Sex Is Gay, Rape Is Epic, No Fatties: Young Right-Wing Men Are Obsessed With Male Power and Male Bodies

"The Spanish came to America and had sex with every single woman."

"Sex is gay”

"Sex? It was rape.”

"Epic”

This text exchange is part of the cache of messages sent in a Telegram group chat by Young Republicans. In these messages, exposed by POLITICO reporters Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo, hundreds of racial and homophobic slurs are used by leading Young Republicans, including a Kansas state senator, along with joking references to Hitler and the Holocaust. 

A lot has already been said and written about the deeply racist, misogynistic, and anti-LGBTQ+ exchanges from this group chat. But I wanted to focus on this exchange because I think it helps highlight some crucial aspects of the sexual politics of the new young right. 

I’ve argued in the past that the new right has endorsed a politics of rape, one that is in keeping with a longer tradition of rape and domination as keys themes in right-wing, authoritarian politics. Here, I want to elaborate on this argument by stressing how a fixation on the male form, homoerotic ideas about strength and beauty, and a contempt for women’s bodies plays into this right-wing politics of rape. 

The problem with sex is the other

It’s important to note that “sex is gay” is an idea found among the incel—or, involuntary celibate—community, most notably from neo-Nazi and self-styled incel Nick Fuentes. In 2022, Fuentes went on a rant on his show, in which he argued that his lack of sexual experience with women “actually makes me really more heterosexual than anyone.” As Fuentes explained:

If we're really being honest, never having a girlfriend, never having sex with a woman really makes you more heterosexual, because honestly, dating women is gay, having sex with women is gay. And having sex with men is gay. Really it's all gay. And if you want to know the truth, the only really straight heterosexual position is to be an asexual incel. That's it. That's all there is…Having sex in itself is gay, I think. I think that it's really a gay act to begin with. Think about it this way: What's gayer than being like 'I need cuddles. I need kisses…I need to spend time with a woman.’

This is classic incel thinking: self-aggrandizing, misogynistic, and revulsion at the very thing they also claim to have been denied—sex itself. As Laura Bates puts it in her 2020 book The Men Who Hate Women, “Incel logic seems to reveal a hopeless contradiction: women are simultaneously reviled for sleeping with men and for refusing to do so.”

Incel thinking is fundamentally misogynistic, but that doesn’t quite capture the intensity of hatred and disregard for women among many. To turn to Bates again:

The incel community is the most violent corner of the so-called manosphere. It is a community devoted to violent hatred of women. A community that actively recruits members who might have very real problems and vulnerabilities, and tells them that women are the cause of all their woes. A community in whose name over 100 people, mostly women, have been murdered or injured in the past ten years.

It’s tempting to shrug off the language in the Young Republicans’ group chat as the pathetic humor of pasty losers. But the danger is real. As Bates stresses, we have seen incel ideology drive heinous acts of public violence, most notably in the cases of Elliot Rodger in Isla Vista and the Toronto van attack committed by Alek Minassian. As Cynthia Miller-Idriss, an expert on right-wing extremism and terroristic violence, argues in her new book Man Up: The New Misogyny & The Rise of Violent Extremism:

Such violence is also fueled by the constant dehumanization of women online, along with the casual celebration of violence and harassment directed toward them. One of the neo-Nazi men arrested for plotting an antisemitic attack in New York City in 2022 had previously shared online that he had violently attacked a transgender person and described himself as "most proud of being 'good at raping women,' " according to an assistant district attorney on the case.

In other cases, women are not just targeted with rage as a means of punishment; they are attacked violently as a strategy of elimination. The six Asian women and two others gunned down in a rampage at three Atlanta massage parlors in the spring of 2021 were killed because the 21-year-old gunman believed he deserved to live in a world without the sexual temptation he believed they created for him. It's hard to think of a clearer example of how mass violence can be generated from a sense of entitlement and male supremacist reasoning. Violent attacks against women in cases like these—as well as in domestic and intimate partner violence and misogynist incel attacks—are not only or even primarily about sex. Rather, they are rooted in what Kate Manne describes as "some men's toxic sense of entitlement to have people look up to them steadfastly, with a loving gaze, admiringly-and to target and even destroy those who fail, or refuse, to do so."

Supremacy is an all-consuming logic on the MAGA right today. Christian supremacy, white supremacy, male supremacy, almost every corner of MAGA is marked by one or some combination of supremacist logic and a desire to subjugate some other group. This fixation on domination is precisely why I argued back in March that Andrew Tate has natural appeal to many younger Republicans and that rape as an ordering principle defines MAGA politics. 

In the context of sex, this comes down to a wholesale rejection of sex as a consensual act for the enjoyment of both parties. This is something that Gillian Branstetter articulates in a piercing 2023 essay titled “The Rape is the Point.” A man’s sexual prowess isn’t so much about pleasing or wooing women. Instead it’s one more act of domination and will, an expression of masculine self-assertion. But that isn’t sex. That isn’t intercourse or love or passion. It’s rape. Branstetter puts it this way:

To [Trump’s followers], Trump’s sexual violence represents the very patriarchal power they seek to enforce. His appeals to a history that never existed are both amoral justifications for his own actions and nostalgic yearnings for a time when consent, of the governed or the raped, was irrelevant. His inability to feel shame is a promise they, too, can be freed of psychic guilt or societal consequence for grabbing what they feel entitled to by birth or accumulated power. What Trump is selling is an absence of virtues or protections—a life where every man is a king free to reign among the stars.

I think it’s noteworthy here to observe that the original exchange in the Young Republicans’ group chat was about Spanish colonists and soldiers coming to the Americas and raping native women. It’s a misogynistic joke layered within a racist view of the description and, yes, rampant rape of the colonial period as a good thing. Western men came and took what they wanted. And, in the MAGA view, it helped give us a Western, European America. 

Rape is a tool for conquest and cleansing, just as sex sexual connection are liberal lushes. As far-right commentator Jack Murphy, on whose podcast JD Vance was a guest in 2022, once wrote, “Feminists need rape… It is our duty as men to save feminists from themselves. Therefore, I am offering rape to feminists as an olive branch.”

Hegseth’s bronzered perverts

I don’t think we can discuss contemporary right-wing misogyny without spending some time on the musing of Costin Alamariu, better known as Bronze Age Pervert (or BAP), as well as the policies of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. 

BAP began as Alamriu’s username on forums like Salo and then became a trolling, vulgar X account, all the while sending missives about masturbation and dispensing lots of opinions about beauty and masculinity. In 2018, Alamariu parlayed the growing success of his online persona into a book. In Bronze Age Mindset , he spends considerable time praising the lost masculinity of the ancient past while relentlessly denigrating women. He fixates on the body, especially the male body, and presents physical appearance as essential to a thriving society, arguing “Only physical beauty is the foundation for a true higher culture of the mind and spirit as well.”

In another passage, he compares them to dogs, writing:

We love dogs because they express so honestly and without dissimulation what we also are and want. They and other pets calm us because promote a kind of carelessness normal to animal life, unencumbered by thoughts of the past or worries about the future, none of which actually exist. Women are, in their natural state, close to this condition as well, or closer on the whole, which is where they get much of their charm and power from (the modern education, that teaches women to be hyper-aware, anxious for the future, abstract neurotics, etc…

As Rosie Gray observed for POLITICO, BAP is obsessed with male relationships—asserting his own heterosexuality while also insisting that most men are actually gay, which he sees as natural and conducive to a world in which a small group of alpha males are responsible for sexual reproduction. Women, as Gray summarizes, are reproductive machines, lower beings, whose liberation has been a disaster for society. They cannot match the perfection of either the male physique or provide the cultural value that male-only friendships afford. 

BAP is eccentric, but he is not obscure. Vice President JD Vance followed him on X, and he’s proven popular among young MAGA politicos.   

Pete Hegseth has not, to my knowledge, expressed any direct connection to or inspiration by BAP. But it’s easy to hear echoes of BAP’s thinking in Hegseth’s constant discussion of war fighters and their need to be trim, beardless, exceptionally muscular killing machines. Hegseth made clear that he doesn’t want to see overweight soldiers or generals in his new, MAGA military. As I noted at the time, Hegseth’s vision conjures to mind the rippling, hairless pectorals of the Spartan soldiers in 300, an image that radiates raw sexual masculinity and a facile understanding of history and war. As for women, Hegseth seems determined to make them unwelcome in the United States military. He recently ended a longstanding office dedicated to providing support for women in the armed forces, a program that Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson (a woman) described as “advancing a divisive feminist agenda.”

Hegseth himself has a troubled record with women. He has been married three times and has been the subject of multiple complaints by women, including a 2017 rape allegation. I’ve already compared Hegseth’s ideal of frenetic, hyper-physical and hyper-masculine politics to Mussolini. It is perhaps worth adding here that Mussolini committed his first rape at age 17 and led a life do reckless violence well before becoming the father of fascism. 

The throughline here is a regard only for men, to the point of fetishization. It’s one that leaves women to the side to be coddled at best and demeaned and abused at worst. The men themselves are supposed to be ideals of beauty and violence, lustful war fighters and brotherly philosophers who make society worth preserving. 

Manchildren of a manchild 

What’s doubly concerning in the Young Republican messages is just how pervasive this thinking seems to have become on the right. After all, these are not sun-starved, basement-dwellers chasing a fantasy of power on the corners of the web. These are ambitious Republicans in their 20s and 30s. As Jonathan V. Last put it at The Bulwark,

These Young Republicans have never known any other type of Republicanism. I assume Trumpism will persist as the dominant feature of Republican politics at least to 2028 and almost certainly to 2032. By that point we're talking about a full generation of Republicans who only understand politics in the context of an authoritarian project.

I made a similar point about the wider electorate back in January for MSNBC. One of the most challenging aspects of turning this ship around is the fact that we have been heading in one direction for so long it is all many younger people know. 

I don’t have a clear answer here. But I do think that, on the issues of sex and gender, we have to get young people off the internet and into the world. Many great and edifying relationships are built online, but the internet is also where misogynistic rhetoric and violence subcultures are doing the most damage to the next generation. 

Objectification is simply harder to do when one is out in the world. And the effects of loneliness, dislocation, and anomie can only be detoxed from our minds with real, human love and connection. 

These might sound like soapy platitudes, but they are also true. And it’s up to men, including men like me, to meet these boys and manchildren out in the wild and show them a better way. 

Featured image is Peter Giunta and Andrew Giuliani