human sexuality: that most women are hypersexual and hyperpromiscuous, and that a significant minority of men will never be able to get sex because all women are spending too much time seeking the attention of the most attractive men. This attitude has manifested in an obsession with the supposed "body counts" of college sorority girls.

"The larger the school, the more prevalent the promiscuity is," reads a representative reply on the viral X post insisting that sorority members will get "passed around" by athletes. "'All' girls may be hyperbole, but 60-70% is probably accurate."

"Most of the girls I knew growing up had 10 bodies by the time they graduated fuckin high school. Lol 4 sex partners over a lifetime my fuckin ass," one X user posted in response to a post I made pointing out that the median woman has only slept with a few people.

"Yet every 18 year old girl opens an OF," another user insisted. 

One possible answer for this fixation on female body counts is that incels are, by definition, not meeting that many women in real life. What they are doing is watching a lot of online porn. While the typical woman only has a few sex partners during her lifetime, and certainly doesn't "sleep with the whole football team," the women who appear in porn videos do fit that description. Many of these posters then are confusing real-life women for the fictional scenarios played out by porn actresses. The resentment incel men feel toward the sorority members—who have done nothing other than being attractive online—is palpable in their fantasies about how, underneath the beautiful facade, the women they disdain are actually worthless nymphomaniacs. 

It's hard not to come away from this particular online catfight without the sense that the weirdos populating the online right just don't like women that much. They're horrified and disgusted when women are ugly—or even "mid," an insult which has been bemusingly applied to famously beautiful actresses like Margot Robbie and Zendaya—but they also resent their own lust toward women whom they do find attractive. 

The good news, for women especially, is that most men won't be found in the depths of incel forums or fighting over anonymous sorority girls' body counts. As tempting as it can be to paint the online weirdos as the norm, real-life men are all right—or at least more well-adjusted than whatever happens in the replies to a Bama RushTok video.