I wrote about the recent “Conservative Dad’s Real Women of America 2024 Calendar” controversy:
In Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2005), Ariel Levy explains how, in the 1990s, “kitschy, slutty stereotypes of female sexuality” were mainstreamed and embraced by women themselves, and how this can end only when “men realize that they have the capacity to fundamentally respect women” and women realize “that they have the power to present themselves as empowered, fully capable people.”
As for conservatives: Either the sexual revolution was fun and games until a bunch of overzealous feminists and LGBT activists ruined it, or the sexual revolution was doomed from the start and the ’90s-style smut found in advertising, movies, and calendars isn’t much removed from our present degradation. In the latter interpretation, what we see in the MeToo movement and even, to a certain extent, in the body-hatred of transgenderism is an expression — however contradictory or hypocritical — of a culture attempting to resolve the misery it brought upon itself.
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.