No. of Recommendations: 6
(on JVL's Bulwark)
Gender Studies
This piece by Samantha Hancox-Li is hot fire.
The new right is a great purveyor of images. Our new Secretary of Defense revels in taking off his shirt and displaying his tattooed, muscular chest. Andrew Tate is much the same, but poses with a cigar and a raw steak while he lectures millions of young men about the right way to treat a woman. Meanwhile AI or OnlyFans or Instagram delivers you an endless stream of dewy girls with flowing hair and glossy lips just barely parted at the camera.
The internet offers a psychedelic dreamscape of gender, perfected. Men with bulging pecs and gleaming biceps. Tradwives bursting out of their cottagecore dresses, slowly whipping batter and cream. You know the aesthetic I'm talking about. You see it on the news every day—or on YouTube, or Tiktok, or wherever visual content is sold. We are all drowning in it.
I call it reactionary camp. Fox News Face, the pancake makeup and bleach-blond hair that every female Fox News anchor is required to adopt. GearBod, the puffed-up look men get on too much synthetic testosterone, veins writhing beneath their skin like grey worms.
It's not enough to just be a man or a woman. You have to crank the dial up till it breaks. Every stereotype must be magnified to the utmost technologically possible. And I do mean technologically. I'm just saying what everyone knows. "Hard work and good eating" will only get you so far. And you'll watch guys who took the "hard work and good eating and mail-order meds" option rocket past you.
If a trans guy tried this we'd call it gender-affirming care.
Witness the bad dreams of the fascist dreamscape. Once-nebbish billionaire Jeff Bezos wanders around Miami roided out of his mind, the woman on his arm plastic-surgeried to the point of parody. Jordan Peterson goes on an all-beef diet until he has a mental and physical breakdown. Mark Zuckerberg wanders around in a baggy t-shirt and gold chain ranting to shareholders about "masculine energy."
Cock your head and recognize, in the bodies and styles of the reactionary right, the same styles taken from drag culture: exaggerated talismans of masculine and feminine, exaggerated performances of manhood and womanhood, all played with completely straight faces. There's no humor or fun here, just a dead-eyed desperation to finally be enough.
