The New Yorker: Conservatives are Bringing Sexy Back

The New Yorker just published a piece by Jennifer Wilson about America’s new ideas of what’s sexy. The trend is driven by conservatives, who’ve claimed breasts, lingerie and hotness in the wake of the left’s transgender, feminist and #MeToo madness.

Here’s the amazing thing about The New Yorker piece: it takes the side of the right. Wilson tries to protest, but her tone reveals that she thinks the left has become too rigid. “How had everything been turned so upside down?” she asks. “Had conservatives taken sexy back, or was this all just an optical illusion, not unlike the kind created by a padded bra or a pair of Spanx?” In response to popular athlete Sophie Cunningham wearing an Arby’s t-shirt, Wilson writes: “How did this happen? How did the right get the meats?” The conclusion: “While we were pretending not to be looking, breasts had somehow become Republican-coded.”

Wilson then turns her attention to Sydney Sweeney and the history of lingerie. Sweeney made feminists flip their wigs by doing a recent ad promoting gambling where she’s nude except for sports balls. Others are feeling equally bold, notes Wilson: “In 2024, Victoria’s Secret, under its new C.E.O., Hillary Super, had announced the return of its signature fashion show, which had been paused indefinitely in 2019. The year before, Ed Razek, the event’s producer, told Vogue that he had no plans to begin casting plus-size or transgender models (whom he called ‘transsexuals’) because the show was about ‘fantasy.’”

Super told Fortune that Victoria’s Secret would now be less “performative” when it came to diversity and would no longer “check every box and make sure every single thing someone could think of is covered.”

Wilson also visits Make America Hot Again, which organizes mixers for young conservatives in New York City. “There’s been a mega-shift,” Raquel Debono, the founder of Make America Hot Again, told Wilson. “It’s like the Mar-a-Lago face. Look at Fox News. Everyone’s got Botox, filler, and their tits out. It’s the bimbofication of maga.” “The vibe shift is real, and it’s spectacular,” added Kat Rosenfield of The Free Press. Wilson: “For this faction, #MeToo had been not a reckoning but an opportunity—to cast the left as sex scolds and their own party as the one now singing along to Shania Twain: ‘I ain’t gonna act politically correct / I only wanna have a good time.’”

In 2019, a former model named Brittany Hugoboom, born Martinez, co-founded Evie magazine, envisioning it as “a conservative Cosmo” and “feminine, not feminist.”

Wilson signals her ultimate surrender when Hugoboom takes her shopping for lingerie: 

She brought me one of their latest designs—the Clarette, a navy-blue lace balconette push-up bra—in my new size and had me try it on. It was so ostentatiously sultry that I knew I could never tell anyone who had critiqued “the male gaze” in a college essay what I really thought of it. When I emerged from the fitting room, Hugoboom squealed. “You look insane!” she said. I agreed, but I used a different term.

This is a long way from 2018, when an article in The Hollywood Reporter asked “Did #MeToo Kill the Push-Up Bra?” The answer is yes. 2018 was peak #MeToo insanity, with woke mobs going after everyone with a pulse, including fashion photographers. Now many of the same leftist elites who were leading the inquisition— I’m looking at you, Caitlin Flanagan—are declaring Sidney Sweeney a champion of sanity and sexual freedom.

The new conservative sex champions bring to mind one of the last ones: Hugh Hefner. The founder of Playboy was pretty conservative. Hefner grew up in Chicago, was interested in magazines and cartooning from an early age, and struck gold in the 1950s when he purchased the rights to publish naked pictures of Marilyn Monroe. Yet from the start Playboy, whose first issue appeared in December 1953, was much more than a girlie magazine. Hefner had a great eye for talent of the non-nude variety, whether it was cartoonists and graphic artists or writers.

In 1955 Esquire rejected “The Crooked Man,” a story by science fiction writer Charles Beaumont. It told the story of a man who lived in a homosexual society and was persecuted for being straight. Hefner published it. Hefner was a jazz fan, and the early Playboy ridiculed rock ‘n’ roll as “noise.” It also made fun of beatniks and hippies. Then there was Playboy’s ridicule of feminism. Here’s Playboy’s call-out accompanying a 1970 article about the feminist movement: “Militant man-haters do their level worst to distort the distinctions between male and female and they discredit the legitimate grievances of American women.” Such a piece today might appear in conservative media.

In Elizabeth Fraterrigo’s book Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America, the author explores Playboy’s place in American culture. The Playboy philosophy was never about making easy money through laziness and hedonism, and even nihilism, which is what so much modern porn is about. Hefner championed hard work and capitalism—“work hard and play hard” was a favorite phrase. He loved the booming 1920s and often harkened to them as an ideal time of great jazz and economic expansion, yet embraced modern technology and modernist art, architecture and graphic design.

Hefner also felt that an employed young bachelor was good for the American economy because of his disposable income. Playboy didn’t advocate the destruction of marriage, but rather letting a man have a period of exploration between college and marriage. Hefner married his first wife Mildred right out of college; the marriage didn’t last. Too many of the new young trad conservatives are preaching about marrying your first love and having kids almost right out of college. That’s an ideal model. It’s just not always the best one.

Here is how Jennifer Wilson closes her piece. The content and tone both indicate who’s winning the new sex war:

Back in New York, I found a package waiting for me: a small pink box from Agent Provocateur. I opened it and was face to face with the Clarette again. “You can’t be a D Cup and not have this bra,” the note said. It was signed “Brittany.” I didn’t know what to make of the fact that the only person who had ever gifted me lingerie was the editor of a magazine that had just published an article titled “Dear Men, Please Stop Drinking Beer. It’s Making You Effeminate and Infertile.” In the end, I guess it didn’t bother her that I was unmarried. As I grudgingly put it back in the box to be returned (journalistic ethics), I found it a relief to know that everyone was having trouble living their politics.