Make America Objectify Women Again
Conservatives are claiming certain women's bodies and sex appeal as an anti-woke political symbol while *oh-so-bravely* celebrating men's desire.
We need to talk about boobs, culturally and politically.
This week, the conservative women’s magazine Evie announced the launch of its $189 milkmaid dress. It’s the same dress that tradwife influencer Hannah Neeleman recently wore on the magazine’s cover, where she is shown milking a cow and looking like a modest farm wife. With Neeleman, zero cleavage was shown. But Evie’s official product shots offer up a sexier image: a blonde, blue-eyed, and very busty model seems to spill out of the dress’ ruched, low-cut collar.
The dress is called The Raw Milkmaid, which sounds inescapably porny but is officially intended as a reference to the increasingly right-wing cause of unpasteurized milk.
reports that the magazine—which has the stated mission of helping women to “harness their feminine energy”—went so far as to post an Instagram Story of the busty model with a milk mustache, the slightest hint of areola peeking out, and the accompanying text, “Got milkmaid?”As I see it, this ridiculous milkmaid campaign is just another recent example of conservatives using women’s sex appeal as a political symbol. It’s part of a broader push to brand certain women’s bodies—and large boobs, specifically—as anti-woke. There’s been a recent phenomenon of straight conservative men proudly reclaiming their desire, as if it had been taken from them. I think we’re in the midst of a resurgence of right-wing erotic nostalgia not just for the 1950s housewife but also a pre-MeToo era of unapologetic objectification.
Consider the way that the actor Sydney Sweeney was claimed as a right-wing idol this year after she appeared on Saturday Night Live and playfully poked fun at the public’s obsession with her boobs by starring in a Hooters skit. Conservative commentators argued that her appearance—from her blonde hair to her large breasts—was somehow proof that times were changing. “Wokeness is no match for Sydney Sweeney’s undeniable beauty,” read one headline. The article began: “Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?” Another article celebrated the return of “the giggling blonde with an amazing rack,” who had “been stamped out of existence, a creature shamed to the brink of extinction.”
Sweeney was hoisted up like a win against diversity, body positivity, and political correctness.1
Last month, Victoria Kjaer Theilvig won the Miss Universe pageant, unleashing a flood of right-wing rhetoric that perfectly illustrated the overlaps of white supremacy, eugenics, misogyny, transphobia, and fatphobia. The pageant’s CEO, Anne Jakrajutatip, referred to the winner’s blonde hair and blue eyes as “the ultimate evolution.” Donald Trump Jr. posted to X: “Biological & objectively attractive women are allowed to win beauty pageants again. WE ARE SO BACK.” (Dork.) Elon Musk circulated a meme about Theilvig that read, “Breaking: Internet Stunned After an Attractive Biological Female Human of Healthy Weight Wins Miss Universe Pageant.”
Relatedly, Tressie McMillan Cottom has pointed to the way that “blonde” is used as a racial signifier that confers “honor, esteem, and power,” and argued that we’re “in the midst of a cultural reclamation of the ideal female body that is suitable for our conservative/authoritarian politics.” That body, she says, is “thin, pale, weak.” What will happen to these “amazing racks” and “double-D harbingers,” I wonder?
The celebration of (white, blonde) sex appeal is treated as important truth-telling—a political act, even. It’s a tack that Evie takes in its latest issue with a headline that reads, “The Importance of Being Sexy: Why Society Needs Aspirational Beauty.” That’s some brave journalism, y’all. Note that many of the same people throwing this party for straight men’s desire also want to ban pornography. There’s even a piece on Evie right now headlined, “Why I Think Pornography Should Be Illegal.” What a classic tension, right?
The busty milkmaid ad would seem to contradict Evie’s conservative values, but the writer and podcaster
points out that this might make more sense if you consider the magazine to instead be pronatalist. Indeed, one woman commented on Evie’s Instagram post about the milkmaid dress, “This dress is going to give me 3 children.” Burke reports that Evie previously released a sexy sundress, which the magazine’s founder Brittany Hugoboom joked was “groundbreaking fertility tech” working to solve “the population crisis.”You see, women are both sex and reproductive object. They are the milkmaid and the cow.
Of course, this conservative obsession with straight, cis men’s boners coincides with the emergence of popular tradwife influencers like Neeleman. Clearly, tradwives target and influence women, but Jessica Grose suggests that they also speak to “right-leaning men.” She points to a study showing that after interacting with tradwife content, TikTok tends to serve up “videos featuring extremist right-wing media figures,” like Nick Fuentes of “your body, my choice” infamy.
Just last week, Pornhub reported growing interest in tradwife content, as well as a rise in searches for terms like “modesty” and “mormon wife.” Sure, MILFs and wives have been going strong for quite some time—thanks in part to the many possible varieties of trespass presented by the wife/whore dichotomy—but the fantasy of the tradwife also specifically suggests a submissive power dynamic.2
This milkmaid campaign is selling a lifestyle fantasy and a sexual one, too.
It’s a very old one at that. Milkmaids were represented in 17th century paintings as objects of desire for the man of the house. Dairies were associated with images of women’s fertility and nurturing. Fast forward to the late-19th and early 20th centuries when sexualized images of “dairyqueens” were used to sell new farm technology. “The dairy pin-up girl was constructed and projected in such a way as to appeal to the aesthetic and sexual appetites of men,” who had all the purchasing power, while also targeting the “visual and stylistic senses” of farm women, who would use this new technology, writes Meredith Quaile.
It turns out this Evie campaign demonstrates just how easy it is to take a misstep around women’s “stylistic sense” when targeting men’s “sexual appetites.” The magazine’s readers were outraged by the dress, calling it “distasteful,” “slutty,” and “promiscuous,” and demanding a more modest version with a higher neckline. One Instagram commenter wrote, “My hubby wouldn’t let me wear this outside the house.” Said another: “While my husband would absolutely love it, at home, neither he nor I would feel comfortable with me wearing this out.” And another: “I don’t want other men seeing me in that or my husband seeing another woman dressed like that.”
Here, the giddy assertion of men’s desire brings about worry over the threat of men’s desire. Celebrations of women’s bodies as a conservative political symbol give way to concerns about the danger of women’s bodies.
Just recently, Sweeney was cruelly attacked by internet trolls as “mid,” “frumpy,” and a “catfish” after candid paparazzi images surfaced of her casually lounging in a bikini by a pool. She failed to meet the beauty ideals for which she was celebrated, and now she’s being punished.
Of course, real-life tradwifery lacks the negotiations and safe words of BDSM; it isn’t about playing with power dynamics so much as realizing them.
“You see, women are both sex and reproductive object. They are the milkmaid and the cow.”
I’ve been working on an essay for a long time about breastfeeding my children and then many years later inducing lactation for kink purposes and this weird milkmaid dress stuff has given me so much to think about and weave into the piece lol