Lifestyle Takeover - The New Right-Wing Women Report
Reactionary politics have gotten a makeover, spearheaded by women who excel at navigating a contradictive terrain of social platforms
In late January, a New York magazine cover story titled The Cruel Kids’ Table went viral. It accompanies the weekend of festivities around Trump’s inauguration, most notably including the Tiktok-sponsored Power 30 Awards, which honoured the influencers under 30 who campaigned for Trump’s victory. What is striking about the story is the aloof confidence with which the young socialites portrayed in the story carry themselves. They’re far from the shrill, disenfranchised loonies bearing tiki torches that came to define the stereotypical Trump supporters throughout his first term. Sure, their attempts at emulating a particular form of Greed is Good 80s glamour fall a little flat, and the photographs accompanying the story attempt to highlight that fact, their high contrast accentuating the sweat stains on the attendees’ shiny synthetic little black dresses and navy blue suits. Nevertheless, the aesthetics that author Brock Coylar describe in the piece feel like the logical consequence of recent cultural trends including Tradwives, Old Money Aesthetics and a resurgence of Americana.
For the first time in as long as most Gen Z and young millenials can remember, mainstream culture does not feel liberal by default, a phenomenon which trend strategist Anu Lingala has dubbed Regressive Nostalgia. To name but a few recent cultural signals: fast BBL fashion brand Pretty Little Thing’s rebrand towards more “classy” attire, not unlike the LBDs donned on the New York magazine cover; tradwife influencer Nara Smith being the latest celebrity to get her own coveted smoothie at the LA lifestyle grocery store chain Erewhon; Kim Kardashian posing with a humanoid Tesla robot on the cover of Perfect Magazine; fast food chain Carl’s Jr returning to their early 2000s ways and premiering a bikini-clad testimonial in their latest Super Bowl ad. Forbes magazine wrote about the latter clip starring influencer Alix Earle that “some will find [it] as problematic as those from the past. But, in 2025 the ad seems less risky in light of the political changes taking place across the nation.” The comment section of the ad, with users celebrating the “return of atomic blondes,” proves them right.
Emboldened by this cultural shift, the New York reportage’s protagonists repeat again and again that the right has become far more fun and sexy than the woke, self-policing left. The lifestyle they represent feels like a twisted take on Brat Summer hedonism, a long winter of non-pc jokes and male gaze sex-appeal stripped of reproductive rights. One of the several young MAGA women Brock Coylar interviewed for the piece is influencer Arynne Wexler. At first glimpse, her Tiktok and Instagram profiles look like generic lifestyle content – she’s a single girl living in Miami (a recent move, after her native New York started feeling too woke), she wears a silk bonnet to bed to protect her hair from overnight breakage and frizz (does that count as cultural appropriation, she teasingly ponders) and she likes to splurge on a restorative IV drip to replenish herself after a night of heavy partying. Showing her face and her everyday life is a crucial part of her political messaging: “People need to see that I look like a liberal!” Wexler hopes to help her female followers release their inhibitions about openly supporting Trump’s politics. Being far-right, she aims to reassure them, is no longer the social death sentence it once was: “You can be urban, live in a condo, go to Casa Cipriani, and still be normal and vote for Donald Trump.”
When scrolling Wexler’s account, which includes incendiary pro-deportation takes and skits mocking testosterone-deficient liberal men1 among the lifestyle content, I am instantly reminded of Alex Quicho’s notion of Girl Propaganda. Quicho is an artist and theorist exploring the role that the Girl plays as the central subject of platform capitalism (see my first Substack post for an in-depth exploration of the Girl archetype). As the headline of her first major essay on the topic posits, “Everyone Is a Girl Online.” Quicho is picking up on the cyberfeminist idea that from Ada Lovelace to the early female computer operators to femme-coded virtual avatars, there is an inherent connection between women* and cybernetics. As Sadie Plant wrote in 1995, “the computer, like woman, is both the appearance and the possibility of simulation. She fits any bill, but in so doing, she is already more than that which she imitates.” While many early cyberfeminists saw technology as a potential tool for liberation, Quicho is interested in a more ambiguous relationship to digital spaces dominated by large tech companies. To her, embodying the Girl role online is a means of “moving with the cage”, of using the expectations and rules of digital patriarchy to one’s advantage.
Building on this idea, Quicho wrote about Girl Propaganda for Spike Magazine in the summer before Trump’s reelection. Her essay was a response to the unspeakable brutality and suffering in Gaza that we continue to encounter on our social media feeds, and the female IDF soldier thirst traps that attempt to normalise it. In this context, Quicho describes a new form of online Girl, “[s]o smooth that everything except capital slides right off, so numb in accordance with the nullifying conditions of the platform, her smiling pliability licensing bad behavior according to basic gender protocols.” Girl propaganda is auto-generative, fuelled by algorithms that boost divisive content and pretty faces, on platforms run by tech feudalists that sat front row at Trump’s inauguration. Its propagators are grifters who pick and choose elements from liberal and conservative aesthetics and intertwine them into a lifestyle that renders fascist ideology approachable and exhilarating to their predominantly young and female audiences. This cheeky form of fascism thrives on the far-right’s willingness to turn a blind eye to paradoxes. In stark contrast to the left’s ruthless in-fighting, the far-right is happy to embrace contradictive figures and worldviews as long as they prove themselves to be beneficial to the cause.
The most potent example of this tendency can be found in an atomic blonde in her own right: Alice Weidel, head of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland. Weidel’s family life lies at the centre of an argument that reads like a twisted appropriation of identity politics: “The portrayal of the AfD as far-right is clearly wrong,” Elon Musk writes in his controversial op-ed for Springer newspaper Die Welt, “considering that Alice Weidel (…) has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you?” Weidel and her partner Sarah Bossard, a film producer who likes to frequent Berlin techno clubs, are raising two sons together. Earlier this year, the politician stormed out of the AfD’s party conference after the majority of the 600 present members voted to define family as an entity consisting of father, mother and children within their electoral programme, effectively excluding their party leader’s own family. After regaining her composure, Weidel declared that she supported her party’s model definition of family, but that she would privately hold on to her own definition.
In her recently reissued 1983 book “Right-Wing Women”, radical feminist Andrea Dworkin argues that the titular subject of her study “acquiesces to male authority in order to gain some protection from male violence.” According to Dworkin, conservative spokeswomen such as the late Phyllis Schlafly understood male oppression just as well as the women’s rights activists of their time. What set them apart was their pessimism, and their ensuing strategy of proving their loyalty to what they considered an unshakable hierarchy. The reissue of Dworkin’s book feels timely, given the current resurgence of traditional gender role rhetoric, but her empathetic reading fails to account for the cognitive dissonance of today’s Right-Wing Women. Antagonizing “woke” queerness while benefiting from rights that queer and trans activists fought for, evoking carefree sex-appeal while also pushing for abortion bans, and presenting themselves as modern, independent women while upholding a political project that actively curtails women’s autonomy, today’s Right-Wing Women thrive in the contradictions that fuel their appeal. Emboldened by a logic of cultural and political dissemination in which vibes overpower factual substance, they promise their followers that they can have it all. And while this promise might be broken eventually, they will continue to benefit from it, at least for a good while – after all, they’ve found a way to hack the system.
On her website, she sells shirts that read “not a lowT soybeta” and “not into lowT soybetas”. Ironically, the negating parts of the respective slogans are printed in smaller font, so that the garments could easily be misinterpreted as proclaiming their wearers to be lowT soybetas when read from afar.
Fascinating insights - well done, Donna!