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

Conservatives long promoted a politics of sexual prohibition. Now such morals have been shed in favor of male domination

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.

For those old enough to remember the rise of Pat Buchanan and Phyllis Schlafly in the Reagan era, or even the earnest displays of Christian faith that characterized the George W Bush administration, this can all be a bit dizzying. For decades, it was the left that embraced public sexuality, taking the lead on comprehensive sex education, gay rights, and abortion access, and celebrating the sexual revolution that was ushered in by the advent of the birth control pill in the 1960s. It was liberals who embraced feminism, and worked to make women’s new freedom to delay marriage and childbearing enforcible in civil rights law. It was the left that retheorized family and marriage, reshaping the age-old institutions into ones that could better accommodate gay relationships and women’s equality. It was the progressives who embraced abortion as a means of sexual freedom and women’s self-determination, and who fought for birth control and sexually transmitted disease testing to be funded by the federal government. And it was the left that championed pornography as a free speech issue – shouting down the feminists in their own camp who critiqued the misogyny of its content, and making porn production and distribution into cornerstones of the liberal vision of the first amendment.