The Incoherent Sexual Politics of the Right

The left doesn't want you to spit on that thing.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity, the podcast where my philosophy on sex has always been the same.

You should have as much of it as you want, especially if it's gay.

Earlier this month, a 26-year-old, semi-successful, right-wing social media influencer named Ashley St.

Claire made an announcement.

Ashley is perhaps best known for her anti-trans children's book called Elephants Are Not Birds, which, you guessed it, is about a young elephant who is tricked into thinking he can become a bird.

Elephants Are Not Birds is published by Brave Books, a right-wing book publisher that, quote, partners with people of moral integrity to teach complex Christian and conservative values.

And so, on Valentine's Day, just a few days ago, Ashley St.

Clair's announcement to the world was this.

Maura, would you like to read it so we can get like a woman?

The feminine touch, yeah.

Five months ago, I welcomed a new baby into the world.

Elon Musk is the father.

I have not previously disclosed this to protect our child's privacy and safety, but in recent days, it has become clear that tabloid media intends to do so, regardless of the harm it will cause.

I intend to allow our child to grow in a normal and safe environment.

For that reason, I ask that the media honor our child's privacy and refrain from invasive reporting.

And at the bottom, it says, media, Brian Gilklich, Digital Strategy Limited, Brian at digitalstrategylimited.com.

That was really good.

That was good.

You're ready to play the Ashley St.

Clair biopic.

Yes, absolutely.

I'm gunning for that role.

This would be Elon Musk's 13th child with a total of four different women.

Since the announcement, Ashley's become the subject of enormous waves of every possible reaction, from congratulations to just about everything you'd imagine the internet would have to say about a relatively obscure young woman who births a famous man's child out of wedlock.

And to be clear, I am no fan nor friend of Ashley St.

Clair, but, you know, she seems to be going through a lot.

And Elon has been quiet.

Elon's only public acknowledgement of any of this so far has been in response to a tweet from longtime gay neo-Nazi Milo Yiannopoulos, who tweeted that Ashley, a 26-year-old, I'm 26.

I'm 26.

What am I doing?

I could be having Elon Musk's child, if I played my cards right.

Milo Yiannopoulos tweeted that Ashley, a 26-year-old, has been scheming for, quote, over half a decade to trap Elon into having a child with her.

To which Elon responded, one word, whoa.

I haven't been around that long, but even when I was a kid, a story like this would have been the only thing that anyone in America talks about for months.

Yet now it feels anodyne.

Like you probably haven't even heard about it.

In a time when some of the biggest brands associated with the new right are Barstool and UFC fighting, and when half of the president's cabinet is actively fighting against their own sexual assault allegations, and of course when the president himself is a decades-long serial cheater and sexual predator this story broke and it's kind of just like you know happy valentine's day

i often make jokes online about the erosion of traditional conservative values within the party that's for decades branded itself as the party of traditional conservative values but it's all starting to feel like that erosion is a feature not a bug of the party and that's what i want to talk about in today's episode to do that today i have invited two friends and fellow podcasters moira don and adrian daub are hosts of in bed with the right a podcast about the right's ideas on gender and sex and sexuality which i've actually been on so for some reason you want to hear more of me you can go listen to my episode over there and i am so excited to have you here you guys are experts on whatever is going on here.

So thank you for joining.

Thank you so much for having us.

It's so nice to be here, Matt.

Moira, Moira, before we started recording, you said that you have been following this Ashley St.

Clair Elon new child debacle ravenously.

Would you like to share any insights?

Yes, I think my metaphor was that I was like rubbernecking on the highway when you like slow down to look at a hideous car wreck because you can't look away.

Yeah, I think that Ashley St.

Clair is kind of a...

a tragic figure, although I definitely agree with you, Matthew.

Like you don't have to hand it to or sympathize with her.

But I think her position right now represents really clearly what the right sexual politics offers to women, what women think they can get out of manipulating a right-wing code of sexuality and adopting a right-wing persona.

And then it also shows how the right does not live up to those promises, right?

So Ashley St.

Clair made what some feminist sociologists have termed like a patriarchal bargain, right?

Which is that she thought,

I, you know, I'm attributing some motivation to her.

We know relatively little about Ashley and her relationship with Elon Musk beyond like what she told, say, the New York Post, which I did read every word of twice.

But, you know, let's give all these parties the benefit of the doubt here and say we don't really quite know much, but we can sort of assume that somebody in Ashley St.

Clair's position thought that being with Elon Musk and by extension having a child with Elon Musk, you know, which we know that he very much wants, would grant her a degree of security and status, right?

She thought that by providing this man with her sexual favors and reproductive labor, that she would earn his protection.

She thought that he would support the child that they had together.

She thought that she would benefit personally from his largesse, either in the form of monetary support or in the form of employment or in the form of, you know, promotion of her projects.

You know, she thought that she was making a deal, right?

I will have this relationship with you.

I will have this baby with you in exchange for these other goods, these other protections.

And I think this is like a very common sort of assumption or logic among right-wing women, right?

They think they're buying into a degree of being protected and being provided for.

And what we see with Elon Musk is that he immediately did not hold up his end of the bargain, right?

So I think there's like a couple of critiques you can make of this patriarchal bargain that actually say Claire made.

One is that it's immoral, right?

It trades on bad values for the sake of personal gain, right?

This is somebody who was, you know, very willing to target, say, transgender children.

And I'm guessing also transgender adults, right?

This is somebody who, as a writer for the Babylon Bee,

was willing to be really kind of mocking and cruel towards particularly LGBT efforts for like dignity and equality, right?

So like, again, you don't have to hand it to her.

But this is also somebody who thought that by allying with the right, that she could get something for herself, right?

So that's self-interest at the expense of other people.

But the other critique that you can make is not really a moral one so much as a pragmatic one, which is that it didn't even work for her, right?

Like she sold her soul and didn't get paid for it.

And this is, I think, something that a lot of right-wing women find is that the transaction that is offered to them by this emerging right-wing sexual politics is one in which they don't actually get their end of the deal.

Like, if you think about it, it's such a pervasive trope on, you know, you mentioned the sort of the barstool right, which is, it's out of pickup artist culture, where basically it's not just about control over women, it's not just control over their bodies, it is also not really even entering into a bargain with them, right?

Like any

demands on you that might arise from it actually show that you've lost, right?

And I think Tweet Exchange that you cited, you can see sort of Yiannopoulos and Musk sort of play the ball to each other, like that's it, right?

They're sort of trying to figure out out a way to negate this feeling that maybe they might owe, or that at least Musk might owe this lady something

on account of, you know, the child.

No, you got to get away from that, because that would be a form of weakness.

That would be a form of dependency that would be holding back sort of his bizarre kind of version of masculinity.

Yeah, you know, I think that's an interesting note, Adrian, because transactional sexual arrangements, like the one that we're attributing to Elon Musk and Ashley St.

Clair.

You know, there's all kinds of ways in which, you know, feminists have critiqued these transactions as dehumanizing, et cetera.

But when you're paying somebody for a service, that implies that they have a claim on you, right?

And I think that Elon Musk's vision of masculinity and of sexuality can't brook any claims by women on him, right?

Like making a transactional deal with another person implies that they can expect something, that you might owe something to them.

And that itself might be seen by somebody like Musk as a degradation or an erosion of his masculinity.

Yeah,

when Elon made that sole contribution to the conversation around his, you know, alleged 13th child when he just wrote, whoa,

Ashley St.

Clair, did you guys see what she responded in a tweet?

Moria saw this.

I want you to tell us.

Okay, wait.

Do a dramatic reading, please.

Elon, we have been trying to communicate for the past several days and you have not responded.

When are you going to reply to us instead of publicly responding to smears from an individual who just posted photos of me in underwear at 15 years old?

Notably, after like, I don't even think a day, this tweet was deleted.

And so I think what you can infer from that was that there was some sort of back channel agreement between Elon Musk's team and whoever was representing Ashley St.

Clair to have her take this down.

Would you say that's...

Probable?

It seems totally plausible.

You know, it could have been that she was offered something in exchange for this.

It could have been that she was threatened.

It could have been that she just got scared.

Moira, what you said is true.

She's tragic.

Can we talk about that children's book?

I haven't been able to get a hold of it yet, but I'm kind of interested because I've had occasion to read a lot of children's books recently.

A children's book should set the, like, open up your imagination.

It should like set the world alight with meaning and possibility, not be like, well, this isn't that.

So, you know, get it in your heads, kids, right?

It's like, it's, you know, hella transphobic, but it's also just like an absolute failure as a, as a children's book.

What's next?

You can't fly.

Fairies aren't real.

You know, like, I mean, like, who the fuck buys this for their kids?

Like, yeah, I got to crush their spirit when they're young.

Well, the whole, I mean, you, did you see that Julianne Moore's book?

Julianne Moore, the actress, she co-authored a children's book about a seven-year-old girl with freckles who hates her freckles and then learns that because they make her different and unique, they make her special and good.

And this is currently under review and in the process of being taken out of libraries in military schools

by the Department of Defense.

They want to replace that with books like this that just tell you, like, actually, you can't achieve your dreams.

It's not even about being transgender.

It's like you can't.

you cannot imagine.

You cannot imagine a world of difference.

You can't aspire to anything because

it's all in service of trying to create this like monoculture and it's just so fascist but there is a whole industry of these right-wing children's books telling children not to dream big not to be themselves not to uh think differently you know it is kind of a uh a militant intellectual foreclosure right that is extending even to these most anodyne and innocent realms as like literal children's books yeah it's it's just beating young people into submission which like i don't know like we're all gay here, right, Maury?

You're gay.

Yeah.

Yeah, we're all gay.

We're all gay here.

Like,

I feel like growing up as a gay kid, you know exactly what it's like to be beat into submission.

And they just want to do that to the, you know, most extreme level.

It's not even enough to be straight.

You have to be like a million other things as well.

This is something that we come back to on the pod all the time that like it's it's heterosexuality as the eternally moving goalpost, right?

Like, oh, you're straight in the basic sense that you want to have sex with someone of a different gender.

Congratulations.

Anyway, it's not enough.

You got to be like, right now you're a beta cuck.

So now you got to do this.

Oh, like, did you buy her flowers?

You can't do that.

Right.

And like, eventually, like, even paying her child support is like basically a sign that you're not masculine enough.

You're gay.

Yeah.

Right.

I mean, like, think of all these.

We, we love, this is like a sort of side line we have on the podcast of just like foregrounding tweets of like, fellas, is it gay to have sex with Taylor Swift?

Fellas, is it gay to have sex with your wife?

Fellas, is it gay to, right?

And like, and you're like, at this point, all this is, is that, like, it's these grifters online that basically tell mostly young men, I think, that, like, however, you're doing masculinity is not really masculinity.

And now I'm inventing this like insane thing where I eat like a raw fucking liver or whatever on YouTube.

Like, it's not a goal to be reached.

It's not a standard to be attained.

It's just about the moving of the goalposts, I think.

And it's always a process.

The goalposts are moved so as to eliminate joy, right?

It's not just like, fellas, is it gay to have sex with your wife?

It's Andrew Tate's admonition that, you know, sex should not last more than, I think it was three minutes, he said.

Wait, if sex lasts longer than three minutes, then it's gay?

Yes, this is something Andrew Tate tweeted, which is, you know, paradigmatic of this attitude that to be truly straight, to be truly aspirational in this like emerging right-wing sexual politics needs to be purged of affection or even, or like playfulness, or even just like pleasure itself, that pleasure can't come from anything other than the domination and the exercise of a superior status over women for the straight man.

I think Adrian is right that it's a continually receding horizon, but the recession of that horizon is about making this bleaker and bleaker and bleaker and more and more angry.

If I've had gay sex that is shorter than three minutes because it's like wild and spontaneous, is that

straight sex?

That's actually straight sex.

Congratulations.

Nice.

Nice.

She's saying Claire would be so proud of you.

I did it.

I did it, Ashley.

I did it, Ashley.

So I wanted to make this episode in tandem with other recent episodes I've made about the sort of cultural rebrand of the Republican Party.

I think especially as it's become the Trump Party.

You know, political parties aren't static in policy or cultural branding.

They're amorphous.

This has been my take, at least.

You know, Republicans were famously the party that ended slavery, as they so often love to tout as a party accomplishment.

Even though the political parties have realigned across so many different lines since then, that that's just basically meaningless posturing at this point.

Obviously, Republicans have become the white nationalist party.

Democrats, on the other hand, have gone from just, you know, eight to 10 years ago, having the slogan, no human being is illegal, to we are tougher on the border than Republicans are.

These are all just groups of people trying to accrue power and willing to rebrand as they see fit.

And I don't know, I felt like I wanted to start this episode with that premise because it makes it easier to understand how the cultural approach from Republicans towards sex as this like white Christian purity thing to this like wild, like reproductive race, we love hawk to a, like these are all just ploys at drawing as many people into the fold with whatever's popular in any given moment, I feel like.

Do you think that's a fair place to start?

Yeah, I think you're right, Matt, that we're undergoing this like really broad realignment in American politics where both parties are shifting to the right, the Republican Party shifting very dramatically to the right, and the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party rather, sort of like limping behind them, like, you know, injured and bleeding.

Yeah, like, you know, like a kid brother.

But, like, then you also get the specific sort of schizophrenic realignment of sexual politics and like sexual and family aspiration on the right, where I think there's a lot of like competing and sometimes conflicting sexual ideas emerging on the right wing right now.

And it's not totally making sense, but it's all like very gross, right?

And there's a lot of different visions of what sex and the family can and should be emerging in the MAGA right and what we might call like the Doge right or the tech right

that don't necessarily look like what we might think of as a traditionally like Reaganite, James Dobson kind of Christian family values model.

Following the right-wing, especially the right-wing culture warriors lately, it's like, okay, they want to bring back, you know, hot sexual women, but they are against contraception and recreational sex.

They want to repopulate the world with as many of Elon Musk's children as possible, but they're against having children outside of wedlock.

You need to be modest, but you need to be sexy.

And it's just like,

what are we doing here?

Yeah.

I think the whole narrative of a a capture of the Republican Party can be overstated.

But, you know, there is still kind of a professional party out there.

Or if you think of like a senator, or like if you think of like, I don't know, like a Marco Rubio, who are trying to sort of triangulate against this online right that they clearly share a lot in common with, but whose language they don't fully speak, right?

Like if you think of like the weird way Marco Rubio tried to sort of get into like masculinity contests with Donald Trump and you're like, oh my god, buddy, this is clearly a foreign language to you.

Don't even try.

This is pathetic.

But what I think you're getting as more and more of the beating heart of the right wing really is the online right.

And I think in the case of J.D.

Vance, you can sort of tell what happens when that just straight up enters the White House, is a kind of sexual politics that's far more reactive or that can identify itself or understand itself only as a reaction, right?

Now, obviously, like Moira will tell you that, you know, all of sort of 70s social conservatism was a response to the feminist movement or the civil rights movement.

But this is a response, I think, in a different way, in that it can feel joy, it can take enjoyment in its own positions only if it thinks it's offending you, right?

I think that's what Hawk Tua is all about, right?

Like, full disclosure, I hope I can speak for you, Moira.

Like, we thought that was delightful.

I know.

I thought she was kind of cute.

And now I like that she's a crypto scammer, although.

But they needed to imagine that we would be like.

How dare you spit on that thing?

Yeah.

Don't spit on that thing.

Betty Fraydan didn't die so that you could spit on that thing.

Yeah.

The left doesn't want you to spit on that thing.

I would like to take a quick break from the show to thank NordVPN for sponsoring today's episode.

As a freelancer who makes a podcast for a job, well, first of all, I don't get health insurance, which is entirely unrelated to anything, but you know I love to complain.

No, I don't get health insurance, but what I do get, fortunately, is the freedom to work from wherever I want to.

And one thing that I really love to do in this great city of New York is find different cafes and lounges to sit down and plug away in.

One risk of that, though, is that I am always using like a million different public Wi-Fi networks.

Networks that are comparatively less secure than the one that I have at home while I'm using the internet just as personally.

Internet connections that aren't encrypted, which means that things that I put into the internet while I'm using those networks like passwords or credit card numbers are much more easily hackable.

NordVPN, quite simply, is a service that protects me from that.

NordVPN encrypts your internet connection so that nobody, not the internet service provider, nor the business or restaurant or cafe, or a potential hacker, can grab your info while you're using a public Wi-Fi network.

Nord is a game changer, especially if, like me, you're a freelancer without health insurance.

Right now, NordVPN is offering listeners of a bit fruity a big discount on their service and four free months on any two-year plan.

If you'd like to check that out, and I highly recommend it, you can head over to NordVPN.com slash fruity.

That's nordvpn.com slash fruity.

Thank you so much to NordVPN for sponsoring today's episode.

And now let's get back to it.

I think there is a way in which, you know, in the 1960s and 70s, the new left had the mantle of sexual liberation, right?

And then that led us, you know, I'm abbreviating a lot of history and like conflicted internal movement movement politics, but that led us nicely into the 1980s when the AIDS crisis,

combined with the like sort of post-sexual revolution sort of backlash to the new left, made the perfect storm for a very particular and very historically contingent kind of right-wing sexual politics, right?

We had a Christian version of conservatism claiming to be defending a traditional family, which was in fact the invention of like two generations before, right?

Against what were perceived as these new and dangerous and excessive cultural trends on the left, right?

And that found its purchase in a really like kind of sadistic sexual prohibitionism, both in terms of like federal non-response to the AIDS crisis as a punishment for the perceived sexual excess of the gay male community, and then also in terms of like a really sexually repressive and sadistically so anti-abortion movement, which sort of arose at the same time in the 1980s and then the 1990s to great prominence, right?

And that's where, that's where we all kind of grew up.

I mean, there's like a decent span of age between us, but that's what was the

right in the middle, so I get to say this.

But like, as the, as the median podcast hosts of this

Zoom call,

you know, I came to political consciousness during Bush One

when the major sexual politics of the right, you know, their preoccupations were absence-only education and opposition to same-sex marriage, right?

And those were both a pretty strictly prohibitionist move.

And then something changed, like a few things have changed since 2004.

But one thing that changed was that you had an emergence of a right-wing, like sexual excess, right?

And of a model of conservative masculinity that went beyond this one-time sort of role of exerting sexual control by prohibiting sexual expression and into this different model where sexual control was exerted with sexual force, right?

Including with like sexual assault and rape.

And that was a

long-standing model that I think a lot of conservative men were taking part in, even when the primary mode of like political sexual politics on the right was more prohibitionist.

But the model of sexual force as an expression of domination was one that has existed for a long time and has been critiqued by feminists, even when it was sort of out of style with the leaders of the Republican Party, right?

It was, you know, Larry Flint, it was

Hugh Hefner, it was a kind of like lewd, like pornographer masculinity.

1980s Donald Trump, right?

1980s Donald Trump, right?

And this was something that, you know, at times had provisional alliances with like feminist movements, right?

Like Hugh Hefner was a huge donor to Planned Parenthood, not because he believed in like women's dignity and rights to control their own bodies, right?

But because he saw the feminist movement, or at least one version of the feminist movement, as a shortcut to continuing men's sexual access.

And now you have Dave Portnoy, president of Barstill Sports, who in many ways is a successor to Hefner, right?

And he is, like Hefner, pretty avowedly pro-choice for the same reasons of like continued sexual access, right?

And he's also a Trump supporter because the mantle of maximum sexual access as a marker of men's domination, as a marker of masculinity, as a marker of status and control, that has become something that the Republican Party is willing to avow.

So I think there's been a real stylistic change, right?

I think we can critique like underlying ideological similarities or continuities in terms of these being forms of sexual expression, both like what we on In Bed with a Right call like the preacher model and the pervert model.

These are both forms of sexual expression that like value ownership and control over women and over their sexuality, right?

But what it does with that control is a real stylistic difference, whether it prohibits sex or enforces it.

And I want to underline what Moira just said about this was there as an undercurrent, even in the most censorious moments of the

Reagan-Bush years, let's say.

I mean, one example, you know, one of the things I work on is the history of the term political correctness.

And that was, of course, a way for conservatives to sort of say, like, well, you don't know how to have fun anymore.

We know how to have fun.

And part of that was always being sexually belligerent towards women, right?

Like every freaking 90s stand-up special that had that title was like, well, I'm a man's man.

Like, I, you know, I slapped my wife's ass and whatever.

You know, okay, great, wonderful.

So, even at a time when the institutional Republican Party sort of, they would play footsie with this, but they wouldn't necessarily, you know, put that in their in their actual political programs, right?

One thing I think that you can use use to measure this is whether or not Republicans resign from office.

Well, I think Republicans have stopped resigning from office for anything at this point.

To be honest, kind of everybody stopped resigning from office.

People are dying in office.

Like, nobody's leaving for any reason anymore.

But to me, like, the paradigmatic case of a Republican politician falling over the kind of sexual politics of his party in the early aughts was Larry Craig.

You all remember Larry Craig?

Um, this was before some of you were born, probably.

Before some of us?

Before me.

This is before I was born.

I'm actually, I'm honestly unsure when it was.

It might have been 2005, 2006.

Oh, okay.

No, I was born.

How are you born?

I'm 26.

You are in the Zoom with someone who is, mind you, the same age as Ashley St.

Clair.

So pay respect.

Yeah.

Have some respect.

But

have you written a

children's book that's just going to crush kids' dreams?

No, but I am about to have Elon Musk's 14th child, so.

Just don't expect any money.

No, I just did it for the sex.

Oh, I'm just kidding.

I can't even make that joke.

I can't even make that joke.

Oh, God.

The amount of money in the world neither exists nor is even possessed by Elon Musk.

Sorry, I veered you off topic.

You were saying Larry Craig.

Yeah, so Larry Craig, right, like a Republican senator from, I want to say Idaho, big kind of values conservative, gets tripped up in a bust at the Minneapolis-St.

Paul airport, I I want to say, by his wide stance in the sense that he slid one of his shoes over to

the other stall.

He was

cruising in an airport bathroom.

With men?

Oh, yeah.

Nice.

Yeah, I guess

does heterosexual mall cruising exist?

No, he was, the implication was he, he made contact with an undercover officer.

And also, I have to say that, like, frankly, the fact that there was a police department staking out an airport bathroom, like...

yeah, ridiculous.

They used to do that, yeah.

And he resigned, and it was this kind of classic case of like he was a homophobe, there was a clear implication he was gay.

Um, everyone in the community was like, Well, yeah, like that's why you would slide your foot over to someone else's stall, it's really nothing else.

And he would come up with all these excuses that, like, I suppose would make sense to like the church lady audience that like had never cruised for sex in a public restroom.

But it was a clear case of them kind of taking their own values i mean seriously but like they were ensnared in the in the logic that they were applying to other people right and i think that is the big difference to today that the the gendered logics that they impose on other people only apply to them to a very very limited extent they themselves part of what masculinity is is not being fettered in this way that was not true of larry craig should we talk about classically abby she's so crazy your bread and butter is like, oh, you guys are so academic.

You guys are so smart with all of this like sexual, political, feminist theory stuff.

I love talking about influencers.

I want to bring my specialty to the table.

Do it.

Do it.

Let's get it.

You are the Leonardo da Vinci of talking about influencers.

I have learned, you know, the reason why Tati Westbrook means anything to me is just all thanks to you.

I'm so happy I can have that impact on people.

So, you know, you the listener, you talking to you.

If you listen to this podcast, you know that I often tell stories about culture and politics through stories about online influencers.

This episode will be no different.

And I want to talk about someone who I have spent years paying attention to.

And that is a one classically Abby.

Hello, beautiful ladies and welcome to today's video where we're going to be talking about how to dress modestly and still look smoking hot.

Hello, beautiful ladies, and welcome to today's video where we're going to be talking about seven ways to be an incredibly classic woman.

Hello, classic crew, and welcome to today's video where we're going to be talking about five femininity mistakes I've made.

What do you know about Classically Abby?

Classically Abby is

a far-right, highly religious, I believe she's Jewish, influencer who is, she's kind of, like, some of her content is what I would consider like mostly like straight influencer content.

You know, like a lot of what I would call like women in the trad wife space, she has crossover appeal where she gets.

the viewers in with something very mainstream, right?

Like, this is a recipe.

This is my makeup look.

This is, you know,

a way that I like to spend the evening with my family, you know, and then comes in with this kind of insane, like, ideological

justification for why she does her makeup this way or why she spends her, like, like why she makes the recipe this way or why she spends her time with her family in this particular like sequence of activities or styles.

And it's, it's like, oh, you really didn't have to go there.

Like insane in the sense that she's like, you know, space lasers or like mind control or like, is it more like seed oils?

Like, what, like, there's so many flavors of crazy.

What, which flavor of crazy do we get?

Allow me.

Adrienne, allow me.

Walk, walk with me here.

You're totally right, Maura.

Like, she'll make just like relatively, it's like, you know, it's like, okay, like, and now I'm putting on brown eyeshadow and mascara.

And it's like, okay, we all put on brown eyeshadow, mascara, whatever.

And she'll be like, but I'd never wear, you know, pink eyeshadow and false lashes like these crazy promiscuous women of today.

And it's like, whoa.

So I put Classically Abby in here because she is, to me, the early 2020s example of a truly conservative, like Republican influencer.

She is like, let me explain.

I'm so happy I can finally talk about this.

It's like,

it's like standing up after six years of sitting down.

In 2019, classically Abby joins YouTube as someone who's clearly trying to just be like a makeup influencer, like a Tati Westbrook type.

I have these screenshots of some of her first videos.

And they're like classic winter look winged eyeliner, high-end makeup try-on, you know, Anastasia Beverly Hills eyeshadow palette review.

And these videos view-wise weren't really getting much traction.

6.2k views?

Why are we talking about this lady?

Well,

I'm so glad you asked.

After a year or two of trying to no avail to be just like a makeup YouTuber, Classically Abby releases a two-minute and 48-second long banger of a video called Conservative Women, It's Our Time.

Let's take the culture back.

This is one of my favorite YouTube videos, and I thought we could just watch it together, if that's okay.

Please.

Okay.

Social media, celebrities, influencers, and YouTubers.

So much of the time, it feels like one worldview, one position is tolerated.

Many of them don't say outright what their politics are.

Many of them do.

None of them need to, and none of them will say what I'm about to.

I'm a conservative influencer.

Being a conservative woman in today's day and age is not easy.

You'll be told that you have internalized misogyny.

You'll be told that you don't care about other women's well-being.

You'll be told that you aren't a real woman.

But none of that is true.

Conservative women are the backbone of American society.

We prioritize marriage and children, support our husbands, and support ourselves.

We help our husbands grow, not by obeying their every word, but by bolstering their strengths and tamping down their weaknesses.

We fight for what's right, even when the world tells us that everyone should do what they want, regardless of consequences.

We stand hand in hand with men, not against them.

And we shouldn't have to remain silent about our views, like I did.

For years, you've been forgotten and left behind as magazines and movies decided you're outdated.

You've been told that the best way to be a woman is to act more like a man.

You've been told that you don't care about women because you care about a child in her womb.

You've been told that sleeping around is empowering, but waiting till marriage is ridiculous.

You've been told that believing in God is passe.

You've been silenced about your views, but not anymore.

Let's take back the culture so women can be women.

Let's talk about how to dress fashionably and conservatively.

Let's talk about how to do your makeup for a night at the opera, not a night at the club.

Let's talk about life from a conservative perspective, and let's not be afraid to do it.

Did she say a night at the opera and not at the club?

Yeah.

It's so self-serious.

She's like, I've been censored.

No more.

With the like dramatic, like Celine Dion piano going.

Yeah.

It's like, it's a masterpiece.

She's so fascinating to me.

Immediately after this video comes out and it goes like pretty viral.

It has like a million views.

She immediately turns into what I wrote in my notes as if Phyllis Schlafly was a YouTuber.

I mean, here are some of her video titles.

Why you should dress modestly, get the attention you deserve.

Why WAP is degrading to women.

Dear ladies, it's good to act like a lady.

Ladies, sex before marriage is ruining your life.

These videos got like actually kind of a lot of views for a while.

But if you were there at the time, you would remember that it was basically just because everyone was clowning on this lady.

Like, I don't think she ever accrued much of a serious audience.

And when she was getting the most views was basically when people were turning all of her videos into memes.

Because like you said, Moira, it's so self-serious.

It's hard to see her as someone you would like genuinely enjoy watching and consuming content from, even if you are actually a conservative.

Well, I think like one of the things that is characteristic of the new conservatism's online style is like a lot of irreverence, a lot of like joking.

And like, that's not really her vibe, right?

She's very righteous in this way that's like almost an inverse of like the self-righteous woke scold she's like trying to antagonize, right?

She's taking on the same stylistic mode of like, I'm a brave truth teller with my point of view, which is not where the online right has been deriving a lot of its power.

I also think it's really like hard, particularly for women,

maybe in general, but I'm thinking specifically on the right right now, to like be a figure of authority, like moral and intellectual authority, which is clearly how she sees herself, right?

She's not seeing herself as like an imp who's like there to gussy up your pieties in the way that like a lot of conservative influencers want to be.

You know, if she was a little meaner, I think it might have worked out better for her.

But she was like, she took herself too seriously.

I mean, I think the Philosophic Comparisons app, but I think that's where it breaks down.

She's not particularly campy, right?

Like, she's not a vamp.

I mean, like, oh, you think WAP might be degrading to women?

Like, so did like every right-wing influencer on YouTube.

Like, you're never going to attain the dizzy heights of like their insane outpourings.

Um, so why do you even bother, right?

Like there is a there's a real button-up quality to this set that I think Moira is right, like really just it doesn't play so well either on YouTube or, frankly, in modern conservative circles today.

Right.

And part of why I followed classically Abby from afar for so long was that her views steadily declined to virtually nothing by the end of 2024, which is when a few months ago, she retired from YouTube.

She was like, I'm done.

She was only getting a couple thousand views a video.

And in that video where she retires, she talks about how she's become a mother and she wants to focus on that.

And obviously, that's a completely valid reason.

First of all, you don't need a valid reason to stop posting on YouTube.

In fact, we should all probably stop posting on YouTube.

So good for her.

But it's way easier to leave something when it isn't really much of a thing at all.

And it was clear by the end, if at any point, that she was not really making much money from this like i think the long and short of it is just that this wasn't really a successful venture for her in the end do we know who she is like what's her background like why is she what brought her like well she's ben shapiro's sister what yeah

we've been talking for how long sorry

jesus what the oh you can tell she looks exactly like now i'm seeing it oh my god i can really see it the eyebrows i will say this last night when i was getting ready to record today, I was watching some of her videos.

And to do that faster, I was listening to them in two times speed.

And when you listen to her in two times speed, she acts on like her brother.

Can I show an example?

Today, we're talking about five pieces of clothing that will catch a man's eye for all the rest of the world.

Oh, yeah, that's him.

That's him.

All right.

You know, there's Ben.

There's Ben.

Every time I saw Classically Abby, it was people commenting on her.

being sexually attractive though and like particularly on like the size of her chest which is like very exaggerated right Yeah, people were pretty gross about her, and it was like clearly what she was aggressively not trying to do, right?

And it seemed like they were trying to take this woman who had gotten the conservative heterosexuality sort of wrong and trying to take her against her will back into that model in a, in a way that was clearly like meant to antagonize and degrade her, right?

And it was like, if she had wanted to do this, because she's trying to go for kind of a, she's not a Christian, but like a conservative, religious, conservative, modesty, censorious model of sexuality, right?

And that's not really what right-wing women are doing right now.

They've got their tits out.

Like every trad wife has herself in a little corset where her tits are out like they're on a, like a platter, you know?

Um, it's this vocabulary or talking points about, you know, the primacy of marriage and motherhood and abandoning your birth control paired with this like kind of vulgar imagery that is clearly like very sexually suggestive borrowing from the pornographic you know there's um maybe it's mixed messages or conflicting signals or maybe it's the emergence of a synthesis between like an emphasis on particularly like reproduction child rearing the home on the one hand and like an aggressive mandate of like sexual like ostentatious sexuality on the other Moira and I did an episode on the real lives of Mormon wives, and that was a kind of connection that we really noticed in that show after six hours of research.

That basically, yeah, it combined traditional locations for women with like, yeah, this very porny imagination overall, right?

Like just like the way they dressed, the way they talked.

very much sort of seeming to exist for a male gaze.

At the same time, right?

Like it was still largely within the confines of the LDS church.

I just remember seeing classically Abby's views dwindle.

And the very naive conclusion that I came to was like, you know, the internet and social media is just full of young progressive people.

And there just isn't room for a right-wing influencer like her because nobody wants to hear this shit about dressing modestly.

And I think I was right that mostly nobody wants to hear this shit about dressing modestly, but I was very, very wrong about the young internet not having room for right-wing influencers.

Obviously, now the biggest influencers on social media helped Trump get elected, but it's just, it's not a Phyllis Schlafly type.

They're not anti-sex.

And the thing is, a lot of them are grifters now.

You know, the biggest stars in right-wing social media are willing to adapt to whatever the thing is that they have to say, whether that be about trans people or Elon Musk or immigrants or pronouns or whatever.

Whereas like classically Abby, just like, it seems like very earnestly believes in like the value of like wearing like maxi dresses or whatever.

I think, I think you're onto something here, Matt.

I think she has a set of values that I think are wrong, but they exist for her whether or not I'm offended, right?

Whereas a lot of these right-wing influencers now, they seem to be just trying to trigger the libs and sort of taking on whatever position will get them that reaction.

And there's no like, there's no they're there.

There's no foundational value system beyond like you know kind of an admiration for domination that they're like really going to try and promote into the world they're like i'm trying to get people mad at me online i'm trying to make a woman with an asymmetrical haircut angry and that is their goal more than like advancing something they actually believe in is their goal we've been talking a lot about trad wives i've been talking a lot about trad wives on this podcast lately and The thing is, Abby Shapiro, I think, was making like actual trad wife content.

Like she was actually talking earnestly about like wearing sweaters and staying home and raising children in a way that didn't have the flair and style and honestly, like oftentimes campiness that we see from a lot of successful Trad Wife influencers now.

Which, speaking of this sort of Trad Wife content in contrast with Classically Abby, I want to send you guys a tweet and get your reaction to it.

So this is a tweet from a right-wing influencer called Elijah Schaefer, who tweeted this video of a woman with the caption, this type of content awakens in a man something so primal, not even an OnlyFans model in lingerie could compete.

And then it is, as far as I can tell, an OnlyFans model, but in an apron.

Yeah.

It is a, I'm going to just describe what I see.

It is a very young looking white woman in an apron and a headscarf that is sort of like tied around her very long blonde hair.

And she's got a little ceramic dish full of eggs.

And she's like looking behind her at a dirty yard full of chickens and sort of like giggling.

And it is a trad wife fantasy of a, I gotta say, like maximum 12, 14-year-old girl.

This is a very young girl, you know, living this kind of like little house on the prairie cosplay.

But he is like specifically trying

to prioritize or like create a hierarchy of womanhood, right?

Like the trad wife is above the OnlyFans model, even though we see both of these kinds of like positions of femininity being like taken up by right-wing women.

These are the two things women are allowed to be.

You can be Madonna or whore.

So Wheeler.

There's nothing in between.

Do you ever interact with like a barista?

Like, do you have, you got, you got siblings?

Do you got any friends?

Like, nope.

It's just OnlyFan models and

Egg Lady.

To me, it's like classically Abby was like the actual trad wife, and no one actually cares about that because it's not fun or interesting to watch.

And then this is like the pornified trad wife.

This almost like reminds me, like, brings me back to like Ashley St.

Clair, right?

Who clearly thought that there would be some like after

compensation in her deal with Elon Musk, right?

Like, she thought she was going to have a happy ending, right?

But there's no real ending for right-wing women in this vision of conservative sexual politics, right?

There's like no way for them to get old.

There's no way for them to like live a life that is esteemed as honorable and dignified in the minds of right-wing men.

Like there's no option for them to be anything beyond like a fantasy gratification tool, which is ultimately like a very short-term proposition, right?

Like living day-to-day as traditionalist housewife is, I think, as you mentioned, Matt, like kind of boring.

This is not something that people really want to spend a lot of time looking at, right?

What they are much more interested in are these like snapshots that evoke a fantasy and provide like a degree of gratification, which they can like retroactively build an ideology around, but they're not actually going to reward the people who try to live that way.

Quick break from the show to thank longtime partner and friend of this show, Blue Land.

Did you know that an estimated 5 billion with a B plastic hand soap and cleaning bottles are thrown out every single year?

I mean, Jesus Christ, how much are you guys cleaning your homes?

No, no, I'm kidding.

We love a clean home, we love a clean home, but there has to be an alternative to the constant churn of plastic cleaning bottles, right?

Not to mention, most of those products are, you know, 90% water, making them heavier to ship, meaning more unnecessary carbon emissions in the process of getting those products to your door.

Blue Land has presented itself as the premier new alternative to wasteful cleaning.

Blue Land makes things simple.

You get a refillable forever bottle, which are very beautiful by the way, and tablets for whatever cleaning solution you want.

Hand soap, window cleaner, bathroom cleaner, you name it.

You fill up your forever bottle with water you have at home, drop in a tablet, and you're all set.

And when you run out, you just fill up the bottle again with water at home and drop in a new tablet.

Those refill tablets start at just $2.25 a tablet.

So not only are you being kinder to the earth, but perhaps also kinder to your wallet.

If you would like to streamline a more sustainable home cleaning process, it might be time to look into Blue Land.

I did at this point a while ago, and personally, I've never looked back.

Blue Land has a special offer right now for listeners of this podcast.

You can get 15% off your first order by going to blueland.com slash fruity.

That's blue land.com slash fruity.

Thank you as always to Blueland for making these episodes possible.

And now, let's get back to the show.

So classically, Abby kind of fizzled out.

And for whatever it's worth, I hope she's having fun being a mother and wearing her beige sweaters.

Good for her.

But the biggest right-wing influencer women today, they resemble Hoctua a lot more than they do classically Abby in their approach to sexual politics because they aren't really conservative, at least not in the way that Abby was.

Do you guys remember how Hoctua became kind of like a right-wing thing?

Yeah.

And that seems like a particular moment to me because when I first encountered Hoctua, like Adrian and I, we talked about like, oh, this is kind of delightful.

Like she's silly.

She's got this beautiful Tennessee accent.

You know, there's like something kind of wholesome about her enthusiasm, which seems like, you know, playful in this way.

Like in the clip itself, like I didn't really see political content aside from like, like, you know, irreverent sexual joy, right?

Or like playful sexual joy, but that that expression of heterosexual enthusiasm by like a blonde white girl with a southern accent was understood by the far right.

And I think you're, you're right, Matt, that there's something about these people that makes them like far right and right wing without being conservative.

And it was understood by that group of people as being coextensive with their values.

Like, yes, a white girl spitting on a dick is our American dream.

You know, like that was a really interesting moment because they seem to be taking not all of sexuality, I would say.

Like they're clearly not this enthusiastic about like, I think the kind of sex like people like us have, you know, but like, um

yeah, I can say that they're not.

Though they kind of are, because I will say, not, sorry, not to cut you off, but it's like they do think about gay sex a lot because they're always yelling at me about it.

Like anytime I say something they find disagreeable.

about anything, I always get a million tweet mentions that are like, yeah, well, how does it feel going home and sucking cock at night?

And I'm like, like, first of all, fine.

Thanks for asking.

Second of all, why are you thinking about it?

But continue.

There's like a way in which like white heterosexuality of this like particular genre wherein the eroticization of domination and the like proud vulgarity of like public sexuality, those have become right-wing coded.

And I think, I think it is like a pretty narrow vision of what sex is that they are in, that they're enthusiastic about, but they understand it as the most like mainstream, normative, and in some sense, like most true form of sex that they're trying to like appropriate for their own ends.

But part of it is also that they have to imagine a left that hates sex, right?

I think this is a generation that has been reared on conservative caricatures of feminists, right?

And this idea that the woke left hates you.

This is the Sidney Sweeney's boobs are somehow a sign that woke died, right?

And you're like,

they can't admit to liking anything anymore.

All they wanted to say was, I find this attractive.

I find this woman attractive.

Fine, good for you.

But it can't be just that.

It has to be a political statement.

It has to be part of the civilizational battle against wokeness.

And it's like, could it be that this Hoctua girl is just kind of infectious?

Giggly drunks are just like a kind of a wonderful thing anyway.

They have a certain charm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And like, and we were all kind of charmed by it the fucking end, you know, is that, is that possible?

Or does it have to be about the great civilizational struggle again?

But, like, they need to tell themselves that it is about this other thing.

And I think part of it is that the people who are purveying a lot of this are not actually having all that much sex, frankly.

Right.

Yeah.

Wow.

Clock that, Adrian.

No one who is having, who is engaging in a healthy sex life, just going to go out and say it, talks about sex the way that these, like, especially right-wing male influencers talk about sex on Twitter.

I will say, I might, I might be like, you know, a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail, but I do think Adrian is right that to some extent, this is about like anti-Me Too backlash, right?

Like, there was for like a very brief moment, a resurgence of the kind of like anti-rape and anti-sexual harassment feminism that the like Dave Portnoy's and Hugh Hefner's of the world have found least easily assimilatable to their own ends, right?

And there was a moment where those conversations about sexual violence sort of verged on like a broader critique of heterosexuality itself, right?

Like, well, it kind of seems like a lot of guys just sort of presume access to our bodies without really thinking about like what we want or what might be fun for us.

You know, those conversations were starting to happen.

And I think the right-wing embrace of like an ostentatious, vulgar, like exaggerated heterosexuality is partly like a rebuke to the feminism of me too that wanted to like look at the ways that sex itself can be weaponized against women.

I also wanted to flag like their weird insistence on like exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics.

Like the like visual eradication of androgyny is something I've noticed on in right-wing influencers.

Like the women have really long hair and really big boobs and like dramatic makeup that makes them look

strange and, you know, a very specific kind of plastic surgery.

You know, they all look like Kimberly Gulf Oil now.

Yes.

Yeah.

And then the men are also doing weird stuff to their bodies, right?

Like they are taking steroids to get really muscular.

Like you cannot.

find a right wing account that has not face-tuned that one picture of J.D.

Vance to make him look like more masculine and like a little more angular.

And so I think part of what they're doing is they're trying to like create also also a visual vocabulary in which the sexes look different on their screens, more different on their screens than they tend to in real life.

Like in real life, secondary sexual characteristics or sexed bodies are a lot more like, there's just a way more variation than there is in this like visual vocabulary.

And not everybody's secondary sex characteristics are that exaggerated.

And also there's a bunch of like queer and trans people who don't exactly look like they fit very firmly into one sex box or the other, you know, and that's completely disallowed, right?

It's this insistence on embodied sexual difference that then goes on to inform like this social sexual difference that is very, very important.

And that's what trans investigation is all about, right?

Like anybody that doesn't have that insane Fox News blowout and it doesn't have, you know, highly exaggerated boobage, it's basically like, could this be a man?

Right.

No, no, it could just be, you know, there are 8 billion people on this planet planet and people look all kinds of ways and it takes it takes so much money and effort for like a regular cis human woman to look like the right-wing women look like it is like a very labor intensive process to look like kimberly gofoyle or melania trump or any of these ladies 100 000 and that's why actually at the top of my outline here i i put a picture of phyllis schlafly who you listeners unaware she was like this second wave anti-feminist like she was all about, like, we don't need the Equal Rights Amendment.

Women can be liberated through work in the home.

And she dressed exactly like how you think she would dress.

She dressed like how classically Abby aspires to dress.

She's wearing these like buttoned-up coats to the top, and she honestly just looks like a, you know, well-put-together, like, dowdy old white lady, similar to like Nancy Reagan or any of the sort of like models of conservative femininity of that era.

And it's in stark contrast to, like you said, the Kimberly Gullfoils and the Melania Trumps, who are distinctly almost like pornified.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's highly artificial in the look.

Yeah.

And like you've placed her in the outline that we're all like stealing glances at as we chat.

Like next to this contemporary right-wing, like kind of thought woman who's got like

very low-cut top.

Sorry, oh, you know who she is.

She is an OnlyFans model named Ava Louise, who famously went to a Trump rally and like flashed her tits and I think was escorted out or something.

Yeah, you can see that kind kind of happening.

It's like a very low-cut white top, very long hair, like a really heavily made-up and like surgically altered face.

You know, it's a um, it is a real night and day look in just terms of like, like, I don't think that Phyllis Schlafly was especially low-maintenance.

Like, I'm looking at this helmet hair she's got from the 70s, and it's like,

like, there was work being put in.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, but the style is different, and the extent and the character of the work is different as well.

100%.

And I feel like a lot of what we're saying ties into, wow, this entire podcast is just held together by bad tweets.

Thank you, Ian Miles Chong.

I owe you my life.

Like you were saying, Adrian, it's like so much of this like sexual aggression that I feel like we're now seeing on the right is framed as like a backlash to like, I guess, the woke puritanical anti-sex left, which is such a weird perversion of everybody's beliefs.

It's also, weren't we supposed to be groomers groomers or whatever?

Like, I mean, like, like oversexed, undersexed, like, just make up your fucking mind what lie you want to tell about us.

We don't have time today to explain who Ian Miles Chong is.

That is a different episode.

Let me know if you want it.

But honestly, I don't even know if I do.

But Ian Miles Chong, this like right-wing Twitter influencer friend of Elon Musk, tweeted this a video of like a

football cheerleader.

It looks like Dallas Cowboys.

Okay, work, Moira.

Come on.

The lesbian has to bring the understanding of sports.

Yeah.

Well, she's in like, she's got, she's blonde.

She's like a tan white girl.

She's got her back kind of arched in these like little white booty shorts and like white cowboy boots and like a top that doesn't make logistical sense to me.

But she's in a cheerleading uniform, you know?

The caption from Ian Miles Chong, our favorite Malaysian, is, this is everything the hideous left hates.

And then it's just like a video of a cheerleader.

This is kind of weird thing about anti-body positivity that they've all gotten into.

Michael Hobbes, I think, has pointed this out a couple of times that they've sort of talked themselves into pointing out that they find certain women hot in order to point out that some people are hot and others are not, which apparently is like a huge news flash to the woke.

left or whatever.

But it is ultimately like make trying to make some kind of shitty point about body positivity.

But I think it gives you kind of a sense that like you have to reconstitute, you have to like sort of like understanding a chess match after you've walked in halfway through.

Like, I don't even, how did any of these pieces get where they are?

Like, what is, what is actually going on?

Yeah, the, the sense that like male heterosexual desire itself is now a position of like defiance and has like

yeah

got like the moral authority of the underdog to be hot for a cheerleader and i'm like i don't know this strikes me as kind of hegemonic i'm just gonna like i'm just gonna put it out there have you you like yeah have you like watched a movie in the last 70 years yeah or like encountered another human being and i think this goes back to the point that you guys were making that it seems like to get the conclusions about the world and how it works their actual real life social lives must be so like warped and impoverished like what kind of life are you living if you think that like you're a brave truth teller for saying that a cheerleader is hot like i just don't understand it well i think it's pretty clear that ian miles chong does not necessarily have a rich life outside of Twitter.

But it is interesting that these

ideas that these kind of like terminally online, weird right-wing internet gremlins make about like, oh yeah, I'm actually the underdog for thinking that a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader is sexy, how that trickles into like mainstream attitudes within the right today.

It's like they won everything.

Like you won.

You control the government.

The cultural institutions are all capitulating to your agenda.

Like you've got all the trends.

You've you've got all the money, you've got all the power, and you still want to be the underdog.

You're still being oppressed by that one Dylan Mulvaney Instagram Bud Light.

They'll never get over the fact that she drank a beer.

Isn't that an unheadline recently?

New star in the conservative movement, now just a guy doing Hitler's loot and crying at the same time.

I'm like,

that's what it is.

It's like, I rule everything.

Why am I still a victim?

I'm like, I don't know.

It feels like you're addicted to both of these positions.

What they're addicted to, I think, is twofold, right?

One, if they ever became fully cognizant of the degree of their own power and dominance in the society, and we're back with Elon Musk, there might be certain responsibilities that come with it.

Right?

They don't want that, can't have that.

Therefore, if you're always the contrarian, if you're the shit poster, if you're just, right?

I mean, Elon Musk is the richest man in the world and still seems to think he's somehow the underdog.

He still seems to somehow think he's just like an online shit poster.

And it's like, no, dude, you own the fucking company.

They want the power.

They are not okay

then having to have any kind of responsibility.

Something that I put in here under this Ian Miles Chong tweet about the cheerleader being hot is it's just like between this, the Hawk Tua thing, this, I think what you said about Dave Portnoy being the successor to the Hugh Hefner throne, which is true, you have this idea that on the right now, there is this like sexual politic of domination, but simultaneously, like they still are the party policy-wise of, you know, being anti-contraception, anti-abortion

by virtue of these things, anti-recreational sex.

And it's like, how can you be the party of sex and fun and young, beautiful people and also have all of those policies?

Like, I guess for me, I'm like, are people not seeing the contradictions here?

Are people just buying into the vibes and not looking at what the policies are where does that shake out as maura sort of started out saying i think there's a promise being made here is a contractual offer being made and i think that for young men this is a pretty tempting offer right the fun without the responsibility right

the children without having to raise them the family as a kind of emanation of your own success rather than something that you know, as someone who has a family himself, like takes a lot of work, but you don't have to have any of that.

Now, for what the women get out of it, I think is a little bit more complicated, but it is this patriarchal compact.

It is essentially the promise that you can have a location, a very firmly established location in their world, as long as you do your part.

And that if you deviate from that location, society will reign untold violence on your head.

I think that's the, right, Mara, would you say that that's the, that's the offer that's being made here?

Like, you can, this is a protection racket, essentially.

This is, this is sexuality as a protection racket.

Yeah, this is like when the mob says, you know, you've got a lovely place here.

It'd be a shame if something happened to it, right?

Like, this is sexual compliance demanded from women as a condition of their continued presence in the social world, as a condition of their exemption from violence, as a condition of their material provision and personal security.

And I think what I would like to say to the Abby St.

Clair's of the world and to the, you know, those

Ashley.

Oh, God.

You are mixing up our conservative influencers.

Classically, Ashley St.

Clair.

What I would say to the Ashley St.

Clair's of the world is that, like, the guy who's threatening you with compliance or with humiliation or with degradation is not also going to hold up his end of the bargain to be nice to you if only you cooperate, right?

Like this is not a trustworthy set of actors here.

Can we also pause on the fact, I feel like we kind of yada yada this part.

Like why is fucking Miley Annopoulos back?

Yeah, didn't he have like a pederasty scandal?

Yeah, he did.

And get sort of shoo-shooed.

But like, I mean, now there's a, there's a like large-scale embrace of, you know, like child marriage and anything like age of consent laws on the right, at least for straight people, right?

So it seems like there would be some extension of that grace or that logic of domination to a gay man.

Also, just like you can just claim that, like, anything you've been accused of is insofar as like sexual predation or anything like that, you could just claim that there's a witch hunt against you and that the media is out to get you and that you're a martyr for the right-wing cause and cancel culture and like they'll rescue you out of the trenches with a podcasting deal.

Also, I believe he's straight now, or he was.

Oh, shit.

Oh, thank God.

Yes.

Big win for the community there.

So I have a couple of wrap-up questions here that will maybe help us tie this up with a bow.

Maybe not.

We'll see.

But what I wrote is: if Republicans are no longer the party of traditional family values, which I think anybody would be very hard-pressed to say that they are, then socially and culturally speaking, like, what are they the party of?

And also,

was the family values thing always a smokescreen and now they've just given up on it?

I think like the simplest answer is that the Republicans are and have long been the party of like domination, right?

And of like sexual ownership and control.

And it's just that the style of that ownership and control, the style of that domination has changed.

So like when we look at like the censorious family values conservatism that, you know, seemed to be anti-sex and contrast it with this like aggressively pro-sex, vulgar, like wounded heterosexuality of the contemporary right.

I think what we see is that both of these are about like the control of women, the use of women's bodies as a site upon which men can prove their own virility and domination.

And that is actually something that's been really constant.

I think asking whether the right is pro or anti-sex can kind of miss the mark and keep us from seeing that what they are is very pro sex as a means of like domination and control and anti any kind of sexuality that might like elude or subvert those mechanisms of control.

So it's not really like, are they for or against sex?

It's like, what are they, what do they want sexuality to do?

And that, I think, is pretty clear.

I want to make my last little follow-up here is just that in the 2024 election, so many groups shifted more to the right with how they voted.

And women, by and large, were among those groups.

You described that the politics of sexual domination, you know, used to be stylized through this purity culture, where it's now being stylized through this, like, we must have as much sex as men want, and how maybe now that the purity culture has been stripped away, that women might feel more freed by that style change.

But I always like to end this podcast on like a, here's what you should take away and like perhaps to a voting booth with you.

I think you would argue that women have not been freed by this change.

And perhaps Ashley St.

Clair could be the tragic mascot of that.

She's a really tragic case.

You know, the core lesson I like take from this shift is that like neither prohibited sex nor mandated sex are like the source of freedom for women.

Like what we actually have to do is imagine sexuality as something that somebody else doesn't get to control for you or impose on you or forbid for you, right?

It has to be a more personal and more autonomous journey, for lack of a better word, you know.

And so, I, what I would encourage people to do is like start thinking about what like real, like truly free sexual expression would look like for women and really for all of us, right?

One where we're not trying to comply with the demands of any kind of like patriarchal or like sexually rapracious masculinity, one where we're not trying to like avoid violence by like giving or abstaining from sex, but one where we have a real genuine freedom to both say yes and to say no or to say what about something else.

You know, that's kind of an unsatisfying, like, I hate it when like left nonfiction ends this way.

It's like, well, we have to imagine differently, but like we do

because like we don't have a model for sexuality outside these paradigms that hurt people.

No, 100%.

I mean, it's like, oh,

I have a joke that's going to cheapen this so much.

Oh my God, go for it.

But I always have to end on a chuckle.

But it's like, you literally, no one is being freed by the insistence that you spit on that thing.

We need to imagine a world where we have the choice to spit on that thing or not spit on that thing and be liberated by that choice.

You know, like you can have, you can have sex with people that you like and

you don't have to like prove your masculinity by only doing it for, you know, two and a half minutes.

I would

encourage men also to think a little outside the box.

Try it.

You might like it.

I mean, it'll be a little gay, but you might like it.

I had sex for three and a half minutes and all I got was this stupid t-shirt.

Thank you so much for having us, Matt.

This was really fun.

I feel like I learned a lot.

You learned a lot.

Oh my God.

The two of you are so brilliant.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for being here.

I choose these episode topics by just, you know, my little cultural fixations that oftentimes I feel like I can't answer.

And so I go looking for people who have a better handle on at least how to think about answering those questions than I do.

And the two of you are just brilliant.

If you who are listening to this want more of Moira and Adrian, you should definitely go listen to their podcast, In Bed with the Right.

It'll be linked in the description.

And I'm so happy that you chose to listen to this podcast today.

I hope that you are doing whatever you need to do to take care of yourself because we all need to see each other make it to the other side of this, and we will.

I love you so much, and until next time, stay fruity.