“Who is the conservative hot girl, and what does she mean for politics?” Newsweek asked earlier this week. To answer this question, the article purports to speak with “experts” on the matter who ended up, (shocker), chalking it up to “gender stereotypes around women’s appearances.”

Unsurprisingly, conservatives on X mocked the outlet for devoting an entire article to the huge mystery of why right-wing men like attractive women. Yet the article did end up dealing with something deeper: conservatives now associate something intrinsically right-wing with a stereotypically beautiful heterosexual woman. The woman doesn’t even have to be overtly right-wing or especially political for the right to adopt her as a sort of mascot for their movement. 

Sydney Sweeney, who has lately earned her place as a right-wing darling, has never made a particularly right-wing political statement. The closest she has come to it was when she celebrated her mother’s “Make 60 Great Again” birthday party. But it is precisely the fact that she isn’t a political scold, and that she is fun, flirty, and most of all attractive that conservatives, and especially conservative men, just love.

Following her appearance on Saturday Night Live, right-wingers celebrated the “death of wokeness” with sexualized comments about Sweeney’s body. In a world that constantly vilifies a heterosexual male’s desires as inherently violent or “rapey,” men on the right found Sweeney’s disinclination to repulse the male gaze refreshing. 

And given that in 2023 the biologically male Dylan Mulvaney was Time’s woman of the year, Sydney Sweeney in comparison is so anti-left she might as well have been Ann Coulter. When ugly men like Mulvaney are offered awards meant for women,  it signals to men with normal sexual appetites that their notions about the “ideal woman” mean nothing. Sweeney tells them their desires matter.

Before Sydney Sweeney, Lana Del Rey was, and in many ways still is, the right’s female darling. Del Rey, like Sweeney, was not an outspoken conservative (although she has since married the archetype of everyone’s MAGA uncle). But she was beautiful, and not only that, she was beautiful in a way men want women to be. She kept her hair long and wore bold lipstick and sundresses. Her love songs were almost worshipful towards the men depicted in them. 

Conservatives are right to celebrate expressions of female beauty—even the vibrant, fertile beauty of a woman in her sexual prime. Insofar as the battle of ideas is an aesthetic war, the right can easily win. The left is making it easy to do so, with their androgynous pop stars and their insistence on boosting the egos of ugly men in dresses over obviously beautiful women. As the right is fond of pointing out, it has been scientifically proven that beautiful people tend to be Republican. 

Beauty is the antidote to stodgy wokeness, but beauty is not promiscuity. Another woman the right has fallen in love with of late is Haliey Welch, a girl who became famous for drunkenly mimicking a sex act to a street interviewer this summer. Welch is cute, sexually free, and obviously loves male attention. One thing is for sure, she isn’t woke. But is she a worthwhile conservative hero? 

Those who consider someone like Welch to be a massive middle finger to the left are missing something important in their line of argument. Open displays of sexual acts, even those done without nudity, numb the masses to the power of sexuality itself.

The aesthetic revulsion men and women feel when they see Dylan Mulvaney is akin to healthy Americans would have felt towards Welch 50 years ago—before the internet and the widespread availability of pornography (not to mention the antics of the left) made her stunt seem like wholesome fun by comparison. A woman who offers a crude glimpse of her bedroom activities to every watching eye across the internet is worlds apart from a woman taking pride in and cultivating her own beauty, even if it is done primarily to garner male attention. In other words, there’s a drastic gradation on the scale from Lana Del Rey to Sydney Sweeney to Haliey Welch.

Even supposing Welch meant to stick it to the left by celebrating some good heterosexual fun in a public fashion, her actions contributed to the degradation of sex and sexuality in a way that feeds the left, not one that restores sanity. Sexuality is an important part of one’s humanity, and essential to human flourishing itself. In fact, it is so important that it is not a commodity to be bought and sold. After all, sex is the only thing that can keep humanity thriving for generations to come since it the gift that gives us life in the first place. 

It is no surprise that individuals are having less sex just as pornography and online depictions of sexuality are more readily available. The cheaper sex is, the more sexless the society becomes.