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.

It would be difficult to realistically dispute that contention, then or now. Though the “information disseminators” who populated the precincts of mainstream thought 30 years ago were perhaps less overtly activist-minded in their orientation than they are today, the basic proposition still holds.

Limbaugh’s fantastically successful show (reportedly 20 million daily listeners at its peak) mostly consisted of his uninterrupted extemporaneous riffs on the news of the day — with an impishly comedic tinge. His main source material was lightly-organised newspaper clippings and faxes. He seldom did interviews and took relatively few phone callers. In theory, he wasn’t doing anything particularly revolutionary — but simply by synthesising American politics through a vastly different lens from anything else which had been on offer for a mass commercial audience, he became one of the most important US political and media figures of all time.

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Ronald Reagan wrote a reverential note to Limbaugh in late 1992 that illustrates why nearly the whole of the American Right is in extreme mourning upon Limbaugh’s death from lung cancer. Though Reagan’s mental acuity was in stark decline at that point, he got it together sufficiently to credit Limbaugh for having “become the Number One voice for conservatism in our Country” — supplanting Reagan’s own vice president, George HW Bush, who had just lost re-election to Bill Clinton. Earlier that year, Limbaugh had stayed in the coveted Lincoln Bedroom of the White House at the invitation of Bush — who even carried Limbaugh’s overnight bag for him, as he would later gleefully recall on-air.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that most of the self-identified conservatives I met growing up in the 2000s — the kind who would go out of their way to inform you that they were proud no-nonsense conservatives — attributed their political identity specifically to Limbaugh. Usually, the origin story was because he was the only midday in-car entertainment option for a motorist who wanted something other than music or sports. But it later developed into a full-scale, self-directed, ideological adventure, with Rush always there to serve as a trusted guide. A sprawling industry of liberal commentators likewise fashioned their own political identities in direct opposition to Limbaugh, alongside the legions of imitators he also spawned.

There will always be a market for media offerings which pride themselves on being unbound by the cloying primacy of liberal cultural hegemonic values. Especially as those values become ever-more monolithic in corporate America, enforced through the imperious dictates of Human Resources regimes. The excesses of oblivious dingbat celebrities and “woke” activists will provide endless fodder, if that’s what you are into.

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But the demise of Limbaugh raises the question of whether that broad anti-hegemonic sensibility necessarily begets any intrinsic attachment to the Republican Party. Limbaugh was so revered by elite DC conservatives — many of whom did not exactly care for his brash personality traits — because of his ability to connect the cultural dislocation of ordinary radio listeners with the imperatives of institutional movement conservatism.

Annoyed by the sanctimony of liberal Hollywood? That annoyance must also somehow translate into steadfast support for the lowering of corporate tax rates, per the formulations of Limbaugh. Tired of being lectured by obnoxious elites in New York and LA who think they know better than you how to run your own life? You are also somehow obliged to back whatever foreign military escapade Washington cooks up. And of course, always ultimately vote GOP in November, lest the nation crumble into irreversible decadence.

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Much of the coverage of Limbaugh’s death has focused on his lavishly affectionate relationship with Donald Trump, who awarded Limbaugh a presidential medal of freedom in the middle of the State of the Union address in 2020; Trump made his first post-presidency media appearance Wednesday in homage to his dearly departed golf buddy. As did Mike Pence, the former Vice President — a one time talk radio host himself, who earlier in his career beamed on the floor of the House of Representatives that it was the “literal truth… to say that I am in Congress today because of Rush Limbaugh”.

But more instructive perhaps as to the whole of the Limbaugh legacy was his equally voracious support for George W. Bush, who released a statement fondly remembering his “friend” Rush, and extolling how helpful he had been during his presidency.

Switch on the radio at any point in the early-to mid 2000s, and you’d hear extended Limbaugh soliloquies on the virtues of the Iraq War and the rock-solid trustworthiness of Bush’s leadership. Shortly before the invasion, Limbaugh heralded the profundity of Bush’s “monumental vision” in the arena of foreign policy, and praised Bush as having exactly the right temperament for the job because he ignored critics of his Iraq strategy. After all, opponents of the war were little more than delusional freaks who fundamentally hated America. On his way out of office in January 2009, Bush regaled Limbaugh at the White House for a private luncheon in honor of Limbaugh’s birthday, presenting him with a “little chocolate microphone”.

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The bitter feud which subsequently broke out between Trump and the Bush family dynasty would, on the surface, seem to have been a quandary for Rush. In one of the most astounding moments of the entire 2016 presidential cycle, Trump stood up at a Republican primary debate in South Carolina and accused George W. of lying the country into war. It was exactly the kind of rhetoric that Limbaugh would have spent probably three shows in a row mercilessly lambasting as emblematic of un-American left-wing zealotry.

Much has been made of the ideological meaning of the Bush-to-Trump evolution of the Republican Party, and there’s no doubt that segments of the coalition did genuinely undergo a transformation in thinking after the disaster of Iraq. But the seamless transition figures such as Limbaugh made from one to the other shows that there was always a market for commercialised partisan entertainment in support of whoever the Republican standard-bearer happened to be. Limbaugh was always candid that his primary motives were ultimately financial — and the money kept rolling in thanks to his service as the agitprop frontman of a movement conservative apparatus which brought him into the fold.

However, resisting the obnoxious encroachments of liberal pieties doesn’t necessarily require hardcore, partisan fidelity to the Republican Party, which Limbaugh exemplified for virtually his entire tenure in the public domain. Given the technological advancements since Limbaugh began syndicating his radio show, audiences have become more diffuse. There is plenty of appetite for a kind of counter-hegemonic synthesis that doesn’t ineluctably flow into unflinching partisan support for one of the two major political parties. This was clear long before Limbaugh’s death — but perhaps this week will hasten the realisation for Republicans that the constructs they’ve clung to since the Nineties can only last so long.