IN
a different campaign or era, it would have been a race-altering moment;
in this one, it was barely a scandal. There was Melania Trump, the
potential first lady of the United States, posing stark naked in
’90s-era photos published by the New York Post — and then in the next
day’s edition, canoodling lipstick-lesbian style in bed. Yet the press
yawned, her husband’s latest outrage overshadowed it, and it only stayed
a story because the date of the photos raised questions about the
future Mrs. Trump’s immigration status.
This
election was supposed to be a referendum on Hillary Clinton, long a
polarizing figure because she seemed to embody the cultural
transformations of the 1960s — the liberal, feminist, working-mother
spouse of the first boomer president.
But
in the year of Donald Trump, the religious conservatives who fought
many of those transformations find themselves reduced to a hapless rump.
The best have retreated to rebuild; the worst have abased themselves before a sybaritic, irreligious presidential nominee.
So
in word, deed and his wife’s “artistic” shots, it’s Trump rather than
Clinton who has confirmed the full triumph of the sexual revolutions.
I
say revolutions, plural, because Trump is a reminder that the 1960s
happened in stages, with different figures and worldviews shaping its
social shifts. As John Podhoretz wrote
in a shrewd column, Trump and Hillary are both children of the ’60s —
but of its opposite ends, the Brat Pack era in Trump’s case and the
flowering of boomer liberalism in Hillary’s.
Much
of what seems strange and reactionary about Trump is tied to what was
normal to a certain kind of Sinatra and Mad Men-era man — the casual
sexism, the odd mix of sleaziness and formality, even the insult-comic
style.
But
while that male culture was “conservative” in its exploitative
attitudes toward women, it was itself in rebellion against bourgeois
norms and Middle-American Christianity. And if Hillary is a (partial,
given her complicated marriage) avatar of Gloria Steinem-era feminism,
her opponent is an heir of the male revolutionary in whose club Steinem
once went undercover: Hugh Hefner.
It was Hefner who fully embodied the
male sexual revolt. Today he’s just a sleazy oldster, but in the
beginning he was a faux philosopher, preaching a gospel cribbed from
bohemia and various Freudian enemies of repression, in which the blessed
pursuit of promiscuity was the human birthright. But really a male
birthright, for a certain kind of man: The sort of hep cat who loved
inviting the ladies back to his pad “for a quiet discussion on Picasso,
Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”
That
was the ideal, at least. Trump, the thrice-married ubermensch who jokes
about Megyn Kelly’s period, is the more usual reality. (So, albeit with
more surface class, was the ultimate early-’60s man, the sex-addicted
J.F.K.)
That
obvious gulf helps explain why Hefner passed from a phenomenon to a
sideshow, while a more feminist vision of liberation became the official
ideology of the liberal upper class.
But
only gradually and partially. The men’s sexual revolution, in which
freedom meant freedom to take your pleasure while women took the pill,
is still a potent force, and not only in the halls of Fox News. From
Hollywood and college campuses to rock concert backstages and Bill
Clinton’s political operation, it has persisted as a pervasive but
unspoken philosophy in precincts officially committed to cultural
liberalism and sexual equality.
It
has also endured by going downmarket in the culture. If you watched
“The Girls Next Door,” the TV show about Hefner’s ménage, you noticed
that the Playboy mystique was emphatically not a joke in the lower
middle class environs that produced his centerfolds and their most
adoring fans. Like Trumpism, Hefnerian values have prospered in the
blue-collar vacuum created by religion’s retreat, community’s
unraveling.
Then
finally, among men who were promised pliant centerfolds and ended up
single with only high-speed internet to comfort them, the men’s sexual
revolution has curdled into a toxic subculture, resentful of female empowerment in all its forms.
This
is where you find Trump’s strongest (and, yes, strangest) fans. He’s
become the Daddy Alpha for every alpha-aspiring beta male, whose mix of
moral liberation and misogyny keeps the Ring-a-Ding-Ding dream alive.
There
aren’t nearly enough of these fans to win him the election. Steinem’s
revolution (Clintonian complications and all) should easily beat Hef’s
at the ballot box this year.
But the cultural conflict between these two post-revolutionary styles — between frat guys and feminist bluestockings, Gamergaters and the diversity police, alt-right provocateurs
and “woke” dudebros, the mouthbreathers who poured hate on the
all-female “Ghostbusters” and the tastemakers who pretended it was good —
is likely here to stay. With time and Christianity’s further decline,
it could eclipse older culture war battles; in the pop culture
landscape, it already does.
Ten years ago, liberals pined for a post-religious right, a different culture war.
Source: New York Times