Today, Explained - Republicans are getting raunchy

Episode Date: September 19, 2024

Conservatives have started claiming hot girls as a culture war victory. Vox's Constance Grady explains why. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah and Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andi Kristinsdottir and Rob Byers, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members SNL host Sydney Sweeney during the "Hooters Waitress" sketch on Saturday, March 2, 2024. Photo by Will Heath/NBC via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The conservative war on woke has had many fronts. DEI. So I'm grieving, it's lunchtime, and we really wanted some Chick-fil-A. But because they decided to hire a diversity, equity, and inclusion corporate position, and also bow down to the woke lords because... Disney. The woke chief of Disney is out. Didn't stand up to any of the woke warriors inside.

Capitalism, even. What woke capitalism says is no, a small group of business elites get to decide how we settle questions on climate change to racial justice instead. And I reject that vision. Many fronts. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. And now, purity. Or is it prudishness?

Coming up on Today Explained, in 2024, Republicans are fighting the war on woke by embracing raunch. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on Vox's culture team. She recently wrote about two people who she says have come to represent the Republican war on wokeness. Not Vivek, not JD. Constance, who are these people?

They are Sydney Sweeney, who is an actress. She's appeared on Euphoria and White Lotus and recently starred in Anyone But You. And Hayley Welsh, who is better known as Hawk Twa Girl. What is making the right fascinated by these two women? So Sydney Sweeney, back in March, hosted Saturday Night Live. She was wearing what you might call some kind of boob-centric outfits. You know, I always thought that this place was the one place I'd feel at home. But if you don't think I belong at Hooters,

I'll go. Wait! And almost immediately, a number of right-wing commenters made the claim that Sidney Sweeney's boobs would kill woke. Hayley Welch famously appeared in a viral TikTok over the summer.

She very charmingly gave a pretty graphic oral sex tip. Oh, you gotta give him that hock too and spit on that thing. And almost immediately, her catchphrase, hock-toi, got claimed as a conservative meme. So it started to appear on lots of handmade Trump merchandise. It's something that MAGA fans shout at sports events now. It somehow very quickly became a signifier that, like, I am on the right. So Sydney Sweeney is an accomplished actor. She's very good.

Hayley Welch is a person on TikTok who is capitalizing on her moment of fame and more power to her. What in particular about these two young women has made them so appealing to the right? Is it just their, is it just their breasts? I mean, I think that's a big part of it. We're in this really bizarre moment where a lot of conservative commenters seem to be kind of obsessed with this idea that Republicans are the party of sex symbols. So when they see a hot girl, and especially a blonde white girl from a rural background, which is the case with these two ladies, these commenters on the right start to make this claim that the existence of these girls is a sign that wokeness is over.

She's captivating. And it's because she looks like art. She just looks happy. Yes. And unbothered by all of the social issues that seem to surround the things that people are pissed off about around her, meaning her beauty, her femininity. So it seems like their position is there's been this sort of progressive ethos

pretty prominent in pop culture over the past decade or so. This ethos they're saying was just fundamentally against boobs and blowjobs. So the prominence of people like Sidney Sweeney and Hayley Welsh for them is a sign that the tide is turning. So Sidney Sweeney and Hayley Welsh, for them is a sign that the tide is turning. So Sidney Sweeney wears a low-cut dress. And if you're in this frame of mind, you're like, that is a statement. She's making a statement about her hotness being something that is in opposition to wokeness. What have Sidney Sweeney and Hayley Welsh said about this? So neither Sidney Sweeney nor Hayley Welsh has, as far as I can tell, talked about politics basically at all. But Sidney Sweeney did get photographed wearing a sweatshirt that said, sorry for having great tits.

Biggest misconception about me is that I am a dumb blonde with big tits. I'm naturally brunette. Very different than a lot of the characters that I play or... All right. So we think of conservatism as liking things the way they used to be, looking back at the old days with nostalgia, before the days maybe of plunging necklines and talking openly on social media about how you do oral sex. Is being sexually explicit now fashionable in conservative circles? I think that it's going to depend a bit on

what parts of conservative circles you're in. I've certainly seen some people on the right, Abby Shapiro, for instance, Ben Shapiro's sister, say, you know, it's not proper for women to be so explicitly sexual. This is not the model of femininity that we should be endorsing. Embracing your femininity is not the same thing as being overtly sexual. Embracing your femininity is not about being a sex object. Embracing your femininity is about the things that make women feminine, nurturing, beauty, not sex. But some other figures seem to be really in favor of it. So someone like Andrea Catherine, she's a pretty prominent Trump supporter on X. She posted, the hawk twa girl

fundamentally expressed conservative values. A woman pleasing a man in a heterosexual relationship, not being bitter towards men. That's why she resonated with so many people. Hey, do you remember the 2020 election? Oh, man, I sure do. Do you remember Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion dropped WAP? Oh, man. What a song. What a moment.

What a song. Cardi endorses Joe Biden. Joe Biden is like, oh, thank you. I appreciate that. But do you remember the response from Tucker Carlson, from Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro was like, I listened to the lyrics and these women must be suffering from some sort of medical condition.

These women are describing a serious gynecological condition. I mean, a bucket and a mop? What? Ben Shapiro four years later is still Ben Shapiro. Tucker Carlson, who was like, won't somebody think of the children? They're still the same guys. What actually changed? The first thing I want to flag is racial politics, because Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion are both Black women. And there's this longstanding racist trope about this idea that Black women are hypersexual, and this is predatory and coarse. This racist idea makes Black women celebrating their sexuality something that I think a lot of these figures

on the right can perceive as threatening in a way that doesn't seem to be the case when we're dealing with someone like Sidney Sweeney. I think the other thing that's actually quite central here is that WAP is specifically about the pleasure of women, right? That's what the chorus is about. That's what the acronym means. Whereas the joke that Hak'taw girl is making is about servicing men and the meme of Sidney Sweeney in her little dresses is about the male gaze. So what really seems to be interesting to these commenters is this idea that women's bodies exist for men to control. You write in your piece for Vox that historically the left or progressives are home to LGBTQ plus rights, abortion rights, sex positivity. And the right is more home to restrictions on abortion, restrictions on contraception, a lot of anxieties about casual sex. Are conservatives changing their ideas about raunch being fun? Are they embracing it's good for there to be contraception and abortion available in service of that goal. That is a position that some of the more libertarian wings of the party

do hold. But I also think that this contradiction of raunch on the one hand and a real anxiety about what kind of sex is permissible on the other hand, I think that's kind of fundamental to the sexual politics of the Republican Party. So something that we see pretty consistently in right-wing politics is an interest in both this kind of raunchy, almost pornographic image of female sexuality, at the same time that there's also this intense insistence on the sexual purity of wives and mothers and daughters.

You're saying that this is nothing new. You're saying that you can look back in time and see this marriage between purity culture and raunch culture. Look back and tell us, where do you think we see this in history? What we're basically talking about here is a Madonna-whore complex, right? And that goes really... All the way back. All the way back. Way back to the beginning. But I think we can also see it expressed really clearly in the 2000s, specifically in the Bush administration. That's this moment when

both purity and ranch are really present in the Bush administration. That's this moment when both purity and raunch are really present in the cultural atmosphere. It looks like a wedding or a prom from afar, but this formal affair is really a father-daughter purity ball. I choose before God to cover you as your authority and protection in the area of purity. With confidence in his power to strengthen me, I make a promise this day to God, to you. So at that time, kids are getting abstinence-only sex education. All the Disney stars are wearing purity rings and saying that you're a slut if you won't. But at the same time, this is the era of Girls Gone Wild. When two teenage girls went wild at a Mardi Gras party with Snoop Dogg, Girls Gone Wild creator Joe Francis personally assured them that they wouldn't be featured in the risque video. They weren't. Jamie and Whitney wound up on the cover instead. On Howard Stern's show, he has this recurring bit where he asks his female guests to take off their clothes,

and then he tells them what plastic surgery they should get. You know, the man show's on the air. That's that old Jimmy Kimmel show that ends every episode with girls jumping around on trampolines. Now, girls jumping on trampolines! God bless you. And you can see, like, all the pop stars of this time, like Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears, they're in this totally bizarre space where they're doing these quite raunchy performances. They have these very sexualized images. I think I did it again. And then their management teams will tell them that they have to tell everyone they're still virgins, even if they're not.

You hope that you'll remain a virgin until you get married. And my mom always told me, once you have sex with a guy that, you know, you're with or whatever, it's like so many more emotions are involved and everything gets like, you know, crazy and twisted. So it's this moment when girls are being told, you know, you have to be sexy, but you also have to be pure all at the same time. And everyone is really getting set up to fail. We'll have more with Constance coming up. Thank you. picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday, and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids, and so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame.

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the ACLU. With your help, they can stop the extreme Project 2025 agenda. Join the ACLU at aclu.org today. This is Today Explained. We're back with Constance Grady, culture correspondent for Vox, who was reminding us of the interplay between raunch and purity in the naughty oddies. That was the early 2000s. But Constance, you write, that didn't last. When did things take a more feminist turn? I think we start to see feminism getting mainstreamed around the time of the things that he pulls off that is almost hard to see now because it seems so inevitable in retrospect is he creates an alliance between his administration and liberal Hollywood. Yes, we can. Yes, we can. It was the call of workers organized.

Women reached for the ballots. He was talked about at the time as the first celebrity president. And so after he has his very successful and very star-studded campaign, we do start seeing pop culture veering into this more liberal place. So probably the moment when it really becomes clear that feminism is going mainstream is 2014. Feminist, a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes. When you were little girls, you dreamt of being... Beyoncé at the VMAs, she's performing, and this giant word, FEMINIST, in all caps. Bow down, bitches.

Bow down, bitches. Bow down, bitches. It appears behind her at the stage, and I remember watching that as a little baby feminist and thinking, oh, my God, it's finally okay to say that you're a feminist. And then comes, a few years after that, comes the Me Too movement. We have another woman this morning telling her story in graphic detail,

accusing Harvey Weinstein and adding to the list that has now grown to more than 60. What impact does the Me Too movement have on the continuation of this from purity to raunch into feminism into something that, I don't know, felt a lot darker and a lot more true? So when Me Too goes mainstream in 2017 with the Harvey Weinstein accusations, that sort of was a ripping away of the veil in a lot of ways and moving away from this kind of more sanitized, corporate friendly expression of feminism into this, I think a lot of people experienced as both cathartic and also incredibly angering and rageful discussion of what so many women had gone through. And one of the things that that movement ended up doing is it really did change the way that pop culture talked about women

and the jokes that it became possible to make. Jimmy Kimmel hosted the Oscars the year of Me Too and made a bunch of jokes about how we need to stop harassing women. If we are successful here, if we can work together to stop sexual harassment in the workplace, if we can do that, women will only have to deal with harassment all the time at every other place they go. Again, he hosted the man show. Fundamentally, there's this giant shift in the way that we talk about women, which I think is part of what makes it so hard to look back at the 2000s now and think,

oh, that's how we thought then? That's so weird. Talk about a paradox. In 2016, Donald Trump wins after all Americans hear an Access Hollywood tape in which he brags about sexually assaulting women. Me Too is also gearing up underway early in his first term. What were we seeing there with respect to ranch culture? Where was it? Yeah, I think that one of the things a lot of people on the right like about Donald Trump is that he is kind of a throwback to eras when ranch culture was more mainstreamed. So I think for people who miss an era when you can just objectify women without any backlash, Trump really symbolizes that moment.

That's part of his appeal for that demographic. There's this sense that, you know, yeah, he gets the way it's supposed to be. You're surrounded with hot women. You objectify them. You sexually degrade them. That's what a man in power is supposed to look like. There is something to that in 2024 that feels notable. Donald Trump is back.

Donald Trump is running against a woman. Donald Trump keeps commenting on her looks. He keeps like telegraphing that he thinks Kamala Harris is hot. I saw a picture of her on Time magazine today. She looks like the most beautiful actress ever to live. It was a drawing. And actually, she looked very much like our great first lady, Melania. How is ranch culture showing up in this race other than Hayley Welch, other than Sidney Sweeney. Yeah, I think with Kamala Harris, you're absolutely right that Trump is obsessed

with the way that she looks, which I think we can certainly see as a way of pushing her back into this more sexualized sphere. I think almost more telling is this claim that's become a Republican talking point. There's this baseless rumor that she launched her career in politics through her relationship in the 1990s with Willie Brown, who was the former mayor of San Francisco. That's something that Donald Trump has claimed, and it gets repeated on the right a lot. We talked earlier about this racist trope about Black women's sexuality, this idea that it's pathologized, it's considered to be too assertive and kind of threatening. That racist trope is part of what the rumor is playing on, this idea that she used her sexuality not in service to men, but aggressively to further her own ambition.

These things, as you've said, are cyclical, can be cyclical. And I wonder if you think what we're seeing now is a backsliding after the years of it being a cool thing to say you're a feminist. Or does Sidney Sweeney, in her way, being like, you guys are weird and I'm not talking about it, here's a sweatshirt. Does it suggest that young women are thinking about this differently this time around, 20 years later? Yeah, it's a complicated question. And I think one of the things that makes it so complicated is there is kind of a gender split on the way that people talk about this. Right now, younger women are dramatically more likely to be liberal than younger men are. And in part, that is a shift that some evidence shows is driven by

feminism and by the way that people think about gender. There's certainly a sphere of the internet that is very popular among young men where you see like podcasts like Joe Rogan. And that is certainly in a more reactionary mood right now. kind of anti-woke perspective and be anti-PC, sort of feel like you're killing some sacred cows over there. At the same time, you're right that a lot of younger women are much less interested in entering into that sphere, which strikes me as being a big difference from the last time this reactionary mood took over the country. And I think it'll be really interesting to see how that plays out as we go through the election and see who wins.

Vox's Constance Grady. Today's episode was produced by Halima Shah and Peter Balanon-Rosen. It was edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and engineered by Andrea Christen's daughter and Rob Byers. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you. Bye.