Diabolical Lies - What is a Woman？ The Shifting Gender Aesthetics of the ＂New Right＂

00:00:00.460 Today's episode of Diabolical Lies was brought to you by Hair by Chrissy's Patent on Middle

00:00:05.660 Part Utah hair and their two-day shipping to Washington, D.C., Peter Thiel's relentless

00:00:10.460 insistence on tracking your period, a discontinued Urban Decay naked smoky eyeshadow palette,

00:00:15.740 and Kristi Noem's dead puppy.

00:00:19.460 Oh my god, Urban Decay taking a stray.

00:00:22.240 Yes, Caro, today I want to talk to you about the shifting aesthetics and gender norms in

00:00:30.660 the new right, or what one sub-stack I found called edgelord conservatism.

00:00:36.660 Ooh, edgelord chic.

00:00:39.360 So while you took us on a historical journey for the ages through legal precedent surrounding

00:00:45.820 reproductive justice, I am going to take us on a historical journey through Fox News hosts'

00:00:51.440 hairstyles and what they tell us about the degradation of women's rights how's that sound

00:00:56.460 oh my god i'm so fucking pumped the only thing that i have had access to while you've been 0.77

00:01:01.020 planning this outline is just photos from time to time and i just feel like i have just been 0.71

00:01:06.580 edging in the best way possible for this conversation i feel like um charlie on always

00:01:11.780 sunny with the murder board i just have like pictures of kirstie gnome before and after her

00:01:16.120 makeover being like, what does it mean? So, um, yeah, I see this episode as picking up and

00:01:22.460 braiding together a few of the threads that we've introduced before. So the themes in

00:01:27.400 blonde highlights are gender affirming care, our episode about fillers, the Evie magazine deep

00:01:34.000 dive, and even our most recent episode about the Facebook and TikTok algorithms. So if you're a

00:01:39.360 new listener and you like this episode, I would definitely recommend listening to those two. And

00:01:44.640 And Caro, I think you had one piece of housekeeping for us as well.

00:01:48.820 Yes.

00:01:49.340 So we've been very happy to see this podcast continue to grow.

00:01:52.880 And we've often had questions about how it works, like why you have to subscribe, all that kind of stuff.

00:01:57.800 And so we wanted to take a moment to kind of reorient and explain how Diabolical Lies work.

00:02:02.360 This is a paid episode, which means that the first, you know, 30 or so minutes are free and then the rest is behind a paywall.

00:02:08.800 Diabolical Lies is completely subscriber funded.

00:02:11.880 We do not take advertisers. Even the free episodes are basically funded by the support of paid

00:02:18.100 subscribers. Yeah, so for example, in this episode, we are going to talk a lot of shit about beauty 0.98

00:02:23.960 culture and it would be really awkward if the first thing you heard when you clicked play was 0.85

00:02:28.600 this episode was brought to you by L'Oreal and not a discontinued smoky eyeshadow palette from

00:02:33.980 Urban Decay. Yeah, and everyone already knows about BetterHelp, so I think we're all set with

00:02:39.020 that. But I have been thinking a lot about this and what it means to ask someone to pay for your

00:02:44.400 work. And I have had a lot of jobs. I have been paid for a lot of different things. And this is

00:02:49.180 by far the work that I'm the proudest of and something that I think about because it is a lot

00:02:53.760 to ask someone to pay $8 a month. That is not something we take lightly. And something I've

00:02:58.840 been thinking about as we've been doing this podcast, Katie, is that you and I went into this

00:03:02.660 very instinctually. Like we just really enjoyed speaking with each other. I think that we both

00:03:07.040 inherently thought of the other person as, like, I remember when I met you, I was like,

00:03:10.680 oh, that's the smartest person in the room. And I just, like, wanted to spend more time

00:03:13.920 learning from you. Let me disabuse you of that notion today.

00:03:18.540 Something that I really love that was, like, a little radicalizing moment for me in my life was

00:03:23.040 listening to David Foster Wallace's commencement speech called This Is Water. If you haven't read

00:03:27.800 the speech, it's a book now, and you can read it. It's very quick. You can read it online. You can

00:03:31.340 watch it. But the whole point of it is trying to understand what the purpose of an education is.

00:03:35.840 And the point that he was trying to make is that we have this idea that an education is trying to teach you things, but a true education is trying to actually teach you how to think, not what to think.

00:03:45.820 And I feel like this podcast is basically you and I chronicling our efforts to try to really interrogate how we think and why we think more so than what specifically we're thinking about, and then trying to use that as a lens to apply it for the world.

00:04:00.420 And so I say all of that because I think it's true that we have very long conversations. It's true that we put a fuck ton of work into these episodes. And all of those are reasons to support, I think. But the biggest reason is because my hope with this podcast is that you're coming away from each episode not just learning about one thing, but starting to interrogate how you think and why you think and starting to be able to apply that to everything else in your life.

00:04:24.320 And so I can say that that's happening to me just by the process of participating in this podcast. And I'm really proud of the work that we're doing. I'm really, really grateful for how many people have signed up. It's so exciting. And we have a lot of plans that we are currently working through that we will be announcing in the year to come.

00:04:40.780 Yeah, we're very thrilled about where this train is headed. So hop on, y'all. Part of the reason, I think, Cara, that I was inspired to explore this topic today with you is for a lot of what you just discussed, which is I can no longer see the world not through this lens.

00:04:58.020 So I'm seeing things like the inauguration and I'm seeing things like this piece in New York

00:05:04.340 Magazine about the parties that happened on inauguration weekend and the SMU Kappa from

00:05:09.160 Mountain Brook, Alabama in her little polyester Zara shift dress on the cover of New York Magazine.

00:05:14.000 And I'm going, what does it mean? What does it all mean? And something that I've picked up on

00:05:19.880 is that the most visible women in the Trump coalition right now all have something in common.

00:05:27.200 And by in the coalition, I don't necessarily mean they are politicians themselves, but they are the women who the Trump coalition tolerates receiving attention and being associated with them and being visible in their orbit. 1.00

00:05:44.560 Tolerates receiving attention? That just hit me like a bag of bricks.

00:05:49.540 A bag of 70-pound hair extensions. 0.91

00:05:51.740 Yeah, there was a lot of chatter in the immediate weeks following the election that you were probably plugged into that, oh, the trad wife soft girl aesthetic. This was a harbinger of Trumpism returning and we all missed it. 0.57

00:06:03.680 And, like, at first that did seem totally plausible to me, but I'm actually starting to see this a little bit differently because I think what you're going to see today is that there is almost this uncanny funhouse mirror effect happening to the concept of femininity in the new right.

00:06:21.740 it is becoming distorted it's almost collapsing in on itself and i have really come to see this

00:06:28.780 as a physical manifestation of the gender politics in our country becoming more and more

00:06:32.900 fucked up technical term and increasing cultural anxieties about gender labor technology so it's

00:06:41.180 especially notable that this is all happening at a moment when the conversation about the rights of

00:06:45.420 trans people and like let's be honest it's usually trans women that we're talking about

00:06:49.200 is at such an unproductive boiling point. 1.00

00:06:51.700 Like, the women who are most prominent in Trump's circle 0.94

00:06:54.260 are now starting to perform their womanhood 0.95

00:06:57.080 in increasingly garish and extreme ways. 1.00

00:06:59.960 So, am I using this episode as an excuse to talk shit about Nancy Mace's fake eyelashes 1.00

00:07:05.060 because I'm a petty bitch? 1.00

00:07:06.580 Yes, unfortunately, that's true. 1.00

00:07:08.780 But more importantly, women's bodies are often a battleground 1.00

00:07:12.660 for ideas about control and power, 1.00

00:07:14.460 and nowhere is that more fucking obvious right now 0.97

00:07:17.080 than on stage next to Donald Trump. 0.98

00:07:19.200 Do you remember, what, seven or so years ago during the first Trump administration when we had a full-out cultural brawl about whether or not Sarah Huckabee Sanders' eyeshadow was up to fucking debate? 0.94

00:07:33.600 Like, it's so— 0.92

00:07:34.620 Is it anti-feminist to critique Sarah Huckabee? 1.00

00:07:37.140 Michelle Wolfe fucking went after her as she should have. 1.00

00:07:40.560 And everyone was like—oh, everyone on the left and the right was like, we can't talk about women. 0.99

00:07:45.460 We can't talk about women.

00:07:46.620 So anyways, this episode is dedicated to that. 1.00

00:07:48.640 Yeah, we fucking can. And we're going to put it behind the paywall because I'm a coward. 0.98

00:07:52.380 All right. Before we get into techno feudalism and the female cyborg, let's talk about Fox News

00:07:59.220 Blondes. We're going to take a tour of the aesthetic ages of conservatism. I'm going to 1.00

00:08:04.540 show you some photos today. All right. So I'm going to need you to really describe them for

00:08:07.960 the class. Okay. So generally speaking, conservative femininity has long been about

00:08:15.580 looking feminine without your femininity or your beauty being distracting or like you're trying too

00:08:22.880 hard, right? It's a very specific performance of what has been called safe attractiveness or like

00:08:28.780 safe hotness. And believe it or not, embodying this ideal was actually key to women's suffrage 1.00

00:08:37.220 gaining widespread support, which I think is just so fucking hilarious. So in the 19th century,

00:08:43.720 many Americans mocked suffragists and other women's rights activists at like early 20th 0.99

00:08:50.280 century as ugly, right? They're like masculine, ugly women. And they were seen as threatening 1.00

00:08:56.640 to our nation's cherished, cherished tradition of women looking pretty and shutting the fuck up. 1.00

00:09:03.580 So ugliness, or put another way, like an unwillingness to engage in gender performance, 0.99

00:09:09.080 is viewed as an affront to traditional American values.

00:09:14.120 So what did they do?

00:09:15.840 They mount a counter-propaganda campaign

00:09:19.200 that effectively they put these cartoons in newspapers and elsewhere 0.97

00:09:23.560 that depicted them as like stylish, beautiful, fashionable, middle-class white mothers.

00:09:30.920 So I'm going to show you an image, and I just want you to describe for us what you see.

00:09:36.400 Wow. This is really cool.

00:09:38.780 Okay, so I'm looking at what appears to be a very old newspaper ad.

00:09:43.800 1915.

00:09:44.920 1915.

00:09:45.560 Okay, you have a woman. 1.00

00:09:46.820 I mean, it's very traddy. 1.00

00:09:48.160 You have, like, a woman with her hair all pinned up, very carefully done.

00:09:52.080 She's holding a baby.

00:09:53.240 She has a little boy who looks like a man, like, wearing a suit.

00:09:56.620 Like a little tuxedo, a little three-piece suit.

00:09:58.760 And then you have, like, a sweet little daughter.

00:10:01.040 And then, let's see, there's, like, a little sewing basket at the bottom.

00:10:04.260 It's like this old house and the top of the ad says, double the power of the home.

00:10:10.540 Two good votes are better than one.

00:10:13.080 Yep. 1.00

00:10:13.520 There was another one that I looked at that basically showed a woman doing like all this 1.00

00:10:18.760 domestic labor and was like, it's good for the home for women to get to vote. 0.98

00:10:24.120 It's good for the home. 1.00

00:10:25.580 Give homemakers the vote. 0.93

00:10:28.100 Central to this idea was really playing up the idea that like extending this power to 0.99

00:10:32.500 women was not threatening to the status quo. Look at this beautiful, demure mother in a dress with 0.95

00:10:38.080 three children hanging off of her. The vote's not going to diminish her capacity to make you 1.00

00:10:42.920 dinner. It's going to expand it. And of course, part of this meant hiding all the suffragists

00:10:47.640 of color, kicking them into the closet, basically being like, we are willing to throw Black women 1.00

00:10:51.700 under the bus eight days a week to get the vote. But to me, it was really this, oh, wow moment of 0.99

00:10:58.600 This didn't start with Megyn Kelly on Fox News. In political action, in political messaging, women's appearance or the perception of that appearance is inseparable from the content of their political message.

00:11:11.920 It's sort of like the medium is the message, but in this case, the medium is an unmoving, shoulder-length blonde bob. 0.88

00:11:19.040 And this goes both ways. Like, the modern-day equivalent to the ugly masculine suffragist is the blue-haired militant feminist that Ben Shapiro is obsessed with.

00:11:28.120 Yeah. So now we're going to talk about Fox News Blonde, as promised. There was a great article about this in The Guardian about seven years ago, around the beginning of Trump's first term, which was basically asking, why do all of the Fox News hosts look alike? And so I'm going to show you another image. And again, I want you to describe what you're looking at.

00:11:49.460 oh my god I feel so sick okay wait this is actually very funny I'm gonna describe what

00:11:58.060 I'm looking at but here's how I'm gonna describe it so I had to send in a bunch of comps for like

00:12:02.940 different book design ideas for yesteryear and so I was looking through like all these famous

00:12:06.800 psychological thriller covers oh good the Stepford Wives has basically one of the covers for the

00:12:13.640 Stepford Wives is based it's really lit it's all these Barbie dolls but they're just Barbie doll 0.97

00:12:18.680 heads and it's one after another and it's really unnerving it's all these women's faces that are 0.99

00:12:24.400 like half real half clay and they're all almost identical but very different and anyways that's 1.00

00:12:30.080 what I'm looking at right now I'm looking so that's this yes I'm looking at this right now 0.96

00:12:35.560 and it's so many blonde women and at first I didn't recognize any of them because they all

00:12:39.960 look so similar but I'm seeing Ivanka Trump I am seeing Megyn Kelly I am seeing is that um

00:12:48.140 Lauren, what's her name? Tommy Loren. Yeah, you've also got Ann Coulter, I think.

00:12:54.100 Yep. Kellyanne Conway. It's actually hard to identify their names. I feel like I'm experiencing

00:12:59.620 a neural overload by seeing so many women and realizing how identical they all look. 0.99

00:13:04.080 This is fucking crazy. Yeah, so we call that dissociation. 0.98

00:13:07.860 You are dissociating right now, I can confirm. So this was the cover photo for a cut article

00:13:13.820 that we're going to read from that is called The Politics of Blondness. But really what we're

00:13:19.060 seeing is like a bunch of women that are prominent in Fox News type infotainment media. And they all 1.00

00:13:25.920 have this very like sculpted shoulder length, yellow blonde, side parted hair. On Fox News,

00:13:32.260 they're typically wearing these like jewel tone body skimming dresses. There's a little bit of

00:13:36.240 tasteful cleavage. You always are getting like a nice leg shot. And this to me really represents 1.00

00:13:42.640 sort of the end of the old regime of George W. Bush-style conservatism.

00:13:47.700 So, Bush's presidency, something really critical that happened during those eight years was the

00:13:54.200 beginning of the 24-hour news cycle. And the 24-hour news cycle served a very different purpose from

00:13:59.660 the pre-9-11 news cycle. There is this article that I want us to read from that says this yellow

00:14:05.660 blonde shoulder-length plastic Mrs. Incredible hairstyle is basically like the dog whistle 1.00

00:14:11.760 of whiteness that's required to serve that function on television. 0.84

00:14:17.220 Okay. It's an unspoken declaration of values, a wink-wink to the power of racial privilege

00:14:23.360 and to the 1980s vibe. The old blonde, common on Fox News, is a specific look. It's layered 0.97

00:14:29.640 and yellow and never too long. I was actually just thinking that. It's controlled and polished

00:14:34.220 and always in place. In earlier generations, news was delivered almost exclusively by white men. 0.92

00:14:40.020 with neat auburn-when-it-wasn't-graying hair.

00:14:43.880 These men spoke in tempered tones.

00:14:46.740 They strove for a bland, unquestionable authority.

00:14:49.980 But at Ailes-era Fox News,

00:14:52.120 the point was no longer to project a sense of well-being or calm.

00:14:55.360 It was to instill panic and fear,

00:14:57.440 and blonde hair was practically a prerequisite for delivering it. 1.00

00:15:01.000 Oh, fuck. 1.00

00:15:02.120 Panicked reports about dangerous immigrants 1.00

00:15:04.180 and the president with Hussein for a middle name 0.97

00:15:06.580 were presented by white women wearing snug dresses

00:15:09.900 with pert noses, bronze skin, blonde hair. 0.96

00:15:13.700 The fox blonde is, in the end, conspicuously unnatural. 0.99

00:15:18.280 She is less blonde as sexy and more blonde as safe. 1.00

00:15:21.960 This blonde is a matronly blonde, 1.00

00:15:24.000 a suburban soccer mom who makes sure everyone buckles up 1.00

00:15:26.720 in the backseat of the minivan. 1.00

00:15:28.480 This blonde is a reminder, perhaps, 0.94

00:15:30.120 of what many Americans feel is truly at stake 0.64

00:15:32.520 in a newly global world. 0.99

00:15:35.100 That is so fucking good. 0.98

00:15:36.200 I'm having like a little bit of a brain-breaking thing. 1.00

00:15:39.120 the white blonde woman as the messenger of American nostalgia is so perfect because she 0.94

00:15:46.660 actually isn't real either. And so, of course, it is a type of woman that also couldn't exist 0.55

00:15:52.620 anywhere else and doesn't actually exist in the U.S. either. It's really dizzying to start to

00:15:58.660 think about that. Yeah. I think one stat that sort of broke my brain, less than 2% of the world's

00:16:05.520 population has blonde hair, but 50% of women who run Fortune 500 companies, so like all seven of

00:16:12.360 them, have blonde hair. Wow. I just found that to be so perfectly representative of the era of Fox 1.00

00:16:21.740 News Republican aesthetic that we've just moved out of. And I think prior to that, before kind of

00:16:28.100 Bush-Ales conservative woman aesthetic, you had the Reagan-era conservative aesthetic, which is

00:16:33.420 embodied by women like Barbara Bush, Nancy Reagan, even Phyllis Schlafly. 1.00

00:16:37.700 It was a little more matronly, a little more dowdy.

00:16:41.420 You would not classify those women as hot in the same way. 1.00

00:16:45.480 They were not posing for the cover of GQ in a silk negligee like Megyn Kelly did in 2010. 0.60

00:16:51.400 Right.

00:16:51.960 And I also, I'm thinking that this was happening at a time period where, like,

00:16:55.980 it has become increasingly acceptable to promote yourself as a consumer

00:17:01.260 in a way that, like, I think when I think about my grandparents' time period,

00:17:05.500 you promoted your value by not consuming and by keeping things forever

00:17:09.880 and by being very frugal.

00:17:12.080 And at some point, there was this shift where now you can promote your wealth all the time.

00:17:16.500 And I'm thinking about something specifically that Jessica DeFino calls the sale gaze.

00:17:20.920 Have you heard of that?

00:17:22.240 Yes. 0.99

00:17:22.760 It's so fucking smart. 0.96

00:17:23.760 The TLDR is that it's the gaze of capitalism, like the gaze of consumerism. 0.97

00:17:27.940 So, yeah, not to, like, give the entire fucking episode away in the first 20 minutes, but basically this is conspicuous consumption as an aesthetic identity, okay? That's, like, basically what we're talking about. 0.62

00:17:38.480 So here's the thing that I think is so fascinating about this, though. Most people point to 2016 in American politics as, like, the big turning point for gender and gender norms in the Republican Party. It's, like, Hillary versus Trump. Like, that's when everything really fractured.

00:17:52.800 and when America heard the Access Hollywood tape

00:17:55.760 and we were like, that's fine.

00:17:57.140 That was like, you know, the turning point.

00:17:58.500 But Rebecca Traister's excellent reporting, 1.00

00:18:01.880 how did Republican women end up like this? 1.00

00:18:04.900 She thinks the real shift that funneled us 1.00

00:18:07.700 into this regrettable bleach blonde 1.00

00:18:11.360 bad-built butch body horror show B-plot 0.92

00:18:13.760 that we are currently living through

00:18:15.320 actually happened in 2008

00:18:18.000 with none other than Sarah Palin. 0.99

00:18:20.680 Sarah fucking Palin yeah this can I say this was obviously during my Republican era and I remember 0.99

00:18:26.920 even then being like did you get bangs I know I didn't get bangs but I remember I am still working 0.99

00:18:33.800 through my love of John McCain I was so John McCain pilt and I remember even then being like 0.99

00:18:40.700 wildly uneducated and just such a little fuck I remember watching Sarah Palin choose that little 0.99

00:18:45.400 tart. Yeah, I remember watching Sarah Palin and being like, this is bad. This is, we're not going 1.00

00:18:50.640 to win. Eighth grade Caroline's like, yeah, we're doomed. Fiscally conservative and socially liberal.

00:18:56.020 That was me worried about my taxes. So Tracer writes about how Republican and Democrat women 1.00

00:19:03.680 used to work across the aisle more. They were friendly with one another. They collaborated. 1.00

00:19:08.500 They generally shared some of the more moderate positions. But this really shifted with the

00:19:14.040 selection of Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate. So this was only the second time in American

00:19:18.740 history when a woman was put on a major party's presidential ticket. The first was Geraldine

00:19:23.760 Ferraro in 1984. But here's the problem. As eighth grade U clocked immediately, Palin was a bit of an

00:19:31.400 enigma. She did not really have the experience or the policy knowledge, which became painfully

00:19:37.320 obvious every time she was interviewed, but this woman had charisma. She had star power. She was

00:19:44.720 style, not substance. I don't know if that reminds you of any other Republican politicians that are

00:19:48.960 prominent. The problem was that she basically upstaged John McCain. Her role, as defined by 1.00

00:19:55.900 that campaign, was to be the silent hockey mom ornament to appeal to the other suburban middle 1.00

00:20:01.560 class women not to open her mouth and speak. And so they really were not sure what to do with her. 0.75

00:20:07.680 So now I want you to read this excerpt from Tracer's piece.

00:20:11.080 This makes me want to go see the SNL skits about Sarah Palin.

00:20:14.700 Sarah Palin was in her mid-40s, young enough not to be collared by the pearls and propriety that 1.00

00:20:20.200 inhibited many of her forerunners in both parties. She was charismatic and uninterested in conforming

00:20:26.300 to outdated gender stereotypes. Or rather, she conformed to a bunch of them simultaneously. 0.96

00:20:31.560 She had a sexy librarian beauty and no qualms about playing it up. 0.73

00:20:35.680 A macho snow machine racing husband who had taken a leave from his job on the oil fields to be the primary parent to their five kids. 1.00

00:20:42.280 Oh, no, is Sarah Palin a feminist? 1.00

00:20:44.120 And she used her youngest child, Trigg, born with Down syndrome, as proof of her hardcore anti-abortion bona fides. 1.00

00:20:50.680 No.

00:20:53.200 She had white nationalist instincts that led her to counter Obama with language about, quote, real Americans.

00:20:59.060 Classic. Love. 0.99

00:20:59.980 And she pioneered a mama-grizzly persona that was both sporty and menacing. 1.00

00:21:05.060 Fuck your dead puppy, this lady wanted wolves to be shot from helicopters. 1.00

00:21:09.400 She was unafraid to stake her own claim to women's equality, advocating for a, quote, new conservative feminism. 1.00

00:21:16.820 Balancing these divergent identities came naturally to Palin, and she was at first chillingly effective.

00:21:22.380 The best to ever play the game of covering the cognitive dissonance of the right's anti-woman policies with high-gloss girl power.

00:21:29.400 What was the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? 1.00

00:21:32.220 Lipstick, losers. 1.00

00:21:34.000 But if Palin was a model for a new generation of right-wing women, she was also a fundamentally unstable molecule. 1.00

00:21:40.420 Ooh, this is so good. 1.00

00:21:41.600 McCain had hired Palin as a gimmick rather than as a colleague, and thus had no idea what to do with her.

00:21:47.220 His campaign fed her straight into the blades of the press, which exposed such deep ignorance of basic policy questions that Tina Fey could parody her on Saturday Night Live, yep, by simply repeating what she had said. 0.99

00:21:58.720 But even had they prepared and protected Palin better, the combustibility of what she brought to the table was a preview of the metaphysical impossibility of women gaining real power on the right. 1.00

00:22:09.320 Wow. 0.99

00:22:09.940 She was a star, and then, almost immediately, too much of one.

00:22:13.900 Palin's poor media showing would be blamed for her ticket's loss, but the eagerness to throw her under the bus surely stemmed in part from irritation.

00:22:21.660 She had not been subservient.

00:22:23.920 She had famously, quote, gone rogue. 1.00

00:22:27.400 Damn. 0.99

00:22:28.720 First of all, I'm like, Rebecca Tracer, if you ever need a kidney, you know who to call. 0.99

00:22:35.160 I love that description of it being an unstable molecule.

00:22:38.720 I don't know shit about physics, but it's like you can't be in two places at once.

00:22:42.180 It's like, you know, you open the box and the cat is either dead or alive. 1.00

00:22:44.760 You cannot both be powerful and a woman. 1.00

00:22:48.080 Like you weren't meant to be good. 1.00

00:22:49.640 You were meant to be there.

00:22:50.980 Yeah, you were an ornament.

00:22:52.020 You were decoration for the campaign.

00:22:54.220 Wow, that's so interesting.

00:22:55.880 And so her personal brand has been called the point where grievance politics entered the right-wing mainstream. It was more brazenly style-based rather than substance-based because, frankly, like, she didn't know shit about shit, but people fucking loved her. 0.99

00:23:09.620 She was a star. And so it's kind of a premonition of what was to come. But yeah, I want to pause and I want to talk for a moment about what we can take from this. Women in American politics have largely been treated as ornamental and present primarily to convey some general vibe to the constituents of whichever party is touting them, whichever version of femininity they are embodying. 0.99

00:23:34.780 And in the early 2000s and 2010s, there were a couple of ways that you could telegraph that you 0.97

00:23:40.740 were not threatening to the status quo with your appearance and your demeanor. So you can do the

00:23:46.360 Fox News blonde soccer mom thing, which does not require being blonde. For the record, I think Katie 0.98

00:23:51.560 Britt is also playing into this font of womanhood, delivering the address from her kitchen and like 0.75

00:23:57.100 the Kelly Green button down with a gigantic diamond cross necklaces, smiling and not blinking 1.00

00:24:02.660 through a story about gang rape. Or you can be the Sarah Palin sexy grizzly bear librarian,

00:24:09.340 which is like the playbook that you could argue Lauren Boebert embodies,

00:24:13.280 putting her children holding AR-15s on her Christmas card. But what you definitely,

00:24:19.060 definitely cannot do, Caroline, is try to take your femaleness out of the picture. 1.00

00:24:26.160 Because the second that you cease to be legible as woman, you are no longer legible 1.00

00:24:32.280 as human. So now we're going to skip ahead to 2016, and you're going to read from Trayster's 1.00

00:24:38.500 piece again. Hillary Clinton was perhaps the most acute example of an assertive Democratic woman 1.00

00:24:44.460 whose efforts to satisfy a ravening press and public intolerant of female complexity left her 0.99

00:24:50.160 so twisted and poll-tested that she became largely illegible as human, let alone female. 0.99

00:24:56.360 Dun, dun, dun.

00:24:57.400 I mean, it also makes me think of Harris.

00:24:59.660 The total refusal to play into either of her identities was so apparent, and it just plays into all of this.

00:25:06.240 Yeah, and meanwhile, the right's doing nothing but identity politics.

00:25:10.480 Right.

00:25:10.780 That's their whole bag is identity politics. 0.83

00:25:13.060 They just don't call it that because it's identity politics for white men.

00:25:17.260 It's not that women's appearances have, like, only now become political.

00:25:20.260 That's definitely not what we're saying. 0.50

00:25:21.600 It's just they've always been central because of how intrinsically bound up appearance is with womanhood and womanhood with personhood.

00:25:29.880 But the shift that we are witnessing now is sending some very conspicuous signals.

00:25:35.340 So to understand what I mean, let's take a look at the current cast of characters who are prominent in Trump circles.

00:25:42.300 And as we do this, I just want you to keep in the back of your mind that Donald Trump owned the Miss Universe pageant.

00:25:47.420 And his ideal woman is, according to Trayster, quote, a simulacrum of every sculpted, shiny, glittery, enhanced expectation of femininity.

00:25:57.420 It's like, you know, a caricature of what it means to be a girl.

00:26:01.360 And so the weird thing about this, and I think others have pointed this out before, is just that Trump seems to actually find the natural female body sort of repulsive.

00:26:10.640 so you may remember his comments about blood coming out of megan kelly's wherever

00:26:15.320 or clinton's bathroom break during a debate as being disgusting i would also add that like even 1.00

00:26:21.640 his most lewd public comments of grab her by the pussy it kind of feels like a robot programmed 1.00

00:26:28.100 like hours of pornography script trying to do locker room talk there is no sex act that involves 1.00

00:26:34.480 grabbing a pussy it's like such an outrageous and inherently unsexy phrase and so it's a really 0.99

00:26:40.520 weird and stilted way to talk about how much you like love the female body yeah i've been thinking 1.00

00:26:47.020 about that first of all with the new york magazine about like the new right and how like all these

00:26:50.560 young people are like conservatism is sexy again and how in the u.s our relationship to sex is so

00:26:56.120 based on power and has nothing to do with sensuality and i think you see that in the way that 0.99

00:27:00.100 donald trump talks about fucking people where it's like it's not about finding the female form 0.99

00:27:04.940 attractive it's not about being aroused by breasts or hips or someone's face it's about 1.00

00:27:10.140 wanting to fuck them in the most literal sense it's conquest and I what I was also thinking 0.99

00:27:15.620 about what you're talking about him being grossed out by the female form I think something that you 1.00

00:27:19.820 and I talk about privately with each other all the time is this general feminist foundational

00:27:25.340 belief that it's pretty interesting that just to be a woman naturally is a radical act like if you 0.99

00:27:31.980 choose not to shave your legs if you choose not to pluck little sprigs of facial hair like

00:27:37.500 just not buying in on stuff is actually the most radical thing you can do I think it really speaks

00:27:43.500 to this whole idea that like even if you are the type of woman who I think you and I might both say

00:27:49.120 that we are which is like yeah I don't wear makeup that often or when I do I'm thoughtful about it and

00:27:53.340 you are never opting out of this it is so hard to just actually be a quote-unquote natural woman

00:27:59.840 which is why it's so fucking funny that all these people are always talking about being a natural 0.53

00:28:03.880 woman. There's nothing fucking natural about this. There's not a fucking natural woman in sight, 0.99

00:28:08.120 babe. It's drag show all the way down. All right. So I have three prominent examples that we're 1.00

00:28:14.260 going to talk about. And this is who I see as especially representative of the bizarre aesthetic

00:28:20.540 transformation of women on the new right. So you can kind of understand the pattern that I think 1.00

00:28:25.140 is playing out here. So phase one was matronly conservative shoulder pad woman, Barbara Bush. 1.00

00:28:30.920 Phase two was safe hot Fox News host. Phase three is what we're moving into now. It's Kimberly 0.95

00:28:37.680 Guilfoyle. It's Kristi Noem. It's Laura Trump. Hell, it's even Bezos' fiance, Lauren Sanchez.

00:28:44.600 And by that, I mean visible plastic surgery, secret lives of Mormon wives' hair, generally harsh, 0.92

00:28:52.420 severe makeup. It's a very frantic, fevered, labor-intensive performance of hyper-femininity 0.99

00:29:00.400 that almost starts to read like drag. Oh, I don't think almost. I think like

00:29:04.100 100%. Like, it's just drag, for sure. Okay, so the first visible example here

00:29:10.640 is Kirstie Noem. What do you know about Kirstie Noem besides that she shot her puppy, which 0.98

00:29:14.420 everyone knows? I actually, I don't know anything about her.

00:29:18.140 Great. Well, I'm pleased to be the one to ruin your life today. So, Kirstie Noem is the governor of South Dakota, who was in the running to become Trump's VP, okay? Like, big deal. Until her book came out, and there was this, like, horrifying anecdote that she included about shooting her puppy and then leaving it to rot in a gravel pit. And she was like, you guys are taking it out of context, but then the context just made it way worse.

00:29:44.860 Wait, why did she shoot her puppy?

00:29:46.600 she took it hunting and it was like too excitable and kept running ahead of the other dogs and she

00:29:52.320 was like this isn't gonna fly she got pissed and so she literally just like took it out back and

00:29:57.480 shot it and left it to rot there and she was like oh this kind of stuff happens on the farm all the 0.99

00:30:02.160 time and actual farmers were like no it fucking doesn't like that's not a thing you're a psychopath 0.98

00:30:07.720 so she but she was like a front runner for trump vp until that became commonly known and then they 0.99

00:30:14.540 distanced themselves a little bit. But she's also notable because she has undergone an almost

00:30:20.280 unbelievable physical transformation since 2020. She kind of rose to prominence in 2020 because 0.97

00:30:26.140 she was like, I'm not gonna abide by any of the COVID restrictions.

Diabolical Lies - February 09, 2025

What is a Woman？ The Shifting Gender Aesthetics of the ＂New Right＂

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