If this is conservative, what are we conserving?
If this is conservative, what are we conserving?
T he Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles recently got into a friendly social-media exchange with the English writer Ben Sixsmith. Knowles had broken some news on X: “Top PornHub staff admits to inserting ‘gay’ and ‘trans’ themes into mainstream porn to ‘convert’ straight men.” Sixsmith reposted this with a comment: “And that’s why we at the Daily Wire will be making our own unashamedly pro-American, pro-capitalist, anti-woke pornography.” Amused, Knowles replied: “I think we’ve found the outer limit of DW expansion.”
Being “anti-woke” is not the same as being conservative, nor is every sphere infiltrated by wokeness redeemable. Nevertheless, with the right-wing-smut lane wide open, enter Conservative Dad Inc. — of “Ultra-Right Beer” — with its “Conservative Dad’s Real Women of America 2024 Calendar.”
The calendar features prominent, attractive conservative young women in bikinis, lingerie, and other revealing clothing in a variety of sultry poses with American flags, guns, and Christian symbols as props. By today’s standard — i.e., hard-core internet pornography — bikini shoots and plunging necklines are tame, if not banal. You’ll easily find worse in movies, on billboards, or on Instagram.
Some took to Twitter to make their disapproval known. “I just don’t see the value in marketing what’s basically, in some photos, soft porn to married (or unmarried) men,” wrote conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey. “Of course these women are gorgeous, and of course I’m all for celebrating true femininity in an age that can’t define ‘woman.’ In my view, this doesn’t accomplish that at all.”
Some say the calendar is “soft porn.” Others, simply “trashy.” Whatever we call it, by conservative standards, the sexual commodification of women has traditionally been a big no-no.
Commentator Inez Stepman suggested that if the calendar had more artistic merit, its sex appeal might have seemed less egregious. This is a key point. Consider nudity in fine art. As the late conservative philosopher Roger Scruton explained, the relationship between art and eros can be understood by distinguishing erotic art from sexual fantasy:
Beauty comes from setting human life, sex included, at the distance from which it can be viewed without disgust or prurience. When distance is lost, and imagination swallowed up in fantasy, then beauty may remain — but it is a spoiled beauty, prised free from the individuality of the person who possesses it. It has lost its value and gained a price.
Good art arrests the imagination and points to something higher. This calendar, vulgar and base, does neither.
Yet as others have noted, it almost evokes nostalgia for the 1990s. Remember when it was real women who were sexually objectified, instead of men who claim to be women? Remember when “sex sells” meant pictures of cleavage and not videos of women being choked and penetrated? Weren’t those the good old days?
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.
Anyone who attempts to advance such an argument will be attacked as a prude and accused of being sexually repressed or “hating” sex. (Those who oppose high standards in sexuality often appear to oppose them in political argument as well, quickly resorting to viciousness and ad hominem attacks.) What these critics miss is that religious conservatives report the highest levels of marital and sexual satisfaction.
The institution of marriage is best conserved through religious tradition, what are commonly referred to as “Judeo-Christian values.” Denny Burk explains that the Torah forbids lust: “The Seventh Commandment prohibits doing adultery (Exodus 20:14), and the Tenth Commandment prohibits desiring adultery (Exodus 20:17, ‘you shall not desire your neighbor’s wife.’)” Meanwhile, 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.
This episode reminded me of the many men who live quiet lives of heroic virtue. They train themselves not to look when temptation presents itself, and they teach their sons to do the same. Over time, choices become habits, habits become virtues, and habituated virtue becomes character. It is character — not smut — that’s worth conserving.