In This Longhouse We Believe: Girls Rule
A uterus-haver enters the Longhouse discourse.
A few years ago, the Internet discovered college sorority recruitment videos; in particular, the “door stack” genre. In each one, co-eds in matching outfits pull open the portals to houses to reveal sorority sisters stacked up like cordwood in the doorway.
In 2016, a sorority at ‘Bama had to pull their recruitment video after it committed the unspeakable crime of showing too many hot white chicks in bikinis and hot pants.
And in a memorably “terrifying” video for Alpha Delta Pi Texas that went viral, the girls eerily chant in unison, “we’ve been waiting for you all summer and we’re so glad you’re finally here!”
There is no escape from the door stack!
It seems today many of us are trapped in a metaphorical “house” of some kind. I was reminded of these sorority videos as the “Longhouse” discourse made the rounds this week. A young Hispanic (I presume) gentleman who goes only by his surname, Lomez, recently wrote an excellent Longhouse explainer for the esteemed Catholic publication, First Things.
In his essay, Mr. Lomez explains the Longhouse concept:
"More than anything, the Longhouse refers to the remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. …Speech norms are enforced through punitive measures typical of female-dominated groups—social isolation, reputational harm, indirect and hidden force. To be ‘canceled’ is to feel the whip of the Longhouse masters.”
“Gynocratic Safetyism,” he called it. Mark my words: this Mr. Lomez fellow is going places!
The above quote also perfectly describes the mental conditioning endured by anyone who has gone through sorority rush. The power of the “Longhouse” as metaphor is that it represents nearly all of what we are fighting against. It is many things to many people; we each have our own Longhouse to grapple with, to bear, to escape, or to haplessly embrace.
Naturally, I mention the Longhouse in my upcoming self-help book for aspiring trad husbands and wives, Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War (June, Regnery).
In one passage, I describe it as the perfect symbol of our liberal feminist overlords:
“… the pantsuited girlboss petty tyrants who do, in fact, run the world, as Beyonce promised they would. That’s what the modern female careerist is carefully groomed to do: run the world—and hire servants to run their households. They, along with their mentally castrated male enablers, are running it right into ruin. (Some of these petty tyrants are former men, but I digress). Certain factions on the right call this oppressive institutional ethos “the Longhouse,” after the neolithic thatch dwellings in early human settlements that were controlled by overbearing matriarchs who crushed the men’s warrior spirit and kept an iron grip on young women.”
Mainstream liberal feminism has constructed two enormous Longhouses in which to imprison young women. I’ve done hard time in both of them. Let’s explore these, shall we?
The Sisterhood Longhouse: Virgins Check In, But They Don't Check Out
In this house, sexual freedom is the ideal state of femalehood. In this house, you exercise your Longhouse-granted rights to be just like the guys. You need to be body-count maxxing. Going out. Going home—via a walk of shame. The walk of shame is your badge of honor. Guilt-free, the more the better, your goal is to collect as many notches on your leather Balenciaga Cagole as you can get.
The Sisterhood Longhouse manifests as real, actual buildings. There are strict dress codes and even stricter behavior codes. It is the frat house where you do too many Jell-O shots. It is the TikTok hype house where you make your 10,000th Get Ready With Me video. It is the Orgy Dome at Burning Man, with lines of dusty young feminists tripping on ecstasy and ketamine waiting to get in and grant favors to the lucky suitors inside. It is the Hamptons summer beach rental. The Indian Wells Airbnb you and your Theta sisters from USC rented for Coachella.
Crucially: What happens in the Sisterhood Longhouse stays in the Sisterhood Longhouse—until you post it, of course.
Unless you are part of a religious community or come from a deeply conservative family, you are born into this Longhouse. As soon as you come of age, you are led into its special confinement pen. You are fed a steady diet of artificial birth control, margaritas, and Venti Chai Lattes, treated to weekly spray tans, waxing sessions, and blowouts, until you are released around your thirtieth birthday by a buyer proffering a diamond engagement ring.
When I think about the Sisterhood Longhouse, I think about TikTok Princess Alix Earle’s sorority pool house at the University of Miami. It’s like a yassified Barbie Dream House, if Barbie was open about her implants and lip filler.
In just a few short years, we’ve gone from University of Alabama sororities getting cancelled for being too white and skimpily clad to the nearly nude Alix Earle and her all-white posse becoming the toast of TikTok.
Twenty-two-year-old Alix is a businesswoman; her Playmate body, bordello fashion, and endless stream of GRWM videos make her totally out-of-reach lifestyle addictive to her 4.6 million worshippers.
She is empowered, she is in charge, she is a double-D girlboss with no qualms about promoting her unattainable looks. In a way, she’s a refreshing throwback to the days when girls aspired to be like the super thin Glamazons in Vogue. There are no fat girls in Alix’s house, mkay?
While she’s meeting with CAA agents and signing billion-dollar licensing deals, Alix’s followers are stampeding to emulate her, let’s face it, totally vapid life. You, too, can live like Alix—you just need to buy the same Rare Beauty highlighter, wear the same 10 brands of bronzer, and drink her Bloom superfoods smoothie. It’s OnlyFans without the cam sex. She moves merch; some of that merch is your daughters into her Longhouse.
The market for girls raised in the Sisterhood Longhouse has dried up, but that’s fine—the Sisterhood is happy to let you live there as long as you desire. Some will spend their entire lives inside, like old nags who get ridden hard and put away wet, unaware that outside the walls is a paradise of freedom—the tantalizing promise of love (what’s that?) and a family (babies, ew!).
Sisterhood Longhousemates are dimly aware of that outside world, the fresh air, but why bother? They are content to make TikToks, stack doorways, unbox new shipments of Sephora hauls, and keep swiping right. Always Be Swiping! That is the only rule of the Longhouse Lyfe.
You should hurry: the pens inside the Sisterhood Longhouse are filling up as entire generations of girls will never find a way out.
The Office Longhouse: A Human Dairy Farm
If you do get out of the Sisterhood Longhouse, you may be swept immediately into the Office Longhouse. There, a brutal, unspoken system of sticks and carrots is used to maintain order among the workers, mainly the women. Want to go on maternity leave one day? Congratulations, how wonderful, please enjoy six whole weeks with your newborn, at which point the maternity leave pay spigots are shut off.
You will literally be starved back into work. Want to eat? Pay your rent? Better find a daycare for that kid.
But don’t worry! Your company has thoughtfully installed milking machines on each floor. Feeling engorged? Just head over to a convenient Lactation Room and hook yourself up to a breast pump.
Please feel free to help yourself to complimentary tap water and some stale granola bars while you express your newborn’s next meal.
You never see any of those “A Day in my Life at Google” TikTok videos about a new mother trying to pump breast milk at her office. I wonder why.
If you are ever forced to use a Lactation Room at the office, then yes, you might be trapped in a modern-day Longhouse.
As for me, I have seen the inside of enough Longhouses to know that I will never return to one. Instead, I preen luxuriously from the friendly confines of my own house—the Mom house, if you will—a fully liberated woman, no spray tan required, where my half a dozen-ish fellow residents give me all the likes and affirmation I need.
—Peachy
P.S. If you enjoyed this essay, you’ll enjoy my upcoming book, Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War (June, Regnery). Pre-order your copy today!
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Learn more at: peachykeenanwrites.com.
The longhouse is a gilded cage the turns into a slaughterhouse after its members hit the wall. Suddenly they are too old to start a family and wonder where the good men went. For the rest of their lives, they feed cats and then become cat food at the end. Congrats on escaping to true freedom and bliss.
What a tragic world we live in, for both men and women.