On Tuesday, the Daily Mail revealed that Bryon Noem, husband of former US homeland security chief Kristi Noem, has a “bimboification” fetish. That is, when adult men attempt to transform themselves into hyper-sexualised female avatars. In his case, surfaced photos appear to show him pouting his lips while wearing oversized prosthetic breasts. Mr Noem has not denied the claims.

The story is many things. It’s a painful tragedy — President Donald Trump said he’s “sorry” for the family. It’s a textbook case of conservative “doublespeak” (as South Dakota governor, Noem culture-warred on trans issues, though with less zeal than others to her Right). It’s also a potential national security concern: a man who enjoys performing as a “bimbo” on camera presents the kind of vulnerability adversaries might exploit to put pressure on his security-clearance-bearing spouse.

Above all, though, the episode is a stark reminder that the myth of a pristine, wholesome countryside is just that — a myth. Red America is no less prone to aberrant desires — what Sigmund Freud called the “perverse addenda” — than the denizens of blue America, whom the Matt Walsh-adjacent Right so often derides as “disgusting freaks”.

This is hardly a revelation. Indeed, it has long been a recurring theme in American popular culture. One classic treatment appears in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). The film opens on a suburban idyll: the sun bathes modest but dignified homes in generous light as neighbours water their manicured lawns behind rose-lined picket fences. Then the camera zooms into this scene, burrowing into the grass to reveal a hidden world of insects and vermin writhing over one another, their harsh chittering overwhelming Bobby Vinton’s syrupy ballad “Blue Velvet”.

The theme persists throughout the film. Lumberton, North Carolina — the eternal Fifties small town that serves as its setting — is riven with psychotic criminality. This is embodied in the villain Frank Booth (played by Dennis Hopper), whose sexual persona oscillates between a violent, abusive “daddy” and a submissive child who calls his kidnapped victim-lover (Isabella Rossellini) “mommy”.

Or consider the canonical X Files episode “Home”, from early in the series’ run. There, an idyllic Pennsylvania hamlet is home to a grotesquely deformed, incestuous clan: the brothers reproduce with their own mother, whom they keep hidden in a closet in the corner of their squalid house. All this, in a horrific bid to preserve their bloodline’s “purity”.

The real-world Bryon Noem offers another case study in this familiar American theme. In a biographical sketch published on the website of his farm-insurance firm, Noem recounts growing up on “a farm in Hamlin County between Bryant and Lake Norden, hauling bales, cleaning barns, pitching hay, swimming in creeks, amongst other things farm kids get to do”.

But then, we now know, there was the other Noem, who liked to play bimbo for the camera; and who, it seems, was essentially transforming himself into a fetishised version of his wife, with her famous Mar-a-Lago look, in essence recreating her as a sexual object within himself (paging David Lynch…).

It’s high time, then, for Americans to ditch their rural-idyll mythos: lower population density is no guarantor of virtue, nor is higher density of perversion.

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Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author, most recently, of Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It

SohrabAhmari

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