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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
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Moira Donegan

In its push to subordinate women, the American right is embracing raunch

A Times Square billboard ad shows Sydney Sweeney with bare shoulders beside
Ad featuring Sydney Sweeney in Times Square, New York City. Photograph: Michael M Santiago/Getty Images

Under Kash Patel, the FBI will now hire you even if you have a history of hiring prostitutes, or of having sex with animals. The rightwing Maha influencer Alex Clark had a guest on to her talk show to discuss the idea that wives should provide sex for their husbands on demand. A new ad for a sports gambling website is being hailed as a victory for the political right, because it features a nude Sydney Sweeney clutching footballs to her breasts. The Tate brothers, who encourage their male followers to pursue compulsive sexual conquest and who have been accused of sex trafficking and violence in the operation of their online cam porn business, have reportedly been friendly with members of Trump’s circle. A dizzying array of elites on both sides of the aisle – conservatives very much included – seem to have been socializing with a pedophile financier, and were so unfazed by his constant coterie of underaged girl companions that one begins to wonder whether they were habituated to such scenes. A prominent conservative writer, best known for her opposition to gender transition care for children, has announced a new book claiming to tackle the problem of young women who are supposedly unwilling to have enough sex. And the women of the president’s members club, Mar-A-Lago, are so well known for their dramatic facelifts, and their lips so stuffed with filler that they cannot quite close their mouths, that their faces are now a shorthand in the world of plastic surgery.

Raunch, vulgarity, a boorish entitlement to women’s sexual service, and the aesthetics – and, indeed, the business – of pornography are being embraced by the right.

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