The Right Has Forgotten What Beauty Is For

D ostoevsky famously put the enigmatic proposition “beauty will save the world” into the pages of The Idiot. With college sorority-rush season just wrapping up, parts of the MAGA movement appear determined to put Dostoevsky’s claim to the test.

A video from the University of North Carolina Wilmington chapter of Alpha Phi International Women’s Fraternity has gone viral for its young women dancing: hair flips, short skirts, and all. Similar videos from Arizona State University’s Alpha Phi chapter have received similar attention, praised for showcasing how these young women are “celebrating Truth, Patriotism, and their Beauty once again.”

Multiple right-wing accounts have posted various versions of the videos, all captioned something along the lines of “This sorority rush video is going viral after liberals lashed out due to conservative women showcasing their natural American beauty. What’s your reaction?” or “The left has no answer for this.” Eventually, these tweets turned blatantly antagonistic: “If this sorority rush video of hot ASU Alpha Phi offends you, you’re either gay or a fat sh** smelling liberal with pink hair.”

A self-proclaimed liberal user countered that “I hate when people do the ‘nobody is saying that’ thing but honestly I have not seen any liberals get mad over a sorority dance video lol,” pointing to the possibility that liberals were never mad about the videos, but it would fit the imagined right-wing cultural agenda for them to be.

The sorority women themselves are almost incidental. What matters is what their bodies can be made to signify. Beauty has ceased to be something admired and contemplated and instead been twisted into rage-bait in the culture wars.

As someone who went through Atlantic Coast Conference sorority life, I can tell you that there is nothing novel going on in this season’s crop of rush videos. These are young women doing an aggressively sorority-woman thing: wearing matching outfits, dancing, posing, being loud, being young, being attractive, and acting, admittedly, more than a little ridiculous. There is plenty to critique in both the performances and the responses to them, but political convenience should not transform vice into virtue, any more than finding something titillating makes it beautiful. What, exactly, does the right believe female beauty is for?

The problem is not that viewers find these women attractive. The women are attractive. The problem is the collapse of distinctions between beauty, desire, morality, and politics. Calling one’s gaze “conservative” does not make it less voyeuristic, nor does a panty shot (and, unfortunately, there were plenty in the online videos) become an icon of Western civilization because a liberal supposedly complained about it.

The conservative tradition possesses a richer vocabulary and understanding of beauty than this. Beauty is not synonymous with attraction; attraction is not synonymous with sexiness; sexiness does not establish health or virtue; and none of these things establishes political conservatism. Yet a sexually suggestive TikTok made by college students somehow emerges from this bad game of telephone as proof that America is healing.

Roger Scruton, perhaps the modern right’s most prolific defender of beauty, argued that beauty offers humanity something increasingly rare in a consumer society: “consolation without consumption.” Its enjoyment does not require possessing or using the beautiful thing — a distinction especially important when the beautiful “thing” is another person. In a 2017 lecture, Scruton contrasted an optician examining an eye as a physical object with looking into the eyes of someone we desire. Sufficiently humane desire encounters the embodied person, attempting to meet the other “I to I.”

That is precisely what disappears in the sorority-video debate. The individual woman recedes behind blonde hair, bare legs, and provocative dancing until she becomes an anonymous representation of “healthy American womanhood.” Her body no longer reveals a particular person; it becomes evidence for somebody else’s argument and an object of desire.

Of course, these women are attractive. That is not the indictment. The question is whether attraction leads the viewer toward recognition of another person or terminates at the consumption of her body. Properly, human desire encounters a person through the body; voyeurism encounters a body and has no particular interest in the person beyond it.

Scruton’s guidance does not make the women passive victims, however. These dances are choreographed, filmed, edited, and uploaded by the sororities themselves, with their members’ attractiveness plainly part of the appeal. If the viewer has an obligation not to reduce another person to her body, the person being viewed bears some responsibility for how she presents that body. But a woman can behave immodestly without consenting to degradation, just as a man can find her attractive without being compelled to reduce her to that attraction. Agency exists on both sides of the screen.

Yet greater modesty hardly seems to resolve the problem. In a recruitment video posted by Iowa State University’s Alpha Omicron Pi chapter, the women wear comparatively full-coverage dresses and do little more than wave excitedly at the camera. The internet’s response to this video was not praise for the participants’ modesty. Instead, one user referred to the women as “piggies” and “fat pieces of bacon,” before speculating that the hottest girls must be at a competing school.

This contradiction suggests that modesty is not really an operative standard for categorizing beauty. The Alpha Phi women are elevated beyond what their behavior warrants because their bodies are pleasurable to look at; the Iowa State women are degraded beyond anything their behavior warrants because, in the eyes of their critics, their bodies are not. In both cases, the moral assessment of the woman follows an aesthetic judgment that is itself little more than a judgment of sexual desirability. One woman becomes an icon of civilizational renewal; another becomes livestock. Neither is permitted simply to be a woman.

A strange set of instructions begins to emerge. Be modest, but not frumpy. Be beautiful, but don’t be vain. Be sexually desirable, but don’t be sexual. Attract male attention, but don’t appear to seek it. Present the sort of body men want to look at, but remain innocent of the desire it provokes. The standard asks women to be objects of desire while simultaneously holding them responsible for never behaving like subjects who desire.

This is a remarkably impoverished vision of womanhood for a movement that claims to offer something richer than the sexual revolution. A culture cannot simultaneously teach women that their worth should not depend upon male sexual attention and humiliate them when they fail to command it. Nor should the conservative alternative to a culture that encourages women to commodify their bodies be one in which those same bodies are inspected, ranked, and sorted into evidence of either civilizational flourishing or decline. Only the vocabulary has changed; the woman remains something to be consumed.

Conservatives are right to insist that beauty matters, but we should be capable of recognizing beauty without conflating it with desirability, virtue, and politics. Perhaps Dostoevsky was right that beauty will save the world. But beauty cannot save much of anything if we encounter it only by asking what appetite it can satisfy or whose side of the culture war it can serve. Before beauty can save the world, we may first have to relearn how to look at it.