Tradwives, incels and cat ladies: The year MAGA broke heterosexuality

[marmar]

Tradwives, incels and cat ladies: The year MAGA broke heterosexuality
Republicans idealize "traditional" marriage, but their actions make the straight life a bad prospect

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published December 27, 2024 6:00AM (EST)


(Salon) Fellas, is it gay to give your wife an orgasm? More than five decades after the publication of "The Joy of Sex," one would think this was a settled question, but alongside the measles and poop-laced milk, the MAGA movement is bringing back sexual dysfunction as part of their dubious vision of a "great" America. In what may be the most "2024" clip of the year, MAGA-capped influencer Josiah Moody called it "gay" to have sex with a woman for pleasure, arguing the "best part about having sex is reproduction" and sneering at people who "just have an orgasm."

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Despite being led by a thrice-divorced chronic adulterer, the MAGA movement is downright obsessed with heterosexual marriage. The relentless drumbeat of Vance's quotes attacking single women existed because he spends so much time in right-wing media spaces, where getting everyone married off — ideally to an opposite-sex partner — is a singular obsession. And yet the model of heterosexuality promoted in the MAGA world is demoralizing. It seems joyless and sad, especially for women. The right's sales pitch for straightness is so gross that it backfires.

Social media right now is an ocean of would-be propaganda for traditional heterosexual marriage. There are "tradwives," who cosplay submissive housewives on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. They overlap with "family vloggers," typically conservative Christians with large families who chronicle their daily lives online. The world of Christian right content online is far more interested in the maintenance and promotion of the patriarchal nuclear family than, say, the life of Jesus Christ, who died as one of those "childless cat ladies" Vance hates so much. Billionaire Peter Thiel has even funded a woman's magazine, meant to compete with Vogue or Cosmopolitan, that positions extremely conservative marriage as the only true path for women's lives.

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This fantasy that women can liberalize men through the power of sex is belied, however, by what MAGA creators themselves are showing the world about marriage, which they portray as an institution where the woman submits herself to a man — which includes letting him be the boss on political ideology. We can see women's skepticism in the population data. Nearly half American women are unmarried. Among single people, 61% of men are actively trying to date, but only 38% of women say the same. "Heteropessimism" has arisen as a term to describe the widespread fear that straight people, especially women, have that it may be impossible to be happy in a straight relationship. .............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/12/27/tradwives-incels-and-cat-ladies-the-year-maga-broke-heterosexuality/