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Good morning! I’m Lavanya Ramanathan, editor of the Today, Explained newsletter, and I hope you’re enjoying our best stories delivered to your inbox each day. 

Today, Vox is looking at an odd cultural paradox: Conservatives are embracing a particular kind of raunch — celebrating actor Sydney Sweeney and “Hawk Tuah girl” Hailey Welch as their sex symbols — even as they toy with curtailing access to contraception and sex ed in schools, and conjure up plans to end to casual sex in America. 

How does the right reconcile its obsession with breasts and oral sex with its anti-sex policy plans? Vox senior correspondent and cultural critic Constance Grady has been writing about purity culture since 2021, and, borrowing a phrase from New Yorker writer and author Ariel Levy, she’s calling the current trend “Republican raunch.”

This week, we talked about how she first noticed this phenomenon, and what it means for all of us. For more, be sure to check out the full story here. (Our conversation has been condensed for length and lightly edited.) 

Lavanya Ramanathan  

When did this trend toward raunch first catch your eye? 

Constance Grady 

There was this weird mini trend of conservative commentators [in March] saying that because Sydney Sweeney hosted Saturday Night Live in a low-cut shirt, that she was killing wokeness. Because I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the pop culture of the 2000s and how it expressed our ideas about gender and sexuality, a lot of people projecting weird ideas onto a cute blonde in a tight top really pinged for me — like, oh, that’s familiar. 

She’s a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white girl; that’s a very comforting archetype traditionally for conservatives in pop culture. And you can see that in the starlets that become, for a lack of a better word, bipartisan figures. You saw that with Taylor Swift circa 2014, and Jennifer Lawrence around the same time — these women who have come from maybe rural backgrounds and embody this white idea of beauty.

But what struck me about Sweeney was not just that her existence and fame was appealing to conservatives, but that somehow that it was a blow against woke culture. Why would the right think of itself as the party of sex symbols?

Lavanya Ramanathan
And then we see ... Hawk Tuah girl. That was actual raunch. It’s quite lewd! To see the right grasp onto that was incredibly surprising. 

Constance Grady 

She’s the young woman named Hailey Welch who appeared in a viral TikTok video this summer where she gave a very graphic and enthusiastic oral sex tip that took off on the internet, especially in places where straight men tend to congregate. Very quickly, she got picked up by the online right, and understood as a figure of the online right. You started to see homemade Trump merch with the words “Hawk Tuah” on it, and MAGA fans yelling the phrase jubilantly at certain moments. It’s this idea again, that the right is the party of sex symbols. 

Tim & Dee TV

Lavanya Ramanathan

And we’ve actually seen this before.

Constance Grady

What struck me is how much it reminds me of the raunch culture and the purity culture of the early 2000s. That was a time of purity balls and purity rings, shaming women who weren’t choosing to remain a virgin till they were married. And, it was also a time of Girls Gone Wild and a moment when this pornified sexual ideal was really central in pop culture. You saw figures like Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson put on very sexualized performances and at the same time be expected by their management teams to tell everyone that they are going to stay virgins till they married. 

That pornography-centric and male-gaze centric — and also really Euro-centric — idea of raunch seems really echoed in the sexuality and sex symbols the right is laying claim to now. 

What they’re also doing at the same time that’s very familiar is they are continuing to shame people whose model of sexuality doesn’t fit with theirs — like people accusing Kamala Harris of this very false idea that she made her way to the top of the political ladder using her sexuality. 

Lavanya Ramanathan

We’re seeing a lot of young men swinging to the right, turning toward Trumpism. Is there any intersection there, between that and the rise of Republican raunch? It’s got a kind of teenage feel to it, doesn’t it? 

Constance Grady

It absolutely does. It’s your dream spring break. It’s hot blondes showing you their boobs and making jokes about blowjobs. There’s absolutely a correspondence between the rise of Republican raunch and younger male voters and party affiliation. 

The idea of being the party of sex symbols is appealing for the online right — this is the party that’s going to give young white dudes in their late teens and their early 20s the stuff that they want: They’ll give you Zyn, give you porn, give you hot girls on TV.

A number of these figures see the Me Too era and more feminist consciousness in pop culture as this sort of scolding, anti-pleasure movement. Richard Hanania, who is one of the people who has really homed in on Sydney Sweeney, has claimed feminists were leading a “jihad against boobs.” We don’t have time to unpack all that, but there’s this sense that humorless scolds have prevented mostly young men from experiencing the things that on some biological level, on some intrinsic level, they want to enjoy and experience. 

NBC

Lavanya Ramanathan 

This is all happening as the messaging coming from the party, at the RNC and from Project 2025 and in policy, taking a hard line on contraception, on no-fault divorce, on porn. How can they be both things at once?

Constance Grady

This is one of the weird paradoxes of the right positioning itself as the party of sex, because it’s also positioning itself as the party making it harder to live out your gender and sexual identity; they got rid of Roe v. Wade; the Heritage Foundation has openly mused about making casual sex less acceptable in the US. These are sex-negative legislative priorities. But the common thread you see in the raunch culture of the online right and in the policies — the central thread is male control and the idea that the people who are in charge of women’s bodies are men. They like Hawk Tuah girl because the joke is about servicing and pleasing men. 

The key to raunch culture is that it happens at the pleasure of men, and makes women subservient to them.

Especially if you grew up in the 2000s and took all of these ideas in, in a childish way, going back and looking at the details of what raunch culture looked like that time around can remind you that it was kinda messed up. And maybe messed up the way you thought about sex.

Having that awareness can help you spot the moves that we see right-wing activists making now, and can help you not want to buy into that ideology a second time around. 

NPHS Inc. and NPHS Community Land Trust

Cheaper to build, cheaper to buy: In San Bernardino, California, a first-of-its-kind housing experiment is underway. Factory-built homes with accessory dwelling units are being transported to the city, where they are placed on land owned by a community land trust to ensure that homes remain reasonably priced for generations.

Our love of analog prevails: Vinyl records, flip phones, and print magazines are the latest status symbol. With the rise of generative AI and the oversaturation of social media, many are looking to unplug and return to the ways of our not-so-distant past. Interest in these older technologies points to a growing movement around cultivating in-person interaction.

Should US Steel be sold? Kamala Harris and Donald Trump both say it shouldn’t — and President Joe Biden agrees. He came out in opposition to the deal last March and soon will reportedly announce that he is blocking the acquisition on national security grounds. Nippon Steel, the largest steel manufacturer in Japan, offered $14.9 billion for the company in late 2023.

Another American death in Israel: Aysenur Eygi, a 26-year-old Turkish American activist, was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier last Friday while protesting Israeli settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank — the third US citizen to be killed in the West Bank since Israel began its war on Gaza following Hamas’s October 7 attacks in southern Israel. The US government has generally handled this issue diplomatically instead of pursuing legal avenues to justice.

Child’s play: Research shows that kids’ unstructured playtime and outdoor playtime has declined significantly along with an increase in screen time. Some experts believe that the rise in anxiety and depression among young people in recent years can be linked to decreased play. But while things have changed with smartphones in the mix, kids are still playing in their own way — and it looks the same and different than before.

Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

North Dakota’s abortion ban is overturned: On Thursday, state District Judge Bruce Romanick struck down North Dakota’s ban on abortion, stating that the state constitution gives the fundamental right to access abortion before a fetus is viable. There are no longer any clinics in North Dakota performing abortions. “The law as currently drafted takes away a woman’s liberty and her right to pursue and obtain safety and happiness,” Romanick said. [AP]

New York City police commissioner steps down: Edward Caban, New York City’s police commissioner, has resigned after federal agents seized his phone last week as part of a criminal investigation of Mayor Eric Adams’s administration. An investigation involving the city’s top law enforcement official is unusual, even as three other investigations — and chaos — swirl around the mayor’s office.  [The New York Times]

— the value that the worldwide functional beverage market is expected to reach in the next four years.

Brands like Kin Euphorics, Olipop, Poppi, Recess, and Celsius are just some of the recognizable brand names that are popping up in the functional beverage space. The product category has quickly become reflective of a growing consumer desire for drinks that do more than just quench thirst but also claim to aid concerns like sleep quality, digestive health, and mood regulation. To learn more about why  sodas, teas, and tonics crossed the line into medicine, read Vox senior health reporter Keren Landman’s story on the subject.

Victoria Stampfer for Vox

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade and news editor Sean Collins. We'll see you tomorrow!

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