There’s a new weapon in the culture wars and its assets are considerable. In America, Republicans have become obsessed with the “conservative hot girl”: an unreconstructed, curvaceous and unashamedly flirty young woman who counts as Right-coded simply in virtue of not dressing like a children’s TV presenter or identifying as asexual.
Avatars of the genre include film star Sydney Sweeney making jokes about her boobs on Saturday Night Live, or Haliey Welch — aka the viral “Hawk Tuah” girl — joyfully simulating expectoration during oral sex in a vox pop on the streets of Nashville. The actual political commitments of these women remain unclear, but either way it turns out that the enemy of your enemy can be your friend with benefits. Or at least, that’s the fervent hope.
Commentators are understandably taking the popularity of old-school heroines like Sweeney and Welsh as a delicious provocation for those who have sapped the fun out of relations between the sexes, with their chilly scolding about the impropriety of people’s actual desires. Though on the face of it, this resembles the sort of complaint a Midwestern teenager might have made about his Republican parents in 1965, we all know who the new morality police are. They are the ones treating “intimacy” as a commodity that should be redistributed for the sake of fairness; putting up posters on trains telling you that staring might be a criminal offence; and writing policies governing adult sexual relations that equate an absence of consent with a lack of constant anxious checking that everything is fine.
And true to form, the progressive media is taking the bait. Earlier this month, Vox’s sneery take on the phenomenon of the sexy MAGA-coded female contains compensatory ego-mending about how it’s the Left that is the true “sex-positive” side, insofar as it is “the home for politicians and activists who agitate for access to birth control and abortions” and “who support LGBTQ rights” (smokin’ hot, amirite?). Newsweek, meanwhile, wheels in “an associate professor at the University of East Anglia”, no less, to inform us from a great height that the conservative hot girl “isn’t a particularly new phenomenon… Women have been positioned through the lens of the masculinist imagery in conservative, populist politics for a very long time.”
This much is true. But then again, I’m not sure how red-bloodedly “masculinist” it is for a Trump-loving young man’s pupils to dilate at the sight of an unabashedly sexy female, almost entirely based on the thought that she must really be pissing off the libs. Last time I checked in with the Zoomer manosphere online — the source of material for this story, presumably to be distinguished from the average Republican voter — they seemed busy rating various women well out of their league as “mid”, and arguing over whether Daniela Melchior from Suicide Squad has Western Hunter-Gatherer genetics, hardly thereby cementing an impression of unalloyed sexual vigour. On this basis then, it seems a bit early to announce that Dionysus has returned. One swallow — or indeed, one spit — doesn’t make a summer.
Though you shouldn’t expect people to tell the truth about sex, there is in fact even more unreality in this particular bit of tarted-up X/Twitter discourse than is usual. For just over the virtual wall at Instagram there are literally millions of women, of both celebrity and civilian varieties and all political persuasions, doggedly adopting come-hither expressions and showing off fleshy parts to good advantage. Glorious as Sweeney is, neither her décolletage nor her righteous pride in it seem like much of a departure from the norm here.
But more importantly: as every sex therapist knows, resentment kills the libido. Progressives arguably started this dance of anger, willing to celebrate objectively dysfunctional body shapes for women — breasts chopped off, morbidly obese, testosterone-poisoned or Ozempic-thin — as long as they constituted a satisfying revenge upon the low-status fecund archetypes beloved of political opponents. In the process, they were perfectly happy to drive a wedge between what Lefty men actually wanted in the privacy of their own psyches, and what they felt they ought to be seen to want in public.
In this matter, they were not helped by the radical Left’s rejection of the existence of something called “nature”, seeing the very idea as a sinister plot with patriarchal and capitalist overtones. Since, as Schiller once told us, “beauty is a playful mediation between nature and freedom”, this gave them only freedom to play with, as they tried to construct a sexually attractive woman out of various cultural bits and pieces left lying around: lipstick, a sassy attitude, a big glass of wine that engulfs your face, a PhD. In the end, of course, they had to cheat, which is why their preferred female commentators are often classically gorgeous though nobody is allowed to mention it.
But with online elements of the Right now lured into the same game, validating buxom country girls like Sweeney and Walsh only because their enemies officially revile them, there has been no improvement in the direction of healthy and uncomplicated eroticism. We still can’t tell what these men really want, rather than what they think they ought to be seen to want. Though superficially speaking, the championing of blonde bombshells may resemble a throwback to some prelapsarian unwoke past where we didn’t have to get so hung up on the politics of sexual desire, in fact we are not in Kansas anymore, and we can’t pretend we only just clapped eyes on Pamela Anderson in Baywatch. Porn has exploded in the interim, and the average user’s real turn-ons lie strictly between him and his incognito search engine.
Another difference between now and then is that there is no single hegemonic story about female sexiness or beauty anymore, nor even only a few. The discourse has fractured into a thousand niches, corresponding in almost every case to some million-pound money-making opportunity for someone else. Young women are using surgical and pharmaceutical alteration on an epic scale, and older film stars’ faces are becoming hallucinatorily uncanny as a matter of course — just look at 69-year old Isabelle Adjani in Netflix’s The Perfect Couple. In this context the “natural look” is just one more artificial construction competing with all the others, and none of them seem particularly connected to anyone’s nether regions.
While the Left pretend nothing is natural, the Right prefer to naturalise what is culturally flexible — think of trad wife discourse about honouring “the natural order”, or Charles Moore writing that actress Olivia Colman has a “Left-wing face”. And this is presumably why some are treating the arrival of Sweeney et al as if heralding a long-awaited return to the garden of Eden. But should the stock of the sex bomb continue to rise in the Zeitgeist, rest assured it will only be temporary. Pendulum swings never do make themselves known at the time.
For comparison, a telling moment in the Vogue documentary about the Nineties currently showing on Disney+ recounts how, after a relatively brief period of intense interest from the fashion industry in their extraordinarily symmetrical faces, models such as Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer and Naomi Campbell were suddenly dropped by model bookers. Even the Golden Mean in fleshly form became boring to look at after a while. The hot new thing involved grunge and heroin chic, skeletal body types à la Kate Moss, and faces that were, in the words of Amber Valletta, “a little off”. Evangelista’s solution was to cut her fringe squint, which apparently worked for a while to keep her relevant. Later on she signed up for a catastrophic “fat-freezing” procedure, which famously didn’t.
Unlike changing hemlines, trying to keep up with passing ideological trends in faces and bodies can easily involve wrecking yourself. Those you were trying to please in the first place won’t care — they’ll just move seamlessly on to the new upvoted fantasy object. Sensible women on the Right should avoid trying to fit in with whatever sort of physicality is currently in favour among terminally online political comrades — whether that involves little platoons, or big ones — for the chances are it won’t be the truth in any case. Instead, I suggest they demand that any male counterparts truly committed to traditional gender roles join the army, or start feeding alligators pieces of raw chicken by hand like the new husband of Lana Del Rey. That should shut them up.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/