Conservative women and the calendar-pin-up con.
Conservative women and the calendar-pin-up con.
O ver the holidays, X (formerly known as Twitter) was alight with a strange sight. Republican activists, who also happened to be women of the younger variety with a green body mass index, were photographed in bikinis, bathtubs, and bras for a $25 calendar. The artifact, titled “Conservative Dad’s Real Women of America 2024 Calendar,” is peddled by a reactionary beer company: Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right Beer. National Review readers can probably guess the advertising scandal that inspired the new, “woke-free” brand marketed by the self-professed patriarchal beer company.
The calendar features, for the most part, lightly clad women recognized across the Right-o-sphere, including Riley Gaines, Ashley St. Clair, Sara Gonzales, Dana Loesch, and Josie the “Redheaded Libertarian.” Gaines lounges poolside atop an “Ultra Right” towel, St. Clair enjoys a bubbly soak next to a stack of beer cans, Gonzales cheekily lights the New York Times on fire, while Loesch brandishes two assault rifles. The “Redheaded Libertarian” cheekily takes what appears to be baked beans out of the oven.
The company’s website describes the calendar this way:
Conservative Dad’s Real Women of America Calendar is a celebration of conservative women who are fighting woke extremist[s] to preserve real women. . . . Featuring the most beautiful conservative women in America.
“Calendargate” ruffled many feathers of the conservative variety when the product made its debut. Religious and moral reasons aside, the project itself clashes with the term it co-ops: “conservative.”
I shall not refer to the “Conservative Dad’s” calendar as conservative, for I find nothing conservative about it. Rather, it is a reactionary endeavor — a heated rejection of transgenderism, soy boys, and blue-haired women in one, alluringly coiffed swoop. Rather than “empowering conservative women,” the project furthers an ugly impetus on the Right today: the desire to objectify women (again?) as a means of returning to previous gender norms.
With the release of Bombshell in 2019 — a film that appeared in the wake of the #MeToo movement — a piercing light was cast on Fox News’s practice (and that of many other Republican stalwarts) of objectifying women for monetary or political gain. Astonishingly, a mainstream movie with a left-leaning message (that also performed poorly at the box office) had little effect on the Right’s status quo. Unfortunately, too many on the right still hold the idea that women have some kind of moral obligation to be hot, or that a woman is somehow lacking something essential about being a woman if she does not ooze sexual enticement.
I would like to challenge this position, particularly when it’s held by self-described conservatives. There is nothing conservative about assuming — or demanding — that women should look like Barbie.
There are two extreme responses to this offered by the Left and the Right of today:
On the right: It is normal and fine for men to objectify women. That is simply the nature of men. (See this unnerving 2016 Dennis Prager article, “Yes, Men View Women as Sex Objects,” on the topic.)
On the left: Objectification itself is not the problem. Rather, the issue lies in a woman’s lack of agency when being objectified by another. To evade being a victim of men’s objectification, women should subvert the male gaze by intentionally objectifying themselves and others.
Both positions are dehumanizing in different ways, and I would like to offer another path.
The primary moral problem of objectification, regardless of the source, is the turning of a “who” into a “what.” The woman in view becomes a “thing” in the process rather than a fellow person. The woman herself vanishes — she becomes the sum of her collective body parts.
Of course, turning a “who” into a “what” inevitably leads to inhumanity. This is the same depersonalizing rhetoric wielded by Roman conquerors against “barbarians,” by slavery apologists against the enslaved population, and by Nazis against Jews. In short, such rhetoric is often used by partisan extremists against their ideological foes.
To the liberal thinker, the core moral problem posed by sexual objectification is being other-ed by viewers who may be malicious. The problem is not sex itself or lust itself. The problem arises only when the woman being objectified has no choice in the matter. And so, in this scenario, objectification is a kind of subjugation — a trespass against the agency of the one being perceived.
However, if a woman chooses to be objectified and reap particular rewards from her own objectification, the modern progressive can find no issue here. If she utilizes her own status as a sex object to gain wealth, fame, power, confidence, etc., then one can only say: “You go, girl!”
In the opening of William F. Buckley Jr.’s famous 1966 Firing Line episode with Hugh Hefner, he introduces the founder and “captain” of Playboy magazine:
Mr. Hefner’s magazine is most widely known for its total exposure of the human female. Though of course other things happen in its pages. Mr. Hefner insists that it is a great deal more — there is such a thing as a playboy philosophy of which he is the prophet. And that that philosophy is destined to liberate us all from what he variously calls superstition, tyranny, moral absolutism, that sort of thing.
The seeds of this playboy philosophy that were sown in the ’60s have come to full fruition today. Left-leaning philosophy now insists that the body must be liberated from all conventional standards or “Puritanical” superstitions.
There is, of course, power to be gained by a beautiful woman who is willing to transgress the boundaries of bodily modesty. To be the most desired person in the room is to win mankind’s most rudimentary popularity contest. Platforms such as Instagram and TikTok — and OnlyFans, especially, which content creators (70 percent of whom are women) use to sell their own homemade porn — rely on the “feminist” glorification of self-objectification to make bank.
By baring her skin and reveling in her physical form, a woman can acquire liberation. Ultimately, this falls in line with the “porn empowers women” argument, advanced by some of the “sex positive” feminists of the ’90s and the pro–“sex work” progressives of today. (Even Crystal Hefner, former Playboy starlet and 21-year-old bride of then 81-year-old Hugh Hefner, has decried the degrading reality of life as a posh Playmate.)
The “Conservative Dad’s” pin-up calendar embraces this leftist ideology regarding women’s bodies. A woman’s sexuality is something for her to commodify, reveal, and sell as she sees fit. The culture of today encourages women to gain power and influence through such self-objectification.
NR’s Madeleine Kearns wrote about the scandal in “On ‘Right-Wing’ Smut”:
What needs conserving is not the liberalism of yesterday but timeless virtues and norms: a courtship culture, one that emphasizes male and female sexual complementarity, abstinence before marriage, fidelity within it, openness to the gift of children, as well as the cultivation of a culture in which beauty is prized over the vulgar and obscene. Lust, however lucrative, undermines this project. . . . Jesus Christ said: “Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Deliberately provoking lust in another, whether by dress or behavior, is similarly sinful according to Christian tradition.
Kearns is, of course, right. When almost anything goes these days, an attempt to adopt a mode of dress or behavior to deliberately provoke lust in another would seem almost comedic.
A principle — not a list of do’s and don’ts — is required. Modesty, a close sister of Temperance, is this principle. Modesty shouldn’t be viewed as a repressive set of rules universally applied (i.e., skirts must fall to one’s knee, or shoulders must be covered). And, of course, we can’t ignore that women have been subjugated to absurd dress codes in the past.
While dress codes change according to time and place — what once passed for, say, modest swimwear in 1824 is light-years away from what might be considered a modest swimsuit today — the principle of modesty never changes. Within the nature of modesty itself, there lies a timeless assertion of human dignity despite the constant change in fashion, occasion, and social mores. Women, by their nature, are blessed with beauty — and so face the unavoidable task of stewarding their particular gift.
Simply put, modesty elevates the “who” above the “what.” Modesty is not a weapon to control women’s bodies, nor is it a silencer of free expression. Modesty affirms that other human beings are persons, not objects. The authentic liberation yearned for by modern women — to be treated as an equal interlocutor in the dialogue of society — can be acquired only by rejecting the self-objectification peddled by groups on both the left and the right.
To all of the folks at “Conservative Dad’s,” the truly conservative position is this one: Modest is hottest.