In the Purity Chronicles, Vox looks back at the sexual and gendered mores of the late ’90s and 2000s, one pop culture phenomenon at a time. Read more here.
In an election year full of unprecedented events and weirdness, there’s been another notable oddity: Whenever a new hot girl enters the zeitgeist — say, actor Sydney Sweeney hosting SNL this spring in a low-cut dress, or Hawk Tuah Girl taking over the internet earlier this summer — conservatives fall all over themselves trying to claim the phenomenon as their own.
“Wokeness is dead,” gloated right-wing commentator Richard Hanania on X back in March, over a video clip of Sweeney in a black dress with a plunging neckline, her breasts at the center of the frame. Hanania’s logic was obscure, but it seemed to go something like this: Sweeney’s prominently displayed chest was somehow inextricably opposed to the progressive ethos currently fashionable in popular culture. That ethos, according to Hanania, was profoundly anti-boob, regardless of how the owner of the boobs felt about them herself. Sydney Sweeney, somehow, was the antidote to this problem.
Hanania’s take soon echoed across conservative publications, including the Canadian conservative-leaning National Post and the Spectator, a British news magazine. In August, after Sweeney posted a series of photographs of herself in a small swimsuit to Instagram, more of the online right rallied to her side. “It’s a bad week to be a militant blue-haired lesbian,” declared Joe Kinsey, an editor for conservative sports website the Outkick, in a post on X over screencaps of Sweeney’s curves.
Meanwhile, Hawk Tuah Girl — a young woman named Haliey Welch — shot to viral fame in June after she appeared in a TikTok “girl outside a bar” interview and gave an oral sex tip that was both graphic and pithy. “You gotta give ’em that ‘hawk tuah’ and spit on that thang. You get me?” she said. The clip zipped around and was lauded on the parts of the internet where straight men hang out. On his podcast, Joe Rogan called Welch “the most famous person on the planet right now.”
Welch, who has gamely worked her newfound viral fame for what it’s worth, has expressed no particular political affiliation, and no one on the left seems particularly outraged by her moment. Nonetheless, in the months since the video took off, “hawk tuah” became something of a conservative slogan, plastered across hand-crafted Donald Trump merch and shouted ecstatically by MAGA fans.
Those observing these developments could be forgiven for their confusion. After all, the left is considered the sex-positive side of American politics, the home for politicians and activists who agitate for access to birth control and abortions, who support LGBTQ rights, who are generally more sexually progressive. It’s Republican politicians who actively campaign against contraception, trans rights, and sex ed in schools, while right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation is openly musing on ways to put an end to casual sex in America.
In the same breath that the right is ostensibly embracing breasts and blow jobs, they are also maintaining their tradition of critiquing the sex lives of their political enemies. Republicans starting with Trump have repeatedly and baselessly claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris launched her career in politics thanks to her relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown in the 1990s, and that Harris essentially slept her way to the top. “Kamala Harris — she’s the original hawk tuah girl,” conservative author Alec Lace said on Fox Business in July, repeating a talking point apparently developed by a slew of anonymous conservative influencers earlier that month.
So as far as Republicans are concerned, is sex for celebrating and flaunting? Or is it for regulating and decrying and shaming?
There’s a sexual ideology that holds all of these concepts together in a single place: the idea that you can celebrate Hawk Tuah Girl and use her catchphrase to degrade a female politician; the idea that a starlet in a low-cut dress is yours to objectify, while contraception and sexual education are dangerous and probably immoral and should be restricted.
It harks back to the idea that was dominant in the Bush era, a moment when our culture was capable of prizing Girls Gone Wild and purity balls in equal measure, when pop stars like Britney Spears were expected to serve their audiences sex on a platter while avowing their virginity at the same time. It’s the ideology that unites Republican raunch and purity culture, that makes them two sides of the same coin: one based on the idea that women’s sexuality should exist in the service of men. The right once again championing this brand of bawdiness while working relentlessly to restrict women’s autonomy and denigrating the women they don’t like isn’t a departure. It’s a return to form.
In the 2000s, three decades after the second-wave feminist protests of the 1970s, 10 years after the advent of the riot grrl third wave of the ’90s, reeling from both 9/11 and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, America entered into a moment of profound conservative reaction. One of the ways that reaction manifested itself was the mainstreaming of what the essayist Ariel Levy called raunch culture.
Raunch culture was the teen girl uniform becoming low-rise jeans with thongs showing over the top, not just as a subcultural trend but as the default. Raunch culture was Howard Stern telling his female guests to undress in the studio so that he and his sidekicks could critique their bodies and tell them what plastic surgery to get. Raunch culture was The Man Show, an over-the-top leer-fest that ran from 1999 to 2004, that ended with a segment called “Girls on Trampolines,” during which — the titular girls on trampolines being not quite bouncy enough — a dance troupe entitled the Juggy Dance Squad would perform in the audience.
The joke was that it was funny when girls were sexy and it was sexy when girls were degraded — especially when they played along.
“Only thirty years (my lifetime) ago, our mothers were ‘burning their bras’ and picketing Playboy, and suddenly we were getting implants and wearing the bunny logo as supposed symbols of our liberation,” marveled Levy in her 2005 book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. “How had the culture shifted so drastically in such a short period of time?”
The joke was that it was funny when girls were sexy and it was sexy when girls were degraded — especially when they played along
Levy’s answer to that question is that women had learned to internalize the misogyny that was all around them, to adapt by reflexively becoming their own chauvinist pigs.
This was the mainstream sexual ideology of the postfeminist and reactionary Bush era: the sense that the feminism of the 1970s was now strident, shrill, and unfashionable. Being up to the minute meant being cool with a little light objectification, meant participating in it yourself — being one of the guys, even if you were a girl.
Levy interviews one woman who demonstrates the extent to which women were expected to capitulate to men’s misogynistic demands: “I went out with my friend a couple weeks ago and some guy touched her ass and she flipped out at him,” she says. “I was just like, ‘Dude, he slapped your ass.’ To me that would be no big deal — if anything, I’d be flattered.”
The end of the 2000s, though, saw the Bush era give way to the Obama era, when liberal politics and pop culture forged what looked for a while like a profoundly powerful alliance. All of a sudden, Beyoncé was performing in front of the giant word “FEMINIST” and remixing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s feminist TED talk into her music. The rest of the culture followed rapidly after her.
Magazines started asking the young stars they profiled whether they identified as feminists, and the stars stopped reflexively saying that no they weren’t, because after all, they shaved their legs. Girlbosses were trending. Disney started making princess movies where the damsels saved each other rather than relying on a prince’s kiss. Period underwear started a campaign about how the fact that it was advertising about periods was actually deeply feminist.
The mainstreaming of pop feminism throughout the 2010s was expected to culminate in the election of Hilary Clinton in 2016. Instead, it faced the election of Donald Trump, a man who publicly bragged about sexually assaulting women. Widespread horror and anger at this result developed into the Me Too movement, further altering the rules for how pop culture could acceptably treat women.
You can see these massive cultural shifts by looking at Hollywood, where the stars who clung on from 2004 to 2024 had to reimagine their images when it came to women. Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who co-created The Man Show and served as co-host until 2003, hosted the Oscars in 2018, months after the explosion of the Me Too movement.
“We can’t let bad behavior slide anymore,” Kimmel declared during his opening monologue. “The world is watching us. We need to set an example. If we can do that, women will only have to deal with harassment all the time at every other place they go.” I don’t say any of this to pick on Kimmel but to make it clear just how dramatically our culture shifted over the course of the 2010s — almost as dramatically as the shift Levy is so shocked over in Female Chauvinist Pigs. The raunch that was so inescapable as to feel compulsory in the 2000s came very quickly to be considered beyond the pale. Now, it would seem a little weird and retro in most circles not to yell at a man who gropes a stranger’s ass in public.
For some conservative commentators, the feminist mainstreaming of the 2010s is a bizarre aberration, a refusal to acknowledge such self-evident truths as the fact that everyone likes a cute blonde with an ample bosom and a small dress.
Hanania, the right-wing writer who started as a white supremacist troll before becoming a so-called “intellectual muse of the Silicon Valley right,” has described the rise of pop feminism in the 2010s as the left declaring “jihad against boobs.” You can see how he — and the rest of the online right — reached this conclusion by reading his Substack post where he elaborates on his original “woke is dead” tweet about Sweeney’s breasts.
“The more attractive women around us are, whether in real life or fiction, the less one is able to maintain two important leftist delusions,” Hanania writes. “That the sexes are or can be made interchangeable, and that sexual selection either is or can be made to be an unimportant part of human affairs. If Sydney Sweeney’s boobs walk into a room, even Chris Hayes is going to experience a physiological transformation.”
Hanania’s take, if I’m deciphering it correctly, is that it is fundamental to human nature for men to publicly ogle women’s bodies and value women accordingly, and that when feminists object to the ogling, they are attempting to put some sort of vise around human nature. Sweeney’s star power, combined with her willingness to show off her curves, he argues, is proof that this vise has vanished and men can go back to the way things should be: sexualizing women pretty much whenever they feel like it.
Hanania is not alone in believing liberalism is some sort of prison for traditional femininity. The idea is fundamental to multiple figures on the online right. Just look at the tradwives who chafe against the cultural tide that normalized going to work outside the home and splitting domestic labor more equitably, or the reactionary elements on TikTok who seem to believe feminists would love nothing more than to forbid women from wearing skirts and dresses.
All of this is a willful misreading of contemporary feminism. There’s a clear difference between Sweeney being proudly boob-forward — while still getting taken seriously as an award-winning actor with major star power — and other people getting rich by exploiting the breasts of beautiful underpaid women, as was the case with Girls Gone Wild, The Man Show, and, heck, even today’s Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.
The radical idea of pop feminism in the 2010s was that you should be accorded basic human dignity regardless of what your body looks like and how you choose to display it, even if you are an entertainer in a visual medium. Raunch culture looks at this request and declares it regressive, prudish, delusional. Raunch must be compulsory or it is nothing.
It’s the compulsion that is the point. If raunch is not compulsory, then it is not degrading, and part of the point of raunch is to humiliate. Now that the Me Too backlash has well and truly arrived, now that Trump is once again grasping for the White House, now that Roe v. Wade is dead and contraception is in the crosshairs, this is the sexual ethos that the right wants to return to its rightful place.
The return of raunch is particularly dangerous for women in politics because, after all, politicians need to perform power.
It is in part to humiliate Kamala Harris that Republicans keep pushing on the claim that Harris slept her way to the top, that they have dubbed her “the original Hawk Tuah girl.” To be clear, there does not appear to have been any impropriety in Harris’s relationship with California politician Willie Brown, who she dated for nearly two years in the mid-1990s. That doesn’t matter to Harris’s attackers, because in raunch culture, the claim feels true.
Harris’s status as a woman in power means that her ambition is held to be inappropriately sexual and immoral
Under this ideology, Harris’s status as a Black woman means that her body is held to be inherently sexualized, all her romantic relationships thus suspect and deviant. Her status as a woman in power means that her ambition is held to be inappropriately sexual and immoral. The way to keep her in place is to suggest that she would be more comfortable on her knees.
Raunch culture says that if a woman must pursue politics, her ideal avatar is probably Sarah Palin: a white woman, the wife to a macho dude who worked for an oil company, a fervently pro-life mother to five children, someone who looked great campaigning in a mini skirt. (Harris’s status as a stepmother, rather than a biological mother, has also come in for criticism from the right.) Palin was equal parts idealized and humiliated by her admirers on the right during her 2008 run for vice president. She was lauded as “smart, scrappy, and oh yes, sexy,” but she was also the center of a novelty song titled “Red, White, and MILF,” turned into a blow-up sex doll, and made into the subject of a porn parody film.
Palin’s foil in the era was Hillary Clinton, a woman whose public image was so thoroughly desexed that the raunchy joke about her was that she was castrating (they used to sell Hillary nutcrackers at airports), that she could not satisfy her man, that “Hillary sucks but not like Monica.” There was no safe distance a woman could take from raunch that would not allow it to come for her, too, engulfing, humiliating, and titillating the onlookers.
If raunch is considered to be humiliating to women, that’s because raunch is about women being of service to men. The right is comfortable celebrating Sydney Sweeney when she references her own boobs and Hawk Tuah Girl making jokes about blowjobs because the idea at the core of those jokes is about women performing sex for men, as an act of service.
Yet the idea that Harris is “the original Hawk Tuah girl” is a tell that Republicans aren’t suddenly more liberated and celebratory around women’s sexuality. They still think it’s filthy and degrading. They just also want to be in a position to take advantage of it.
This basic fact is why raunch culture and purity culture co-exist so closely. It’s why the online right can think of themselves as being pro-sex and also be in favor of outlawing abortion and making it harder to access contraception. All of it is about men controlling women’s bodies: controlling how they look, how they have sex, and how they have children. The point is always that it’s not the woman who chooses.
What makes raunch culture Republican is not just the underlying conservative social politics, the misogyny, the fact that it goes mainstream when the country is swinging rightward. What makes raunch culture Republican is that its logic is commercial.
The woman idealized by raunch culture is an easily identifiable archetype. You can buy most of her attributes, points out Levy in Female Chauvinist Pigs.
“If we were to acknowledge that sexuality is personal and unique, it would become unwieldy. Making sexiness into something simple, quantifiable, makes it easier to explain and to market,” Levy writes. “If you remove the human factor from sex and make it about stuff — big fake boobs, bleached blonde hair, long nails, poles, thongs — then you can sell it. Suddenly, sex requires shopping; you need plastic surgery, peroxide, a manicure, a mall.”
On the other side of all that is potential profit. Welch has a merch line. When Sweeney hosted SNL, she joked in her monologue that her backup plan to launch her career was to show her boobs.
The claim that sex belongs to Republicans should not be understood simply as a bizarre and self-deluding brag. It’s a threat.
“With Sweeney, what it really comes down to is this: Sex sells. That has never changed,” explained Amy Hamm in the National Post as she celebrated Sweeney’s breasts as “harbingers of the death of woke.” Sex sells, and raunch codifies sex into especially saleable forms.
Sweeney and Welch, however, have been able to keep at least some of the profits they’ve amassed largely to themselves. The ideal under pure raunch culture would be for their profits to go to the men who exploit them. That’s what happens if raunch manages to kill woke: Women lose control of not just their bodies but also their money.
The irony here is that the resurgence of Republican raunch is arriving on the tail end of a widespread movement in the mainstream to reexamine and rethink the conventional sexual wisdom of the 2000s. At the very moment that, in essay series like this one, in documentaries like Framing Britney Spears and podcasts like You’re Wrong About, and more reevaluations of women who were mistreated in the 2000s than we can count, lots of people who grew up in the Bush era are beginning to process exactly how messed up the sexual politics of that decade were, people on the right are expressing a profound nostalgia for those politics. They are saying, “We’d like to go back, please,” to when it was fine to treat women as sexual objects and treat their sexuality as a commodity.
But the claim that sex belongs to Republicans should not be understood simply as a bizarre and self-deluding brag. It’s a threat.
Correction, September 13, 9 am: This story, published September 13, originally misspelled Haliey Welch’s first name.