Avatars of the genre include film star Sydney Sweeney making jokes about her boobs on Saturday Night Live, or Haliey Welch — aka the viral “Hawk Tuah” girl — joyfully simulating expectoration during oral sex in a vox pop on the streets of Nashville. The actual political commitments of these women remain unclear, but either way it turns out that the enemy of your enemy can be your friend with benefits. Or at least, that’s the fervent hope.

Commentators are understandably taking the popularity of old-school heroines like Sweeney and Welsh as a delicious provocation for those who have sapped the fun out of relations between the sexes, with their chilly scolding about the impropriety of people’s actual desires. Though on the face of it, this resembles the sort of complaint a Midwestern teenager might have made about his Republican parents in 1965, we all know who the new morality police are. They are the ones treating “intimacy” as a commodity that should be redistributed for the sake of fairness; putting up posters on trains telling you that staring might be a criminal offence; and writing policies governing adult sexual relations that equate an absence of consent with a lack of constant anxious checking that everything is fine.

And true to form, the progressive media is taking the bait. Earlier this month, Vox’s sneery take on the phenomenon of the sexy MAGA-coded female contains compensatory ego-mending about how it’s the Left that is the true “sex-positive” side, insofar as it is “the home for politicians and activists who agitate for access to birth control and abortions” and “who support LGBTQ rights” (smokin’ hot, amirite?). Newsweek, meanwhile, wheels in “an associate professor at the University of East Anglia”, no less, to inform us from a great height that the conservative hot girl “isn’t a particularly new phenomenon… Women have been positioned through the lens of the masculinist imagery in conservative, populist politics for a very long time.”

This much is true. But then again, I’m not sure how red-bloodedly “masculinist” it is for a Trump-loving young man’s pupils to dilate at the sight of an unabashedly sexy female, almost entirely based on the thought that she must really be pissing off the libs. Last time I checked in with the Zoomer manosphere online — the source of material for this story, presumably to be distinguished from the average Republican voter — they seemed busy rating various women well out of their league as “mid”, and arguing over whether Daniela Melchior from Suicide Squad has Western Hunter-Gatherer genetics, hardly thereby cementing an impression of unalloyed sexual vigour. On this basis then, it seems a bit early to announce that Dionysus has returned. One swallow — or indeed, one spit — doesn’t make a summer.

Though you shouldn’t expect people to tell the truth about sex, there is in fact even more unreality in this particular bit of tarted-up X/Twitter discourse than is usual. For just over the virtual wall at Instagram there are literally millions of women, of both celebrity and civilian varieties and all political persuasions, doggedly adopting come-hither expressions and showing off fleshy parts to good advantage. Glorious as Sweeney is, neither her décolletage nor her righteous pride in it seem like much of a departure from the norm here.

But more importantly: as every sex therapist knows, resentment kills the libido. Progressives arguably started this dance of anger, willing to celebrate objectively dysfunctional body shapes for women — breasts chopped off, morbidly obese, testosterone-poisoned or Ozempic-thin — as long as they constituted a satisfying revenge upon the low-status fecund archetypes beloved of political opponents. In the process, they were perfectly happy to drive a wedge between what Lefty men actually wanted in the privacy of their own psyches, and what they felt they ought to be seen to want in public.

In this matter, they were not helped by the radical Left’s rejection of the existence of something called “nature”, seeing the very idea as a sinister plot with patriarchal and capitalist overtones. Since, as Schiller once told us, “beauty is a playful mediation between nature and freedom”, this gave them only freedom to play with, as they tried to construct a sexually attractive woman out of various cultural bits and pieces left lying around: lipstick, a sassy attitude, a big glass of wine that engulfs your face, a PhD. In the end, of course, they had to cheat, which is why their preferred female commentators are often classically gorgeous though nobody is allowed to mention it.

But with online elements of the Right now lured into the same game, validating buxom country girls like Sweeney and Walsh only because their enemies officially revile them, there has been no improvement in the direction of healthy and uncomplicated eroticism. We still can’t tell what these men really want, rather than what they think they ought to be seen to want. Though superficially speaking, the championing of blonde bombshells may resemble a throwback to some prelapsarian unwoke past where we didn’t have to get so hung up on the politics of sexual desire, in fact we are not in Kansas anymore, and we can’t pretend we only just clapped eyes on Pamela Anderson in Baywatch. Porn has exploded in the interim, and the average user’s real turn-ons lie strictly between him and his incognito search engine.

Another difference between now and then is that there is no single hegemonic story about female sexiness or beauty anymore, nor even only a few. The discourse has fractured into a thousand niches, corresponding in almost every case to some million-pound money-making opportunity for someone else. Young women are using surgical and pharmaceutical alteration on an epic scale, and older film stars’ faces are becoming hallucinatorily uncanny as a matter of course — just look at 69-year old Isabelle Adjani in Netflix’s The Perfect Couple. In this context the “natural look” is just one more artificial construction competing with all the others, and none of them seem particularly connected to anyone’s nether regions.

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While the Left pretend nothing is natural, the Right prefer to naturalise what is culturally flexible — think of trad wife discourse about honouring “the natural order”, or Charles Moore writing that actress Olivia Colman has a “Left-wing face”. And this is presumably why some are treating the arrival of Sweeney et al as if heralding a long-awaited return to the garden of Eden. But should the stock of the sex bomb continue to rise in the Zeitgeist, rest assured it will only be temporary. Pendulum swings never do make themselves known at the time.

For comparison, a telling moment in the Vogue documentary about the Nineties currently showing on Disney+ recounts how, after a relatively brief period of intense interest from the fashion industry in their extraordinarily symmetrical faces, models such as Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer and Naomi Campbell were suddenly dropped by model bookers. Even the Golden Mean in fleshly form became boring to look at after a while. The hot new thing involved grunge and heroin chic, skeletal body types à la Kate Moss, and faces that were, in the words of Amber Valletta, “a little off”. Evangelista’s solution was to cut her fringe squint, which apparently worked for a while to keep her relevant. Later on she signed up for a catastrophic “fat-freezing” procedure, which famously didn’t.

Unlike changing hemlines, trying to keep up with passing ideological trends in faces and bodies can easily involve wrecking yourself. Those you were trying to please in the first place won’t care — they’ll just move seamlessly on to the new upvoted fantasy object. Sensible women on the Right should avoid trying to fit in with whatever sort of physicality is currently in favour among terminally online political comrades — whether that involves little platoons, or big ones — for the chances are it won’t be the truth in any case. Instead, I suggest they demand that any male counterparts truly committed to traditional gender roles join the army, or start feeding alligators pieces of raw chicken by hand like the new husband of Lana Del Rey. That should shut them up.

These competing forces — a resentment of punishing beauty standards on one hand, and on the other the yearning to be beautiful oneself, with all the privileges that entails — have long been a source of tension, one that the movement keeps trying to resolve by treating beauty not as an objective quality, but a resource to which all women are entitled. Hence the endless campaigns telling women that they’re beautiful no matter what they look like, that they deserve to feel beautiful, that beauty is something every woman possesses in her own way.

The latest iteration of this phenomenon is a howler of a trend piece, which was published at the weekend by the New York Times — and subsequently went off-the-charts viral. “A social media movement inspired by the rapper Megan Thee Stallion strikes back at the gatekeepers of beauty,” announces the subhead. This movement sees being “hot” not as the condition of being physically attractive or sexually desirable, but as a state of mind, a vibe. Gone are the days when being hot required that another person bestow the label upon you. If you identify as hot, then you are.

The NYT piece goes on to enumerate all the ways in which young women “are expanding the definition of hotness, taking it beyond its former association with old notions of attractiveness”. You can be hot by doing things like eating spaghetti, cleaning grout, graduating from law school, and taking walks. In fact, the hotness of a given endeavour seems defined less by the activity itself than by the fact that the woman doing it is a) conventionally attractive, and b) under the age of 30. (Meet the new hotness, same as the old one.)

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There is nothing original here. It is a truth universally acknowledged that young people like to mess around with language, walling themselves off with vernacular from the generations that came before them. Before the vibe shift there were trends, or the zeitgeist; before the hot girl there was the cool girl; the feminists of the Seventies trashed their sisters while their granddaughters cancel each other.

But the idea that hotness could have nothing whatsoever to do with beauty, or the male gaze, or even the most nebulous idea of being hot to another person… well, this is also not new. We — that is, women — have tried this before.

It’s 1945 in the fictional village of Bedford Falls, New York: a young woman named Violet Beck responds to a compliment on her dress with a scoff, “What? This old thing?”

It’s 2017: Karlie Kloss is just having a casual cup of tea in her bathrobe, not trying to look nice or anything.

It’s 2022: a TikTok influencer named Mia Lind is taking a “hot girl walk”, the tenets of which are self-affirmation, self-reflection, and goal-oriented thinking. (“You may not”, Lind says, “think of boys or boy drama”, a great new riff on that old gag where you tell someone not to think of an elephant. Of course I’m thinking about boy drama now.) The hot girl walk is a four-mile exercise in cultivating confidence. It has nothing to do with looking good, as you can tell by the photos Lind posts of herself on her walks, in which she looks absolutely hideous.

Here, oddly enough, both contemporary feminism and the patriarchy seem to be in agreement: the opposite of “hot” is trying too hard. A truly beautiful woman is not like other girls. She’s effortless, unassuming, even unaware of how alluring she is — because she’s either too modest to acknowledge it, or too liberated to care.

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That is not to say that the women professing to reclaim and reboot “hot” for the masses are lying, exactly. They’re in their twenties, perhaps the only time in one’s life when it is genuinely possible to be hot by accident, or at least without too much effort. But let’s be clear: when a woman posts a video of herself eating spaghetti and receives a lustful outpouring in return, it’s not because of her confidence. It’s because she’s a conventionally attractive 28-year-old putting something in her mouth.

Of course, it would be nice if it were otherwise. And periodically, we flirt with the idea that everyone can be beautiful: that we can change our lives, even change the world, by changing our words. That you can put hotness out into the universe, so to speak, and convince the world to desire you simply by calling yourself desirable. Granted, this change in mindset might prove transformative for some people, in the same sense that the makeover scene in your average teenage rom-com transforms the nerdy nobody into a beautiful prom queen: it only works if she was beautiful all along.

But wanting to be wanted is out of style, too: that’s why it’s so important to launder the basic, embarrassing desire to be considered desirable until it comes out on the other side, nice and clean and feminist. The litany of defences is so familiar that it not only approaches, but already is, parody. I’m wearing makeup and sexy lingerie, for myself. I’m losing weight and getting a boob job, for myself. No one is going to love me if I don’t love myself first, not that I want anyone to love me, I’m entirely above that, and I am definitely not thinking about boys or boy drama on my hot girl walk — for which I have donned a crop top and a pair of the smallest shorts that offer just a peek of my underbutt area, just for, who else, myself.

That the hot girl walking might want to think about boys instead of life goals, or envision herself romantically partnered as one of those life goals, is obviously not to be discussed. Wanting to be pretty or desirable, or worse, wanting to be these things to men, is something the truly empowered woman must deny, deny, deny. (Remember when Victoria’s Secret jumped on the rebranding bandwagon last year, with newly-minted spokesmodel Megan Rapinoe decrying the harm done to young women by heteronormative underwear advertisements?) As with every prior iteration of this attempt to simultaneously exploit and eschew the male gaze, reclaiming and expanding the idea of “hot” is a new twist on the retrograde idea that a woman’s value to society is dependent on gaining access to the “hot” category. A beauty pageant that takes all comers is still a beauty pageant.

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But alas, diluting the meaning of the word so that “hotness” comes to encompass anything a woman of a given age might do is not the same as actually making hotness accessible to the masses. People invariably notice that even in a world where everyone has been freshly christened as “hot” by definitional fiat, a much smaller group of people are still “hot” according to the original meaning of the word. No matter how we torture our language and ourselves, human beings still notice and appreciate the beautiful things, and people, among them. It will never be otherwise, and do we really want that? Wouldn’t it be better to just appreciate what is beautiful, while striving for what is fair?

But like so many grand goals in activism, that would take courage, and work, and extraordinary disruption — including, in this case, the courage to not just demand access to society on behalf of “ugly women”, but to identify as one of them. To admit that beauty, or hotness, or whatever you want to call it, is simply not within reach. Who wants to be the first to let that particular dream die? Of course we’d rather keep insisting that hot is a vibe. Of course we’d rather believe that beauty is accessible to all. It is not just easier, but nicer to imagine a world in which all it takes to be hot is to say you are, than one in which hotness has ceased to matter at all.