Calendargate
The Calendargate controversy among American conservatives developed in December 2023 after the release of a 2024 calendar featuring photographs of female conservative activists and commentators, several of whom wore revealing clothing. Debates online among conservatives, including some of the women who had posed for the calendar, continued on social media websites into 2024.[1]
Calendar
Earlier in 2023, conservatives angry that
In early December Ultra Right offered as
Reaction
Some conservative commentators reacted negatively in a vigorous online debate later that month around the Christmas holidays,[1] criticizing its sexuality and objectified the women involved,[2][3] even calling it "demonic".[1][4] Former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis responded to another tweet mocking Gaines for posing so suggestively for the calendar after having cited fears of locker-room voyeurism to justify excluding transwomen from sports. "This is the problem with conservatives who think they can act just like the secular world," she wrote. "If conservatives aren't morally grounded Christians, what are we even 'conserving'?"[1]
Commentators who supported the calendar not only described social conservatives as being prudish, but saw it as also taking a stand against homosexuality. Proud Boys co-founder Gavin McInnes called the controversy "literally gay. You're allowed to enjoy looking at sexy, beautiful women. It's healthy and normal. Grow up." Scott Greer, a former editor at The Daily Caller, wrote that "[t]he outrage over the tacky conservative dad calendar proves that the chief enemy for some conservative women is male sexuality. There is a reason why so many of them marry closet cases." Another commenter, FromKulak, wrote a long post about how the calendar's critics "just want[ed] to replace the femminist-nuerotic [sic]-flamboyant priest class with their own alliance of the bowtied, resentful, and closeted."[3]
Subsequent analysis, commentary and opinion
At another conservative publication,
Nate Hochman, a speechwriter for Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who had in 2021 defended Turning Point USA's controversial decision to rescind porn star Brandi Love's invitation to appear at their conference,[7][relevant?] found fault with both sides in an essay about the controversy in The American Conservative, a paleoconservative publication. "In the abstract," he admitted, "calendars with pictures of women in bikinis aren't much to write home about." What he found "exceptionally off-putting" about the Real Women of America calendar—"a ham-handed right-wing effort to be hip"—was that it had been created by and for conservatives. "It's difficult not to feel a certain amount of secondhand embarrassment for everyone involved." But at the same time, Hochman wrote, "the calendar's critics ... veered into much more bizarre territory", in particular proposing instead that it show conservative women either pregnant or attending to children, "somehow an even more disconcerting concept".[4]
The underlying problem, according to Hochman, was conservatives' failure to articulate a vision of what American culture should be, or even a consistent critique of what it was:[4]
[C]onservatives no longer have the foggiest idea of what a 'culture' actually is, let alone what it would take to shape one... Instead of creating an authentic counterculture—one that might someday be able to challenge the hegemony of our decaying mainstream institutions—conservatives are locked in a dialectic relationship with the very social norms and mores that they ostensibly seek to overcome.
From progressives
The progressive outlet
At Salon, Amanda Marcotte characterized the Barstool faction as having more traditional views of patriarchy, "see[ing] sex as men's right and women's burden—and childbirth and marriage as ways to trap women into servitude to men", she pointed out that the social conservatives understood that that was "a hard sell outside of their circles" politically. Trump's success and their tacit acceptance of his embrace of this viewpoint, however, left them "lying in the bikini photoshoot bed they made for themselves."[8] Mediaite derived the message of Calendargate to be that "[c]onservatives should be upholding family values like the sanctity of marriage, honoring women, especially the mothers of their children, celebrating 'real' women without objectifying them, but also reiterating the alpha male status that will make America great again."[2]
"I only wish that I believed this would become a huge, ongoing fight rather than petering out (so to speak) after a few weeks", progressive journalist Kevin Drum wrote on his blog. "But this isn't the kind of thing Fox News will obsess about, so it's unlikely to last." He took no position on the issues involved, but, noting that this sort of internal feud was more common on the political left, said it was "nice to see conservatives taking a crack at it. Let's keep it going, OK?"[9]
Vice writer Magdalene Taylor took note of a video Isabella Marie DeLuca, another young conservative influencer, had posted in October of herself baking a cake that had drawn fresh attention after Calendargate. In the video her breasts under her T-shirt are prominent while she bakes. It does not focus on them nor otherwise draw attention to them, but some commentators suggested DeLuca was drawing attention to "the spectacle of those giant ta tas" anyway, or that they expected her to add a link to her supposed OnlyFans page. The labeling of that content as well as the calendar images as "pornographic", she said, despite the minimal sexual aspect, showed how pervasive pornography was in modern culture. "[It] really does increasingly dictate how we view the world, and many now broadly define porn as anything that seeks our attention". But, Taylor continued, "[b]y calling everything porn, we're not really making any sort of point. We're just making more porn."[10]
See also
Notes
- ^ Loesch is wearing a T-shirt, jeans and lifting an assault rifle in each arm
References
- ^ a b c d e f Beauchamp, Zack (January 10, 2024). "How a horny beer calendar sparked a conservative civil war". Vox. Vox Media. Retrieved February 12, 2024.
- ^ a b c Frevele, Jamie (December 28, 2023). "'Conservative Dad's' Calendar Featuring Scantily Clad Riley Gaines and Other Sexy Pics Sparks Outrage on Right". Mediaite. Retrieved February 16, 2024.
- ^ a b c Ettinger, Marlon (December 28, 2023). "Conservative Dad's 'Real Women of America' pin-up calendar divides the online right". The Daily Dot. Retrieved February 19, 2024.
- ^ a b c Hochman, Nate (January 1, 2024). "Beyond the Calendar Wars". The American Conservative. Retrieved February 21, 2024.
- National Review Online. Retrieved February 19, 2024.
- The Washington Examiner. Retrieved February 19, 2024.
- ^ Hochman, Nate (July 26, 2021). "No, Porn Stars Are Not Conservative". The American Mind. Claremont Institute. Retrieved February 21, 2024.
- ^ Marcotte, Amanda (January 12, 2024). "Why Evangelicals are raging about Ultra Right Beer's sexy anti-woke calendar". Salon.com. Retrieved February 12, 2024.
- ^ Drum, Kevin (January 10, 2024). "Calendargate is splitting the right". Jabberwocking.com. Retrieved February 21, 2024.
- ^ Taylor, Magdalene (January 5, 2024). "Nobody Knows What Porn Is Anymore". Vice. Retrieved February 21, 2024.