Now, should the worst come to pass — should Western civilization be erased from the face of the earth — then those of us who make it to the fallout shelter will be able to add another crime to the list. Annihilation will also be Sydney Sweeney’s fault. A culture that can produce a scene like the one in Euphoria season three — in which Sweeney’s character performs sex-cam work while dressed as a baby — apparently deserves all the hydrogen bombs coming to it.

The HBO drama appears to have been the final straw for the influential ultra-nationalist Russian “philosopher” Alexander Dugin, who earlier this month launched into an extraordinary rant on X, apparently inspired by his late-night TV viewing. “Look: is there at least one argument why the US shouldn’t be erased from the face of the earth?” he asked. 

To those who might respond: “Sydney Sweeney in American Eagle jeans”, Dugin offered short shrift. Sweeney may be a MAGA darling — she is, after all, blonde haired and blue-eyed and comes from a Republican-coded family — but to a committed Russian nationalist, this is irrelevant. “You are not the people,” he wrote. “You are stupid slaves on the Epstein’s menu of cruel cannibal elites. You are eaten, your brains are. It is why you watch Euphoria. Because all of you are perverts. Disgusting civilization. No reason to exist. Please, die.” Thanks — we’ll take that on board. 

It’s not too hard to see why Euphoria — with its interracial, intersex, into-absolutely-anything cast — would be a particular trigger for the Kremlin’s on-off court philosopher. Born in the Khrushchev era, Dugin spent his youth vaguely agitating against communism before the break-up of the Soviet Union deeply wounded his national pride. Like every fascist before and since, he became obsessed with the idea of humiliation. He co-founded the National Bolshevik Party — the “Natbols” — with Eduard Limonov in the Nineties. The party’s flag was a Nazi-style white circle on a red background — only instead of a swastika, it had a black hammer and sickle. Russians aren’t generally fans of the Nazis; Dugin admired both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks for their Nietzschean will to power. It was the liberal West, with its dangerous ideas like human rights and free speech, that he regarded as the true evil. A hairy ogre of a man, Dugin conveyed his ideas with charisma and force. He was a hard drinker and a rich storyteller with a deep resonant voice in which he delivered mesmerizing monologues about the destiny of Russia to the eager young jackbooted Natbols. 

For all his mad array of influences — Hitler, Stalin, Guy Debord, Terminator, Lao Tzu, Mishima, Rosa Luxemburg, René Guénon — and his fondness for terms like “rhizomatic” and “hermeneutic circle”, Dugin’s philosophy is actually pretty simple. In Foundations of Geopolitics (1997), he argues that Russia must reverse the humiliation of the Soviet collapse by rebuilding itself as the core of a new Eurasian empire that is destined to challenge and ultimately dismantle Western (i.e. American) hegemony. America and the EU in this vision are not merely political rivals like China, India or Iran, say — but decadent forces, intent on dissolving Russia’s identity and historical purpose. Beneath the book’s strategic language lies a messianic strain: a wounded civilization is redeemed through expansion, action, spiritual renewal and permanent struggle. Only Russia, with its spiritual depth, its powers of endurance, its capacity for hard action, is capable of saving the world from the liberal antichrist. The book has become a set text for Russian military leaders and seems to have guided Vladimir Putin’s strategy in Ukraine. Asked what policy Russia should take towards its Western neighbor as early as 2014, Dugin’s response was: “Kill! Kill! Kill! There can be no other discussion.” 

Dugin’s pronouncements became more deranged following the assassination of his daughter Darya in a car bomb in 2022, and his targets have become a little more scattergun. He has a particular hatred of the popular Russian cartoon character, Cheburashka, for example — “the concentrated expression of that very feeblemindedness against which I have battled my whole life” — and frequently rails against Marvel movies, McDonalds, and various other symbols of American cultural power.

But Euphoria — in which literally every character is performing sex work to support their crystal meth addiction and/or gender reassignment surgery — would strike Dugin as a representation of everything evil and degrading in Western culture. And the fact that America permits this depiction of itself — indeed, that Euphoria has launched the careers of some of its most lauded stars, including Sweeney, Jacob Elordi and Zendaya — is further evidence of the moral degeneracy of a culture. In his fawning interview with that useful American idiot, Tucker Carlson, Dugin declared that the dystopian futures depicted in Hollywood movies like The Matrix and Terminator were not warnings, but actual visions of where the West was heading. Why do American filmmakers never depict happy families or thriving communities in their future visions, he asked. It’s because Americans are willing on this apocalypse. Thus Euphoria’s self-loathing, atomized, narcotic, nihilistic, multi-racial hell is basically a warning — this is what America would impose on the rest of the world, a staging post on the way to Skynet. 

What’s interesting about all this — and what Russocurious American conservatives like Carlson often seem to miss — is the strain of messianism in Russian thought. Americans are so accustomed to thinking of their culture as the envy of the world and their eccentric conception of “freedom” as the universal absolute that the idea Russia might have its own global vision seems not to have occurred to them. They are more comfortable patronizing Russia as a backward, violent, pitiful place — much of which goes back to those images of Russians in the Eighties queuing for Big Macs in Red Square and going crazy for Levis (which clearly made Dugin furious). Thus Carlson could tour a Moscow supermarket in 2024, simply amazed that they have affordable groceries. But this cultural complacency frequently leads non-Russians to miss Russian critiques of the West (say, of American racism) and to underestimate the very real strain of messianism in Russian thought — that is, Russia’s own mission to save the world.

So as ludicrous as Dugin often appears, there is a coherent set of ideas behind his philosophy — and in any case, recent history tells us that it is the ludicrous people we need to take most seriously. To understand where Dugin is coming from you need to understand the Eurasianist tradition of which he is a mutant 21st-century outgrowth, as well as Russia’s dual conception as both an Asiatic and Christian civilization. There are many ways this dichotomy manifests. You can see it in the rivalry between the two capitals: St Petersburg, constructed by Peter the Great as a “window onto Europe”, and Moscow, the older Slavic center of Orthodoxy and imperial memory. But there are two key moments in Russian history that the Eurasianists have drawn upon to lend grandeur to their vision.

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The first is the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, when the forces of the Russian principalities defeated the Tatar army of the Golden Horde and began to free their lands from their Mongol oppressors. In the Russian cultural memory, this event has mythic significance: the point at which Russia begins to define itself through resistance to, and absorption of, the steppe world. “Our path runs through the steppe – and boundless anguish / Your anguish, O Russia!” wrote the symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok in his cycle On the Field of Kulikovo (1908), which conjures a “holy banner” and the “Khan’s sabre” rising against a blood-red horizon. The idea this animates is Russia as a land formed of Mongol violence and Christian redemption — with a destiny of, hurrah, “boundless anguish”. 

The influential Central Asian scholar (and virulent antisemite) Lev Gumilev — son of the appallingly persecuted poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev, both acquaintances of Blok — built an entire civilizational theory from this image. He argued that the Mongol period had not merely been an occupation but a formative synthesis. Rather than seeing Tatar horseman rampaging through Russian villages, raping Russian women, burning Russian crops as a catastrophe, he reframed it as a creative ethnogenesis. The Russian “ethnos”, in Gumilev’s formulation, emerges from a fusion of Slavic and Turkic elements, formed through long cycles of what he calls “passionarity” — a kind of heroic fusing of land, soul and idea. Gumilev developed an entire theory around this “ethnos”, arguing that this was no mere abstract theory but a “biophysical reality”. 

From here comes the notion that it is actually the liberalizing, secularizing, Enlightenment Europeans who are actually the dangerous ones — since they want to flatten out all ethnoi into one rainbow coalition of consumerism. Or as Dugin had it in his rant on X: “Whites? They are destroyed the world and themselves. To be white means to be nihilist. It is self hatred race. It caused so meany troubles to others and to itself. It lost the right to be something. No arguments to support their existence.” (He is said to speak 15 languages, and you have to wonder if his grammar is as bad in the others.)

The second foundational moment was the fall of Byzantium in 1453, when Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman Turks. From this rupture emerges one of the most consequential ideas in Russian political theology — of Moscow as the “Third Rome”. As Philotheus of Pskov argued in the 16th century: “Two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and there will be no fourth.” Rome itself had fallen into heresy (i.e. Catholicism), Constantinople to conquest, which meant that Moscow remained as the final guardian of true Orthodoxy. This notion would guide Russia’s self-conception not only as a state, but as a providential civilization — the nation destined to preserve and ultimately redeem Christendom itself and, certainly, its near neighbors like Ukraine and Georgia. So, Russia is no mere country but a vessel of sacred history, a restraining force against chaos — a katechon holding back dissolution; the dissolution of Sydney Sweeney, Zendaya, Jacob Elordi and friends. 

This is the deeper ideological field upon which later debates about Russia’s destiny take place. Whenever “Westernizers” have argued that Russia should reform itself along liberal, democratic, secular lines (Dugin would say “white” lines), there are always “Slavophiles” to argue that this is not the Russian way. In the 19th century, Slavophile philosophers like Aleksey Khomyakov and Ivan Kireevsky argued passionately against European modernity, insisting instead that Russia’s strength lay precisely in what Europe had lost: Orthodoxy, communal life, and a form of spiritual wholeness they called sobornost — a notion of organic unity in which truth emerges not from isolated individuals but from a living moral community.

There are traces of this in many of the great 19th-century Russian novels. Fyodor Dostoevsky, indeed, had his own Euphoria moment when he visited London in 1862 and was appalled by what he saw. “Everyone is drunk, but drunk joylessly,” he wrote. “Everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility…” But what unsettled him most was not vice but order — or rather, the promise of a new kind of world order. He was one of millions of international visitors to the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, which featured 28,000 exhibitors from dozens of nations showcasing steam engines, telegraphs, leech barometers, machine tools, Japanese prints, American cocktails — the whole world assembled in one glass pyramid. Forever after, the “Crystal Palace” recurred in Dostoevsky’s work as a horrifying hallucination of mankind forced into rational order through science, commerce and industrial progress. Where Western visitors might have seen a vision of global harmony, Dostoevsky saw spiritual erasure: atomization, loneliness, the reduction of human beings to interchangeable units in a vast rational machine. If you have ever toured the shopping malls of Los Angeles or Dubai, you may have experienced a similar shudder. 

“All Europeans try to attain one and the same goal,” Dostoevsky later wrote — that is, “the universally human ideal”. But in striving toward this abstraction they dissolve the very cultures that give human life meaning. Only Russia, he concluded, had the spiritual vigor to withstand such a fate. Russia possessed “a distinct peculiarity of its own” — a “talent for universal reconciliation, universal humanity”. This is the essence of sobornost: a paradoxical unity that preserves difference within a shared spiritual whole. This idea is the great theme of Dostoevsky’s Pushkin speech of 1880, where he presents the Russian national character as uniquely capable of absorbing and reconciling all cultures while remaining spiritually intact. It is also a theme Dugin resumes in his X commentary: “To be on the side of Russia, of Iran, of China, of multipolarity is to be on the side of the being against the non-being. The (post)modern West is the citadel of the non-being, of nihilism.” Liberalism, in his reading, is a project to liberate the individual from any form of collective identity — be it Church, family, nation, empire, even gender (trans-related scare stories are a particular source of horror).

So Russia’s mission is to save the world from all this — and especially its near neighbors in the so-called Russkiy Mir, a telling phrase. Mir in Russian means “world” and also “peace” — but it also has a connotation of a peasant village community (as opposed to svet, which means “light” but also high society). So when Putin appeals to the Russkiy Mir he is not merely referring to the Russian-adjacent peoples of Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, etc — but harking to an idea of organic peasant communal life. Come back to the village-empire! (Mir is, of course, also what Russians call the International Space Station. The progenitors of the Soviet space program often referred to the idea that the USSR, owing to its enormous spiritual depth, was the most suitable nation to represent Earth in the cosmos.)

All of this would be wonderful if Russian peasant life were not famously brutish, miserable and subject to ultraviolence from on high. In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha recounts the story of an eight-year-old peasant boy who accidentally injures his master’s favorite hunting dog while throwing stones. The landowner orders the child to be stripped naked and spend the night in a miserable hovel. In the morning, he is torn apart by hunting dogs in front of his mother and the whole village. For Alyosha the story represents the failure of any kind of system — Christian, political, philosophical — to account for human suffering: “If the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don’t want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him!” In other words, any system or theory that tries to justify or excuse the suffering of the innocent is obscene. The realism of Dostoevsky’s depiction of this horrific event — and the social hierarchy that permits it — serves as a convincing repudiation of any argument that could be used to justify it. 

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Indeed, it is never entirely clear what the Russian Utopia actually looks like — beyond “eternal anguish”, that is. Nor have I ever seen any of these thinkers truly spell out what those in the Russkiy Mir are supposed to get from their spiritual communion; the millions of Kazakhs who starved during collectivization, for example, or the Siberian tribes slaughtered as the Russian Empire marched eastward; or for that matter the more than 350,000 young men (predominantly from the Muslim-dominated monotowns of the South) who have died fighting to impose brotherhood on the disobedient Ukrainians. A vision of nationhood that promises redemption through suffering is quite useful when you want to explain away millions of dead. The hardest pill to swallow for many following the Soviet collapse was the idea that all of that suffering meant nothing — hence the ever-escalating need to put all the famines, all the wars, all the purges and sieges and atrocities into the service of some higher ideal.

Still, rather like the oligarchs of America who romanticize honest blue-collar work but have no idea what it actually consists of, the great romantics of ordinary Russian life tended to be from the svet as opposed to the mir. Most of the Slavophiles were serf-owning aristocrats. Putin’s legitimacy, such as it is, is largely predicated on his ability to provide shopping malls and farmers’ markets for a Moscow elite who are quite happy to shuttle back and forth to their villas in Dubai, Zurich, London, Nice and Cyprus when it suits them. Dugin himself seems to spend an awful lot of his time watching HBO and scanning social media — and, I would suggest, not enough time reading Dostoevsky. 

It seems outside of Dugin’s philosophy that Euphoria might itself be a critique of precisely the kind of societal atomization that capitalism produces — and that this capacity of Western democracies to critique themselves might indeed be a source of strength. Putin has been careful to provide modern capitalist comforts to Russian elites, but he has meanwhile cranked up the state censorship machinery to pre-Glasnost levels, so any Russian who attempts anything like an honest depiction of Russian life will soon be censored, banned, banished, imprisoned, or voluntarily exiled, like the recent Cannes Grand Prix winner, Andrei Zvyagintsev. It’s not as if Russian youths are all happily singing patriotic songs as they march towards the drones of the Donbas. 

Meanwhile, the third season of Euphoria does gesture towards redemption. After she winds up in the home of a family of Texan true believers, the character of Rue (played by Zendaya) experiences a growing religious obsession — culminating in an epiphanic vision of God and a hint that there is, in fact, a higher meaning, beyond lonely pleasure-seeking. As Dostoevsky wrote: “Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your own sins but the sins of others.”

“Wokeness is dead,” I typed out. This was a succinct way to express the idea that there was something subversive about a blonde female celebrity unapologetically appealing to the male gaze. It’s not too much to say that this launched the discourse around Sydney Sweeney as a Right-wing icon, prompting dozens of think pieces across the ideological spectrum and feeding into the debates generated by Sweeney’s controversial “good jeans” commercial for American Eagle.

The result: I’m mentioned on Sweeney’s Wikipedia page, one of my proudest accomplishments.

Yet by many people’s intuitions, when I sent that Sweeney post, I shouldn’t have been online at all — I should have been playing with my kids. My scrolling and posting at the moment were related to what you might call my “phone addiction,” though I don’t like the term; the vocabulary of mental health likely causes more problems than it solves. Better to say, simply, that over the years, I’ve looked at my phone too much.

But more recently, with the start of the new year, I’ve managed to keep the habit in check. This, without giving up technology or screens altogether, which would be impossible for me — that is, unless I were willing to give up on my information-based line of work. But as the Sweeney post showed, in this job, it pays to always be ready to blast out an inspired line or take at the right moment. The post did bring me a great deal of attention; punditry is, in part, a numbers game, especially in a digital age. Likely, online attention and interaction are beneficial for your work, too, even if your job is less public-facing than mine.

In my defense, moreover, when I’m on my phone, I’m mostly doing things that are squarely related to my job as a writer. I surf real news, cycling through the apps for Substack, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and other high-quality sources of information. The rest of the time is spent answering emails or direct messages, participating in group chats, and, above all, tweeting (or whatever it’s called nowadays). Practically all my book reading is now done through screens, too. Still, despite these practical uses, I have for years walked around with the nagging feeling that I should cut back. 

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And now I’ve managed it. How? I’ve made some rules that share three important qualities: they are strict, minor, and realistic. There’s no silver bullet. Rather, I’ve found that moderation is the best policy. And it has made a real difference in terms of improving my productivity and ability to focus. 

Absolute restrictions don’t work. In the past, I tried (or thought about trying) drastic rules, such as not using the phone during meals, when I’m with my kids, during an entire day of the week, or for four to eight hour periods. But I’ve concluded that such measures are too demanding. Maybe one day, I will be able to afford these more substantial breaks, but I’m not there yet. Nonetheless, while total abstinence over any substantial period of time is not a realistic option, there have been a few easy ways to cut my screen time, while helping, rather than hindering, my ability to communicate with a large audience.

It’s actually one, easy rule: I’ve eliminated device usage during what I call transition periods.

For example, take going to the gym. It used to be normal for me to look at my phone when I arrived, in periods between switching stations, and when walking from one part of the facility to another. I would thus end up spending too much time in the gym, when it would’ve been better for my state of mind, productivity, and physical health if I just simply put the phone away and listened to music without scrolling through apps and social media feeds. I’d certainly be able to do more sets in a shorter period of time. So now I have a new rule: no being on my phone while working out, except for choosing which songs to listen to.

Peeing had also come to take up too much of my time. Standing at a urinal is 10 seconds of my life where I have always found it more enjoyable to scroll X than stare at a tiled wall. But as with the gym, once you allow the phone to intrude on that, ahem, sacred space, everyday activities are drawn out. A quick glance might absorb me in a comments section or group chat. The 10-second urinal visit, in this way, ends up taking several minutes, by the end of which I forget the next thing I need to do. This adds up. Sometimes, it’s good to have 10 seconds just to think — or urinate — without any outside stimulation, freeing oneself to get back to work as soon as possible. 

The biggest change has been no longer looking at my phone while walking or driving. Yes, I was actually doing this. Now, if I’m walking and have the urge to read an article or respond to text, I will either put it off or stop in my tracks in order to scratch that itch. The most dangerous thing for productivity and the general flow of life isn’t when I’m focusing completely on a device. Rather, it’s been the in-between states, when I’m distracted by the screen in my hand while I am supposed to be working out, going to the bathroom, or just walking from Point A to Point B. In these intervals, I’m usually not handling the phone for its more productive uses, such as reading books or answering emails, so I’m just making every task take much longer than it otherwise would, for little benefit. 

And yes, in the past, I’ve sent texts and composed tweets while on the road. I once heard that John von Neumann read books while driving, and since I wanted to be a genius like him, I also took up the practice. It’s actually doable. Like von Neumann, though, I also have a habit of getting into car accidents and decided to no longer tempt fate. No more looking at my phone, even at a stoplight. The practice of scrolling for a short indeterminate amount of time has no real advantages, interrupts what could be fruitful trains of thought, and is difficult to prevent from snowballing into being online while the vehicle is moving — amid the unpredictable sea of other cars, pedestrians, garbage trucks, and so on.

That’s it. Walking, driving, working out, peeing. It doesn’t seem like much. But these things cumulatively make up a large part of my days — and those of many others. I have not adopted an antagonistic relationship with my phone. It is, after all, a library of books, a daily newsstand, a connection with friends, and even my job — the portal through which I influence the world. 

There would be no way to hate my phone without hating myself and everything I am doing in life. I am grateful to Big Tech for giving me a single device through which, within the span of a few minutes, I can look at pictures of my kids at school, post a comment on some contemporary controversy that might be seen by millions of people, and read a page or two from Diarmaid MacCulloch’s magisterial new book on the history of sex in Christianity. We shouldn’t forget that we are lucky to be alive in the time after Steve Jobs made his contribution to the world. 

Even with my more limited cutback, I’ve seen changes to the rhythm and flow of life. Now, much more often than before, I’ll notice some quirk of someone I come across whom I previously would have ignored, and I’ll strike up a conversation with them. Or my ear will catch the chatter of a married couple fighting, which will cause some reflection on the human condition. Sometimes, I just have a few extra seconds to ponder an important idea that I’ve read in a book, using brain space that would otherwise be occupied by intricate knowledge of some completely worthless social-media feud.

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Nonetheless, the nature of my work and my intellectual interests means that I have to practice moderation toward the real world as much as I do toward cyberspace. I’m not making any heroic attempts to be less online. It would be nice to say that I unplug and take entire afternoons off to play with my children. But here’s a secret about kids: they’re kind of boring in large doses. You can make a silly face, throw them up in the air and catch them, buy them a toy, and so on. But after a while, you find yourself looking for something more stimulating. I don’t feel bad about allowing them to run off and play while I look at my phone, and then turning my attention back to them while chuckling over a very funny tweet I just sent. 

In addition to letting go of the belief that my family needs my full attention, I’ve also given up on the romantic dream of a simpler life, in which work and recreation are kept separate, or in which “meatspace” is the default and the digital realm is the exception. When I’m tweeting, I’m working, being entertained, engaging in self-expression, and keeping up with friends at the same time. 

Like every other intellectual, I have moments in which I envy those who work “normal,” tangible jobs and are supposedly doing something much more real and in tune with human nature than I am. But I quickly snap out of it, understanding that, for better or worse, I’ve chosen the kind of life in which someone with my peculiar combination of strengths and weaknesses is most likely to flourish. Appreciating the phone without letting it control my life is in part a story about self-acceptance and growing increasingly confident in my place in the universe. 

One day, I would like to step away. Perhaps not permanently, or even for a multiyear period, but just long enough to get a true feeling of what it is like to live without a constant sense of connection to the outside world as mediated through pixels on a six-inch screen. I’m just old enough to remember being an adult without the iPhone, but it’s been so long that there is no way to trust that my memories are accurate, and haven’t been radically distorted by the conversation around what phones are doing to our national politics and the mental health of young people.

There is a balance we must all live with. For some, going cold turkey, or taking prolonged breaks, might make sense. If writing essays like this one weren’t my job, circumstances would probably push me more in that direction. Many years down the line I might be satisfied enough with my accomplishments, influence upon the world, and level of wisdom attained to put the phone down completely. Until then, I’ll see you on Substack, X, and the UnHerd app. 

The commercial attempted to tone down the porny aspects by also showing a woman on a park bench breastfeeding, or a woman lifting weights, but those moments were overwhelmed by the titillating nipple-probing, the barrage of boobs stuffed into tight, low-cut tops. Overall, the effect was striking: love porn or hate it, the total pornification of culture is complete.

This is only partially a story about the adult-entertainment industry, which is huge and growing, with an estimated $71 billion in revenue expected in 2025. Nor is it a story about porn serving as the true means for sex education, though the average boy or girl encounters pornography at age 13, according to the UK Children’s Commissioner. What does seem to be new is a cultural takeover that goes beyond adult entertainment.

We no longer lustfully and happily tit-stare, as has been the human way since time immemorial. Nor do we fantasize about breasts as something we might like to catch a glimpse of. Instead, they’re all dolled up and shoved in our faces, aesthetically sexualized but contextually neutered, no more or less an object of desire than a can of Bud Light. Keep your pharmaceutical company off our porn, please. There’s sexy, and then there’s breast cancer, and the two are not the same.

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There are signs of this everywhere, in high culture and low, perhaps starting with the fact that the one of our most popular social-media platforms is now called X for no apparent reason. Beauty trends for young women on an even bigger platform, TikTok, are a driving force. Heavy makeup, exaggerated lips, breasts and butts, and long plastic nails that used to read “stripper” or “porn star” are now for everyone. The latex or leather dress paired with over-the-knee platforms and (of course) jet-black acrylic claws, the regalia of the high-end dominatrix, is now part of the Upper East Side mom’s humdrum repertoire, divested of erotic meaning.

“Clean girl”, one of the dominant makeup trends, might appear at first glance as a countervailing tendency. It’s “clean” in the sense that its adherents wear light eye makeup and a natural lip and cheek palate and dress classy or preppy. But the look relies on thick layers of “natural looking” foundation and is mixed up with porn tropes like huge puffy lips and perfect fake nails. Clean-girl influencer Frida Aasen Chiabra has 1.1 million followers on Instagram and got her start as Victoria’s Secret model. Her feed shows her spraying perfume on herself, frolicking on tropical islands, and routinely going about her “real life” in lingerie or offering a butt-shot. Porn users have taken notice. The No. 1 trending porn search term for 2024, according to statistics released by Pornhub was “demure”, up 133% year-on-year, along with “modesty” (up 77%) and “traditional clothes” (34%).

It’s perhaps no surprise that two actresses from the television show Euphoria, which depicted teens in hard-core sex situations as a matter of course, are also social-media influencers of this type, known for their assets. With Sidney Sweeney (23.5 million Instagram followers), it’s breasts; with Chloe Cherry, who had a role on the show’s second season, it’s lips. Sweeney, fresh-scrubbed and collegiate-looking in a turtleneck sweater, made a cameo on the Super Bowl’s When Harry Met Sally reunion ad for Hellman’s Mayonnaise — and delivered the famous line “I’ll have what she’s having.”

Chloe Cherry (1.1 million followers), whose lips are silicone-injected to alarming proportions, was a porn actress before her role on the show, and made a pornographic parody of the show with Jenna Foxx in 2023. The two actresses have notably different public profiles — to have surgery and implants versus “natural” attributes — telegraphs variations in social class to some extent. But both are defined by a body part — in the way porn-searches reduce our desires to a single anatomical feature or piece of apparel: “fake lips”, “big tits”, “high heels”.

The porn is unstoppable. Tradwife influencer? You wear a corset over your frills and also have enormous breasts. Trendy? You’re wearing cheetah-print and have “aura” pattern on your dagger acrylics. Sally Rooney heroine? You make your money on OnlyFans. French bad-boy writer anguished about your country’s relationship with its Muslim inhabitants? You made a porn tape. Married to Kanye West? You drop your coat on the Grammys red carpet, naked except for a transparent slip. Ye himself? You share videos of your favorite porn stars during the Super Bowl (and deactivate from X afterwards, after a flurry of anti-Semitic posting).

Female reader of mass-market fiction? You’re reading Romantasy, a genre that slips into graphic descriptions of penetrations and orgasms every few chapters. American teen? You routinely refer to glazing, which now means paying too much attention to someone, but whose etymology is the porn term for having someone ejaculate on your face.

The young-man version of TikTok is probably rap music, where a similar dynamic unfolds: everything is sexualized, and none of it means a thing. The graphic description of sex acts in rap has been happening since at least the 1990s. The direct pipeline to young children, however, is a Zoomer phenomenon, and the normalization may be newer yet. My 13-year-old son, three seconds after the Netspend lyric “shut up, bitch, I need some spit” comes out of his phone, assures me that “all rappers respect women” and that they wouldn’t consider doing otherwise, because it would damage their careers.

To take Kendrick Lamar and Drake — he’s right. Both say they respect women, and have made extensive public comments on it. Another example that’s currently popular and apropos is the rapper J. Cole’s song “Wet Dreamz”. The song has more than 1 billion streams on Spotify and describes the rapper’s desire to lose his virginity: “hadn’t been in pussy since the day I came out.” When the song’s narrator and the girl he likes get into bed, Cole says, “And most of all I’m praying, ‘God, don’t let me bust quick’ / I’m watching pornos, tryna see just how to stroke right / Practice putting condoms on, how it go, right?” The song endorses porn as sex ed, comes from a person who “respects women,” and bows to convention and popular morality with contraception. All good!

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By Mary Gaitskill

The logical endgame of the sexual revolution has been to turn sex into a recreational activity whose only meaning is defined by the people experiencing it, and whose only moral issues center around consent. By these standards, there is scarcely any reason for consenting adults not to make porn, if that’s their choice, and it’s equally OK for other consenting adults not to enjoy their solitary pleasures while watching it. Equally, it makes sense to export porn’s tropes into the mainstream and enjoy them, if that’s what we’re doing. Most of us have certain squicky feelings when it comes to kids viewing porn, but large-scale cultural pushback against these images entering our homes is only just beginning. The age requirements for porn access currently being enacted by 19 states will be an interesting test case.

There are cracks in the façade: a loneliness epidemic, statistics that this generation of oversexualized teens is having less sex, an increasing prevalence of porn-addiction and erectile dysfunction in younger and younger men. Also, the acts seem to grow more extreme and less desirable the more we get used to them.

The great and much maligned anti-pornography activist Andrea Dworkin has been having a bit of a renaissance lately. She has received some semi-positive tributes in the press, including on the right, and Picador is reissuing three of her books on this month, including Pornography: Men Possessing Women. Dworkin was a brilliant extremist and a wonderful writer, and though most of her conclusions are utterly wrong, she’s fun to read. Some lines from her fiery, man-hating pen will go down in eternity. And oddly, despite how wrong she was on almost everything, it has turned out the way she thought it would with porn and mass culture—they’ve become one.

By now, you will surely have seen the video of actress Sydney Sweeney at the end of her Saturday Night Live hosting debut last month. She’s enthusiastically waving goodbye, her breasts barely contained by a dress that looks like it was designed to reveal as much of their surface area as possible, while also preventing them from floating away into space — which seems, in this case, a genuine risk. There was no reason why this moment should have been so remarkable, this being neither the first plunging neckline nor first set of boobs to grace the SNL stage, and yet, a consensus swiftly emerged that Sweeney’s physique was more than the sum of its perfectly spherical parts. Conservative writer Richard Hanania summed it up when he tweeted the video with a three-word caption: “Wokeness is dead.”

And here we are, weeks later, still deep in the double-D discourse. “Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?” asked Canada’s National Post last month. “Why Is the Discourse Around Sydney Sweeney’s Breasts So Unhinged?” wondered Vogue a few weeks later; And, finally catching on, this weekend the Daily Mail published a deep dive into “Sydney Sweeney and her double-D breasts”, including the revelation that her father ran from the room to avoid seeing one of her many nude scenes in HBO’s Euphoria.

Virtually all commentary on the topic has come to the same conclusion: that for better or worse, Sweeney’s breasts are a locus for the power struggle between patriarchy and the feminists who want to smash it. Vogue‘s Kate Lloyd laments the history whereby “large breasts have been used as shorthand for sexual availability”, while the Post‘s Amy Hamm cheerfully suggests that noticing Sweeney’s rack is akin to an act of civil disobedience in a culture ruled by “diversity, equity, and inclusion fanatics” who would brainwash us into believing that every body (or boob) is equally beautiful. But the true driver of this breast obsession is, to me, at once deeper and more universal: if you want to understand the shape of a society, generally, the shape of the women most visible in it is a good place to start.

Women’s bodies have always existed in conversation with the zeitgeist — a living canvas onto which we project our hopes and fears, our fantasies and anxieties. Sometimes, the connection is straightforwardly reactionary; in the late 1890s, as society grew increasingly nervous about women’s liberation and greater freedom of movement, idealised femininity was embodied by the Gibson girl, a heavily corseted creature with a slender waist and vaguely sleepy expression. She existed in sharp contrast with the boogeyman of the suffragette, whose muscles had been thickened by wanton bicycling and who bore a permanent scowl. Sarah Baartman, a South African woman whose remarkably shapely rear earned her the moniker “the Hottentot Venus” and a starring role in a 19th-century London freak show, was an avatar for the culture’s growing fascination with far-flung places and peoples — and its assumption that the latter were a bunch of hypersexual savages.

More recently, a famous female body has been a harbinger of broader social change: 2014, the year the archetypal social justice warrior first found a tentative foothold in the cultural mainstream, was also the year the very white, very thin ideal of the previous decade was finally hip-checked out of the picture. The fully nude Kim Kardashian in Paper Magazine ushered in a golden age of butts that would endure for the next 10 years. To say that the rise of BLM was inexorably tied to the popularity of the BBL would be to misunderstand their relationship — these things are not causally linked; but the same culture gave us both, and their parallel trajectories are surely not a coincidence.

Which brings us to Sydney Sweeney and her breasts, and whether they represent wokeness in decline in the same way that Kardashian’s bared buttocks were the figurative bad moon rising. Some have argued that the cultural response to Sweeney signals the resurgence of a sort of wholesome raunchiness that we haven’t seen since the Nineties — the era of the Baywatch babe, the Victoria’s Secret runway show, and a Comedy Central series that began and ended with slow-motion footage of Playboy model types jumping on trampolines.

“If you went to any mall in the American Midwest in 1999,” writes Bridget Phetasy, “you would have seen dozens of Sydneys wandering around, traveling in packs, twirling their hair and doing that same hot girl thing with their hands when they got excited.” She may well be onto something. Hanania, who continues to insist on the anti-woke significance of Sweeney, has suggested that the actress is also representative of the phenomenon of the “mid” (that is, unexceptional-looking) woman due to her “natural breasts, low class physiognomy, and nasally bored girl voice”. But this is to undersell and fundamentally misunderstand what makes Sweeney so appealing. Her prettiness isn’t unexceptional, but it does feel distinctly analogue — rooted in the physical rather than the digital world. If Sweeney doesn’t look like the actual girl next door in 2024, she certainly resembles the actresses who played this type in the pre-Y2K era teen movies. What strikes me when I watch one of these movies now is not the dated sexual mores or politically incorrect jokes, but the sheer physicality of people’s faces and bodies, the texture of their skin. In a world of poreless, AI-generated hot girls — one in which we digitally airbrush everything from our dating profile pics to our Zoom meetings at work — there’s something exciting and startling about this type of unfiltered, organic beauty.

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I suspect it’s this, rather than Sweeney’s “low class physiognomy”, that makes her such an object of fascination (and triggers the shrieks of “mid!” from the world’s most terminally online men). I also suspect that this is why the breast discourse isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Beyond the obvious — men still like boobs, news at 11 — the fascination with Sweeney seems to speak to a broader pattern, one that encompasses everything from tradwife influencers to the anti-birth control backlash to the “big naturals” category on PornHub to the panic over seed oils.

While some of these movements are sillier than others, all of them can be understood as a response to the disembodied state of contemporary existence. Our personal and professional lives increasingly take place in virtual space; even when we’re together, we are more and more alone. Our identities are increasingly untethered from our real-world behaviour or relationships. We tap at screens instead of touching anything else, including each other; the Zoomers are disavowing not just sex but heterosexuality en masse. The fertility rate has fallen off a cliff, and our public officials appear to visibly short-circuit when asked to define the word “woman”. Even if you don’t believe that this is cause for urgent concern, it’s still disorienting, and it’s no surprise that some of us are yearning for an anchor. We want to feel connected. And what better way to do that than by returning to the bosom — literally, if possible?

It’s also no surprise that the discourse resulting from that yearning is as unhinged as the situation that inspired it. We are fractured, adrift, siloed, with little shared understanding of what is true. And in the uncanny valley of the current culture, yes, Sydney Sweeney’s breasts are spectacular. But they are also, more importantly, real.