Episode 68 -- Republican Makeup with Jessica DeFino

You reject your humanity for the sake of becoming this godlike figure with a godlike power.

And that really is what Republicans are doing, particularly in this gender-affirming care space.

They're saying, I

am a woman, so I am allowed to use these interventions, and you are not.

And you're really taking up this sort of like godlike authority.

And I think this pull to get rid of like all traces of human life on your face really is part of that sort of performance of authority.

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dot.

And I'm Warren Dodd again.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So Adrienne, today for this very special episode, we are talking about a little trend, both in life and on TikTok, called Republican makeup.

What do you know about Republican makeup?

Nothing.

Okay, great.

Literally nothing.

I'm so sorry.

I mean, I saw the topic on the schedule and I sort of conjured some people.

I was like, oh, you know, there's like, well, I know about like Fox News hair.

So I was like, oh, okay, like it would stand to reason.

But that's literally as far as I got.

I got to be honest.

Okay.

Well, Republican makeup is a TikTok trend and a hashtag that arose from the fact that, you know, I don't know if you've noticed, but Republicans look kind of

different than us mere mortals.

I'm thinking like, you know, iconic, high-profile Republican women like Kimberly Guilfoyle, Melania Trump, Christy Noam, our new Homeland Security Secretary, Congresswoman Nancy Mace.

They've got a particular

look.

It's very specific.

There is a lot of fillers, especially on the lips and cheeks.

There's usually like a nude lip.

That's right.

There is foundation that's like kind of the wrong shade,

very large, kind of feathery, false eyelashes often.

And there is a very specific hair, the Fox News hair, which is these waist-length coiled waves, right?

And in our doc, I've put in a couple of iconic examples.

I've got Kiberi Girafoil at the RNC.

I've got Laura Loomer, the sort of like right-wing troll who's had, you know, some procedures done to look a very specific way.

I've got like kind of this picture of Christy Noam at an ice raid doing her, you know, Gestapo Barbie.

Honestly, when I looked at that in the planning deck, I was like, well, did this like migrate over here from our planning for the AI slot one?

Because this looks like someone was like, Chat GPT, generate Christy Noam in an ice uniform, but this is really her.

No, this is a photo from an early morning ice raid, I believe in New York City, where she showed up at the crack of dawn in full glam, right?

Her hair is on point.

And, you know, we're not the only ones who have noticed.

There is a TikTok trend, hashtag Republican makeup, in which women, liberal women, have begun to parody their right-wing look with women doing their own makeup in dramatic Republican fashion.

JD Vance is like the patient zero of eyeliner abuse, yes.

And here to discuss this trend with us, both Republican makeup, the makeup, and Republican makeup, the sort of media phenomenon and the hashtag is Jessica DeFino, one of my favorite writers who is a critic of beauty and wellness, but also the author of the absolutely excellent substack, The Review of Beauty, and I think one of the smartest people writing about gender right now.

Jessica, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm so excited to be here.

So let's get into it.

Jessica, what is this trend?

Hashtag Republican makeup.

So Republican makeup, I believe it was started by this influencer on TikTok, Suzanne Lambert, who first pointed it out.

And she described the aesthetic as, quote, drained, dusty, and matte.

So the idea is that Republican makeup is very overdone.

It's over the top.

It's under-blended.

Like you can really see the lines of foundation, the lines of contour.

It's very conspicuous.

So the look is kind of like cakey.

The lips are overlined.

The eyebrows are like giant and blocky and overdrawn.

There's very severe severe eyeliner.

Like it's definitely sort of a caricature of femininity, but worn sort of for the everyday.

Yeah, it does look very, the skin looks quite dry.

It uses a lot of product.

The foundation is put on very thick, and it's often kind of an orangey color.

I guess maybe in a nod to Donald Trump himself,

the eyebrows look incredibly artificial.

It's like a solid,

like almost like a marker streak of eyebrow instead of the like more naturalistic like drawing of little hairs that you see some people do.

Right.

It's a very peachy blush, at least on this one that I'm looking at.

It seems to be like an interesting contrast between like the pink of the blush and the more like yellow, warm, orangey tone of the foundation.

Yeah, there's probably some like contour and bronzer going on underneath the blush as well.

So you can see like these distinct shades like popping out from under one another.

Yeah, I don't totally know like, like technically, I don't know enough about makeup to know what these women are doing, but I'm like, oh yeah, you look bad.

You know?

Yes.

It's like, it's very over the top and it's taking a lot of cosmetic trends that I would say were really big in the 2010s, like in the Kardashian era.

Yeah.

And kind of like dialing them up to 11.

So I think part of the kind of like critique and what people are having fun with here is that the look is kind of passe.

Yeah.

This was kind of how everyone famous looked like, you know, 10 years ago.

I mean, the Trump echoes are hard to miss.

I mean, like, I've never, I can't believe I'm contemplating that man's lips, but like the lips from real Trump kind of the over application of lip gloss, I feel like really gives them kind of a Trumpy thing.

And then the bronzer really,

you know, I guess he is the most famous bronzer users currently on our TVs.

Yeah.

I also think the big eyebrows really bring out the dead eyes,

which, you know, if you got it, flaunt it.

You know, if your eyes are truly just fully dead, why not also have those eyebrows?

But I guess the other thing I was wondering, so one explanation for Fox News hair I had heard before, and I think this even came up in our episode about the Mormon housewives, is that it's a somewhat maladroid way of showing off wealth.

Because one thing it is, is impractical.

and

expensive.

Yeah.

What are we looking at?

You know, I don't really go shopping other than for other people at Sephora.

I don't know.

Yeah, I would say it's expensive.

And more than expensive, it's effortful.

Like a lot of effort and attention and energy is being funneled into creating this look, which requires constant product use.

I mean, the other thing that I didn't mention, well, people call this the plastic surgery element of it, Mara Lago face, which is.

excessive use of fillers and Botox, all of which require upkeep every couple of months.

Same with hair and hair extensions and the blowout is weekly, if not daily.

So it is, it is a signifier of a ton of like money, time and energy funneled into like controlling the body.

It's also a lot of product.

It's so much product.

If you're using high-end, you know, expensive Sephora makeup and not like the cheap drugstore makeup, like just putting this much product on your face has got to like deplete your bank account much faster?

Yes.

I mean, well, not in defense of Republican makeup, but I will say I don't think that there's a ton of difference in the amount of product and the amount of time that goes into achieving this look versus the more popular in like liberal circles, like dewy, no makeup makeup that hinges on a lot of skincare use.

So I would say like the person who cares about their appearance is probably funneling the same amount of time and money into what they look like.

It's just very different aesthetics that are popular with these different like subsets of the population.

Tell us about the emergence of this hashtag.

So it emerged as kind of a way for liberal women to like mock and critique this ascendant aesthetic of you know the group in power using, I guess, like kind of like cultural cachet and coolness

against a group that you know antagonizes them and their freedom.

that has all the like institutional power, right?

So I'm interested in the use of this trend

to like mock Republican women and where it came from and what its tone is and why it's caught on so much.

Right.

So, I mean, these videos that are mocking Republican makeup are often set to the trending audio of the song God Made Girls, which I think is like the perfect way to

really frame what's happening here.

Wait, I think we have to talk about this song God Made Girls.

Adrienne, have you encountered Ray Lynn's God Made Girls?

I have not.

Let's all spend a moment here.

You guys ready?

I'm so ready.

All right.

Let's go.

Somebody's gotta wear a pretty skirt.

Somebody's gotta be the one to flirt.

Somebody's gotta wanna hold his hands to God-made girls.

I think this song was invented in a lab to drive me personally and specifically insane.

Like this song makes me want to kill somebody.

It's so perfect for this moment though.

Like, I know.

The layers.

Oh my gosh.

It also features the music video, which features so many shots of a woman in a mirror singing to herself.

Yes.

This is very,

and she is indeed wearing Republican makeup.

And then it's like a hodgepodge of like

trad wifey aesthetics.

She's like in a ball gown on the back of a horse in like a field.

And now she seems to be in a like a, there's various children who have magic of some kind.

I know it's um it's like like a ballerina farm cayhole, you know?

It's just like it's a very dark artifact.

Yes.

So you think that this like trending audio is central to the joke.

I think it's central to the joke.

I think there's a lot of like undertones that really frame what's going on here with Republican makeup, too.

Cause like the lyrics obviously just hit on a bunch of like gender essentialisms in terms of like typically, you know, quote-unquote feminine traits.

It's like somebody's got to wear the pretty skirt.

Someone's got to be the one to flirt.

So God made girls.

Like girls are beautiful and breakable.

You know.

all of that.

And I think it's an interesting background track to critique Republican makeup because of its religious connotations, first and foremost.

Like, I think that's appropriate because beauty in society really does function as an ethical ideal, especially for women and gender non-conforming people.

So like, you know, meeting a beauty standard is not just about your appearance.

It's like a moral imperative that's tied to your self-worth and your social value.

And it's like messaged as this moral duty.

Failure to conform to the standard of beauty like leads to moral and social judgment.

And yeah, I think this song is kind of an interesting way to

talk about the way that the beauty industry has borrowed a lot of tactics from religion.

Like even when you look at the language of beauty, you know, it's a miracle product.

It's a holy grail.

It's a skin savior.

Like even something as simple as having good skin implies this like moral imperative to have it.

Like our quest to be beautiful is a quest to be seen as good.

And like I think the promise of like the optimized body like has a lot in common with like the promise of like Christianity.

Like you get to move through the world with special protections and privileges because of what you believe in.

I mean, the Virgin Mary was so morally good that she literally didn't die.

Yes.

Well, yes, and that's the same promise.

It's like beauty and religion have like this ultimate promise of immortality, like agelessness.

You'll never go into age.

You're not going to feel the effects of like mortal life on your body.

I also think about like the incorruptibility of some corpses of saints.

Like they don't decay.

And this is

a sign of divine favor that like your mortal coil will remain intact and unravaged by time.

Yeah, there's a logic that is very consistent there.

I mean, in their defense, some of the pictures you've just shown me, for their bodies at least, this may literally be true.

I don't think those bodies are decaying anymore, but the people will be dead.

No, they're preserved with monthly injections of neurotoxins for sure.

Oh my God.

And then I think the next layer of why this song really hits on what people are getting getting at is that it's like these videos are kind of an attempt to expose the hypocrisy of Republican makeup and the Republican belief in gender essentialism.

Because like this party is very much attached to the idea that God made man and he made woman and he made them different for very specific reasons.

And it's God's plan to have masculine men and feminine women and nothing in between.

And that like women being wives and mothers and objects of beauty is their biological destiny.

And of course, that all like falls apart when you look at these like very extreme and unnatural interventions required for the Republican version of femininity.

Like you're claiming biological destiny and there's nothing biological or natural or God-given about like this caricature that you're embodying.

Right.

Like if it was so innate, it would not require so much consumption, so much time, so much effort and artificiality, right?

Right, right.

And I think that's kind of what the people making these videos are trying to get at.

Like, this isn't God-given.

This is man-made.

God did not design those eyebrows.

Yeah.

Like, that was not in his plan.

Now, our producer, Mark Yoshizumi, points out that we never plug the Patreon on the main feed episodes anymore.

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It's interesting, right?

The trend is called Republican makeup.

But as you say, these kinds of interventions that are necessary to create this supposedly natural feminine ideal, like that doesn't start with makeup.

You're supposed to also inject and cut and

modify surgically, right?

Right.

And I do wonder why does that kind of drop out in the critique, or does it drop out of the critique?

And what is the role of those kinds of interventions here?

Aaron Ross Powell, right?

No, I mean, I think they play a huge role, particularly in the Republican attacks on gender-affirming care, which I think is what a lot of people are trying to get at and point out.

Like, specifically, I'm thinking of like Trump's recent youth care ban executive order, which defines gender-affirming care as like, quote, chemical and surgical mutilation.

And what's interesting there is that what that order calls mutilation is normalized and even encouraged for cisgender people of all ages, and particularly the people in power of this party.

So it's like those interventions are okay

so long as it's in the name of heteronormative beauty.

Yeah.

Just to give our listeners a sense of that, in researching a reaction piece to that executive order, I looked up how many girls in the United States get breast surgery before they turn 18,

you know, cis girls, that is.

And the numbers are obviously way higher than the number of trans kids who go in for any kind of treatment.

It's

utterly normalized.

And then you're right, it's treated as this absolutely abhorrent, you know, an obviously immoral thing when it's done for the benefit of a different group.

What kind of procedures does the Mar-a-Lago face require?

We mentioned a lot of fillers.

Yeah.

And you do see like sort of this tightness or hardness of the face that I understand to be like a signature of injectables, right?

But then there's also like a lot of changing of

the shape of the face.

Like much bigger lips, much more like exaggerated cheeks.

Like, what are they going for there?

Totally.

Yeah.

I mean, I would say the procedures that these Republican women are seeking out, like, aren't particularly out of the ordinary.

Like, these are the procedures that are trending across the political spectrum with people who are getting cosmetic work done.

They're just being done in a different way.

So the procedures are Botox, which is a neuromodulator that kind of relaxes and freezes your facial muscles so that you don't get expression lines or like fine lines and wrinkles from aging are kind of, you know, disappeared for however long the neuromodulator lasts.

There's fillers, which are used to like inflate the lips, inflate the cheeks, often like inflate the chin.

You can even do like a nose job with filler as well, a non-surgical nose job.

So, all of that's being done.

There's definitely a lot of facelifts, like that tight look is usually the result of like a surgical facelift or a half-facelift.

Brow lifts that will lift the brows up to look younger.

Blepharoplasty is something that's really popular right now, which is like the surgical removal of part of the skin on your eyelid, like above your eyelid, or a lower bleph below the eyelid to like take away some of that puffiness and make the eye look more open and animated.

I mean, breast implants are a huge part of this.

Liposuction is a huge part of this.

Even fat transfer, there's like fat transfer is very popular now.

Doctors will take fat from a part of your body where it is not desirable and re-inject it into a different part of your body where fat is more desirable, like you know, the upper cheeks, for example.

So, yeah, that's all being done by a lot of people.

But in this subset of women in particular, I think what's different is that you want it to be noticed.

Like being noticed is a big part of the appeal.

Whereas in other demographics, the idea is that you don't want anyone to know you've gotten work done.

You want to look like you just got like a really good night's sleep or something.

So, I mean, I think there's like a couple of different reasons for this.

I think obvious cosmetic surgery is a class performance.

It's like showing that you are funneling wealth into your face for the sake of like looking like you can.

and then i think there's also part of it where like the more work you have done like this studies show the less able you are to sometimes see yourself accurately so you don't realize how far things are gone you don't realize that you're like moving into caricature territory and then there's also like corruption of aesthetic doctors.

Like there's been a lot of reports on the filler, like overuse of fillers.

And doctors get paid by like how many units they put in.

And the fillers also like wear away.

And so doctors will often recommend you get them refilled sooner than you need to.

And it creates this like very inflated look just because of, you know, that's capitalism, baby.

So yeah, there's a lot of factors going on here, I think.

I'm really interested in this idea that they are trying to make their plastic surgery and their work look conspicuous, that they're like not trying to look au naturelle.

They are trying to look like they spent time under the knife, like they put in a lot of money, like they put in a lot of effort, and like, I think, frankly, like endured pain to look the way that they do.

Yes, no, completely.

I mean, that's such a big part of it is just this idea that beauty is pain, and beauty is a woman's duty, and therefore being in pain for the sake of being beautiful is just part of what a woman must do or should do.

And yeah, I mean, it's it signals like a really strong dedication to this sort of ideology.

And I think, yeah, the uncanniness is a part of it.

It's funny.

I've been taking this class on puppets and automata and marionettes, kind of wanting to study why these things are so influential in the beauty space right now.

Like, obviously, the most enduring beauty standard right now is this sort of mannequin, perfect look.

And what's been so interesting to me is this

sort of object and God are two sides of the same coin.

So I think, you know, a lot of what we would say about this uncanny look, about this sort of like mannequin puppet look, is it's objectification, which it is.

But the other thing that you become when you remove like your human features is more godlike, you know, lacking that emotion.

Some Henry from Cleisden there.

I love it.

Yeah.

It's sort of like you reject your humanity for the sake of becoming this godlike figure with a godlike power.

And that really is what Republicans are doing, particularly in this gender-affirming care space.

They're saying, I

am a woman, so I am allowed to use these interventions, and you are not.

And you're really taking up this sort of like godlike authority.

And I think this pull to get rid of like all traces of human life on your face really is part of that sort of performance of authority.

Wait, Adrian, who's Heinrich von Kleissen?

This is a Germany reference I did not catch.

He wrote about the Marionette Theater.

Oh, really?

That's his point that like the grace of the marionette is both.

It's both the perfect automaton and it touches on the divine.

So I was just making a guess as to what's on the syllabus there.

That is on the syllabus, yeah.

That makes so much sense to me.

And I also think that like we could even make a slightly darker reading and say like the inability to express emotions or to read other people's faces, which is something that this makeup trend, frankly, has in common with AI.

Yes.

Is a pretty easy way to disable your own empathy if you're gearing up to do something say really really world historically regrettable so i just you know i do think there may also be that that like these are people who are trying to sort of dull their capacity for for empathy in anticipation yeah i wanted to ask a little bit about i didn't realize that like part of what we're seeing here might be that they're being taken for a ride by their doctors.

And that seems to me also so emblematic that in some way,

I wouldn't call that the Republican thing, but certainly on the Trumpist right, I'm always struck by how everything is both a grift and not, right?

Like, we called it the Mar-a-Lago look.

Everyone at Mar-a-Lago is grifting Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is grifting everyone at Mar-a-Lago.

Like, who's the mark?

Who's the grifter?

Who can even say anymore, right?

And so, what better way to emblematize that in your face is to be like, did I get taken for a ride by my plastic surgeon?

That's for me to know.

That's for him to know and for me not to say, you know?

Such a good point.

And it's also, I think, like

this idea, I think a lot of women try to embody the beauty ideal to escape the clutches of misogyny, because we're told like the more beautiful you are, the better you'll be treated, the more power you'll have.

And it's just, it goes to show that like you really can't escape that

through beauty.

Like beauty is part of that.

And you'll kind of like always be in its clutches.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting that there's something about

these people who are very contemptuous of vulnerability, right?

And there's one logic by which excessive

cosmetic or like surgical interventions look

invulnerable, right?

They make you look less human.

They make you like quite literally less capable of expressing emotion.

But on the other hand,

They make you look very, very vulnerable, right?

Because this looks like somebody who, you know, I mean, this is a judgment that i'm maybe not entirely willing to endorse uh but i always do when i see somebody who's had a ton of plastic surgery done to the point where they look kind of unhuman my thought is that's a person in a mental health crisis

oh like that's a person who is suffering

the effects of misogyny and no longer has a total grip on reality, right?

And there's a way in which it's both broadcasting invulnerability and broadcasting your vulnerability to insecurity into the the logics of misogyny at the same time.

Well, vulnerability in another way too, right?

Like I've long been fascinated with why Republicans like Lindsey Graham.

And I've come to the conclusion they like him because he's a gay man who thinks he's fooling them.

And part of the fun is the sadism of like, oh, this guy thinks he's fooling us.

He thinks he's in the closet.

This man's not in the closet.

And there's something similar with plastic surgery, right?

Oh, she thinks she's getting away with it.

We can all tell.

And you're right, Maury, that is a a form of great vulnerability.

And to accentuate that and to be like, possibly either in on the joke or not in on the joke, that that's new, right?

The idea is if you get caught out, it's like, well, this is obvious.

It gets embarrassing.

It's you're making a laughing stock of yourself.

You know, if you deny it, like men with hair pieces who deny they're wearing a hairpiece, right?

Like that the vulnerability is that other people can tell much more than these people think themselves they're giving away.

And that does, I think, often lead back to gender and sexuality.

That people, oh, you think you're fooling me, or you think you're fooling everyone, but you're not.

But so much about MAGA is about the rejection of shame.

Yeah.

Yes, I am lying to you, and I will admit that I'm lying to you.

In this case, yes, I got terrible work done.

Yes, yeah.

And I'm going to, and I'm going to show up on the RNC stage looking like a deflated balloon.

Yeah.

And that is my prerogative as a cis woman, as a white woman, as a paragon of this kind of status.

And as Matt Gates, let's be honest, because I feel like every time he shows up on a Republican stage, all of Twitter used to go, oh, Jesus Christ.

Yeah.

I mean, what about the work that the men are having done?

Because MAGA men also have a very particular look, even though like hashtag Republican makeup seems to be directed much more at the women.

Right.

Yeah.

I think the longevity movement is a big part of this.

I think for men, anti-aging has been rebranded as longevity.

And there's this sort of like tech component to to it.

I mean, you even see it with all the MAGA tech guys who are next to these Republican lawmakers.

They're all using this technology and it's been rebranded like kind of for bros.

So, I mean, Botox is a huge part of it.

The facelifts are a huge part of it.

I mean, the very masculine, like, caricatured jawline is really prominent.

Is that done with fillers or is that an implant?

I think it depends.

I think a lot of chin implants are happening, but you can get jaw filler to kind of create that like very angular, sort of square look.

And then I think hair plugs are really prominent as well.

So it's, yeah, it's taking these like traditionally masculine features and just, yeah, caricaturing them through injectables and surgery.

So there's like a way in which

the

look

itself serves as a signal of like membership in the group, right?

Like just looking like this broadcasts something about you and it broadcasts something about like your politics, right?

Nobody's going to look at Christy Noam and be like, that woman definitely voted for Kamala Harris, you know?

And by extension, Kamala Harris would never have that haircut or those extensions or those lashes or those lip fillers, you know?

And

of course, part of this is a race thing.

Yes.

And like something that I see a little bit in Republican makeup is an attempt to like minimize ethnically ambiguous features.

Like the nose is always very narrow.

Yes.

Like contoured so.

And like the lips are very big in this way that, as you mentioned, seems like a little bit of a like appropriation of the 2016 like Kylie Jenner look, like very much.

borrowing from black culture, but that itself remains like an assertion of racial privilege, right?

Right.

It's like a cosmetic colonization of taking this feature that is associated with one race or ethnicity and grafting it onto like your white, wealthy body because you can.

But yeah, I think that's definitely a part of it.

Like pretty much all beauty standards are born out of systems of oppression.

They're the physical manifestation of those systems.

And yeah, beauty in that sense is a power structure.

And so of course all of these things influence what aesthetic signals we're adopting and why.

And I mean, I think there's obviously a ton of overlap with the way, you know, the fascist movement shaped beauty standards in Nazi Germany.

Like physical perfection was a huge part of their political propaganda.

It was blonde hair, blue eyes, fair skin, symmetrical features.

Like symmetry was a huge thing.

And that's something that I think contributes to this uncanny look in the Mar-a-Lago face or the Republican makeup.

Trying to draw those eyebrows perfectly symmetrically, like right, trying to get your lips to be a one-to-one perfect ratio.

Like that's not what people look like.

Like symmetry doesn't really exist for most most of the population like that um but yeah a lot of this is like to reinforce this like eugenics driven racial hierarchy yeah yeah i mean there's a ton of overlap yeah i mean i think yeah this this podcast gets back to the question of physiognomy quite quite frequently and it's true that like the idea there of course is that yeah that the face expresses what makeup can actually hide so right like early 20th century physiognomists and craniometrists were like well your bone structure doesn't lie it gives away what you can hide.

And what you could hide often enough was traits that they hated, right?

Like race mixing, quote unquote, Jewishness, right?

Right.

All these things.

And it's really fascinating to see it sort of here put in the service of this exact same thing.

You create the norm face in order to be able to then pathologize any deviation from it,

right?

Because that's very much also implicit here, that like that the deviations from this are softness, right?

Like

these men get these chins in order not to look like beta cucks.

There's a very particular kind of soy boy they're not trying to be and that they probably fear, not so secretly, they are, in fact, are, right?

So to me, the idea that someone says, I'm going to get some injectables in order to look the way I used to look five years ago, as opposed to the way I probably should look now.

totally the most understandable thing in the world.

The idea that I don't want to be this other person strikes me as different and much scarier, right?

Like I don't want to look like this other group,

right?

Not like myself, but a little bit more haggard.

Like, yeah, that does suck, but I don't want to look like these people seems to be very much the name of the game here, doesn't it?

Oh, completely.

And it's also, it makes it harder for people who aren't part of those groups, those in-groups, people who aren't white to comply.

And part of the like evil genius of this system of beauty standards is that in incentivizing people to comply, you're stealing all of their resources in the process.

You're leaving them unresourced.

They are funneling their time, their money, their effort, their attention, their energy, their headspace into this project of looking as perfect as possible.

And yeah, they might eventually look that way, but what do you have left at the end of the day after you've reached that

aesthetic standard?

It occurs to me that we might have like come back here to the notion of like these

very dramatic, exaggerated, sort of self-consciously artificial beauty standards on the political right as being again, a rejection of transness, right?

An attempt to like exaggerate and even almost caricature the sex binary, right?

Yeah.

Because like Both MAGA men and MAGA women to me look like they've had a lot done, but they look quite different from one another.

And there's something about like a rejection of the trans or queer project of undermining the social meaning of sex and the doubling down on like the sex binary and

their personal investments in their place on it that seems like just really

honestly kind of sad to me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, when I look at Republican makeup and this artificial femininity as contrasted with the fact that they are blocking trans people who need gender-affirming care from using these tools as well.

I think they're sort of enforcing this new understanding of what is natural, and that, like, an obviously effortful beauty is a sort of natural beauty, not in the sense that, like, these features are natural, but in the sense that it's considered a naturally feminine quality to pursue physical beauty.

And, like, that's part of the myth of the eternal feminine: that women are meant to be beautiful.

And if they're not, they're meant to make themselves beautiful, to like put themselves through pain to do it.

And the added element here is that you're only allowed access to those like painful interventions if you are, you know, a biological woman to begin with.

So there's sort of this strange acknowledgement of the fact that like, yes, it is work.

And we are restricting who is allowed to put in the work to appear quote unquote feminine or masculine in order to like preserve that hierarchy.

It also strikes me that like we can get to that central contradiction over and over and sort of say like, oh, they say they naturally know what a woman looks like.

They know what a natural man looks like, but then it's all totally unnatural.

But of course, like in some way, that's only a contradiction if you take nature to mean a certain thing.

What they mean is nature is the thing that we say that it is, right?

Yes.

I can do this and I get away with it.

You can't, right?

There are...

these kinds of people and these kinds of people.

And I feel like these weeks, we see a good demonstration of this, where like they're not trying to get away with everything they're trying to get away with things that other people cannot they're trying to say that there are two kinds of people in the system some for whom this law applies some for whom it doesn't and here the same thing is extended to our very nature and personhood it seems to me yes totally it's interesting because a lot of the sort of liberal critique of Republican makeup for these reasons is sort of tying into the same like moral judgments or ethical judgments that I think it's trying to be against.

Like, you know, there's plenty of studies that show like people judge those who use overt cosmetics, like makeup and tanner, as morally inferior.

And that is what liberals are doing here in this critique.

They're sort of playing into the same exact playbook that there is like a moral hierarchy to beauty or to what kind of interventions you undergo.

So yeah, I think there's like this element of like Schadenfreude, you know?

Yeah.

To be like, these are the women of the party that's policing our gender, but they're kind of saying, look, they can't even perform their gender correctly.

You know, they're not even doing all the right things.

Yeah.

I would say, I think you're right in your critique of like the liberal, like hashtag Republican makeup trend, right?

The mocking of the incorrect performance of womanhood by the standards that like those women who are making those videos are applying to.

But I think that you touched on something really smart earlier, which is the actual standard isn't exactly beauty, and it's definitely not naturalness, right?

The standard for femininity embodied by Republican makeup is masochism, right?

It's about a willingness to punish yourself, to expend money and time, and to endure pain and to become, I think we can say grotesque, out of a pursuit and a desire for that approval and that sanction of, you know, male attention and social validation like that self-degradation that the beauty pursuit can imply is i think what the point is and that's what they're considering like the essence of womanhood it's that masochistic drive

more than the actual content of how they look yeah i completely agree on that entirely depressing note

jessica defino i'm so glad that we finally had you on the podcast it's such a pleasure to see you always and i hope all of our listeners will check out the review of beauty because it's really excellent.

And I learned something every time I read it.

Thank you so much for having me.

This was so much fun.

Thank you so much for coming on.

This is absolutely fascinating.

And now I'll be downloading TikTok and just scrolling for hours.

God-made girls will be stuck in your head.

Yeah, it will be stuck in your head.

It's infectious in the worst way.

I'll be singing involving a horse in a wedding gown.

Thanks for listening.

In Bedworth the Right is made possible by hundreds of listeners who support us via patreon.com.

Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau.

Our title music is by Katie Lau.