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

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.

The right, meanwhile, was long married – pun intended – to a politics of sexual prohibition. When the Christian right was at the peak of its power, the Republican party had many of the same policies it does now: demanding bans on abortion, opposing gay rights, looking askance at birth control, pushing cuts to sexual health programs, rolling their eyes at civil rights protections meant to protect women workers from sexual harassment, and opposing comprehensive sex education, favoring instead abstinence-only models. But back then, when Evangelicism and the prim repression of the Protestant right were the dominant cultural force within the Republican party, these policies came packaged in a distinct style: one of sexual prohibition and shaming, that emphasized a kind of sexual self-discipline in the guise of decency. Back then, it really was a scandal when a pastor was caught cheating on his wife, even when his partner in infidelity was an adult woman. Sexual morality was a virtue that the right trumpeted in a very particular style: no sex until marriage, and even then, only the baby-making, heterosexual kind.

Was this all a ruse? The sexual morals of the Christian right seem to have evaporated as soon as the nation heard Donald Trump utter the words “grab ‘em by the pussy.” Now, an ostentatious lasciviousness reigns. In today’s Republican party, raunch is the coin of the realm, a “locker room talk” style of sexual vulgarity is de rigeur, and positions of power in the Trump world sometimes seem to go hand in hand with sexual assault allegations for men, and very specific kinds of surgical enhancements for women. The preachers have retreated, and the perverts have taken over. In the Maga era, sexual domination is synonymous with manliness, and porn is the lingua franca.

But is this really such a great change? After all, the transformation of the Republican party from a Christian culture that prioritized sexual prohibition to a pornified culture that celebrates sexual force has been a stylistic change, not a policy change: Republican politicians are still voting to make casual, premarital, non-procreative sex as dangerous, expensive, and risky as they can possibly make it – at least for women. If the left’s celebration of porn as a free speech issue always somewhat undermined their supposed commitment to women’s equality, the right’s onetime finger-wagging at pornography’s glorification of women’s sexual humiliation always clashed with the reality that the Christian right shared the same message and goal. Sexual prohibition and sexual force, after all, are just two different styles of what is ultimately a single project: the use of sex to subordinate women. At least now we can stop pretending that they’re not the same thing.