One of her essays for the publication, “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America,” published in December 2016, detonated at precisely the right instant and launched her near-overnight transformation from a pop-culture writer into the #Resistance’s 25-year-old mascot. But the woman whom The New Yorker once crowned the “Millennial feminist warrior queen of social media” is feeling ambivalent about this week’s news that publishing giant Condé Nast is folding Teen Vogue into its flagship website, laying off 70% of its staff, and dissolving its politics desk.

Looking back, the now 34-year-old Duca sees her Teen Vogue persona as, well, kind of an asshole.  She left the magazine in mid-2018 and spent most of the last six years very offline after experiencing a New Age come-to-Jesus moment (that was also an actual come-to-Jesus moment) on psychedelics.

“I was Little Miss Resistance, an image supported by the mainstream media,” she tells me on Thursday. “I was so young and completely emotionally immature and just obsessed with screaming my opinions at the top of my lungs and thinking that that was, like, helping democracy.” She adds: “sometimes it feels like that whole period was a blackout.”

For many of those who came of age during the late-2010s media-politics cyclone, it’s hard to look back with clarity. The immediate present might feel politically alive, what with the earthquake-like election of Zohran Mandami and the daily disruptions of Trump II. Still, it’s eerily muted compared to the years following Trump’s descent from the golden escalator. From 2016 to 2022, politics — thanks to the omnipresence of social media — felt like electricity running through every surface.

The political theorist Anton Jäger coined a label for it: hyperpolitics, the fusion of celebrity, entertainment, and politics, in which breathless outrage and the expression of your personal and political identity online become a kind of civic participation.

In the era of hyperpolitics, it only seemed strange at first when Teen Vogue went woke. The publication began life in 2003 as a spinoff of Vogue, aimed at teenage fashion consumers under the Condé Nast umbrella. In the wake of Trump’s rise, the magazine that once printed stories such as “Ten Ways to Slay at Prom” was suddenly publishing op-eds on climate justice and white supremacy under headlines such as “9 Climate Activists of Color You Should Know.” Executives at Condé Nast were happy with their brush with relevance among young women, even as critics sneered. But the shift made sense.

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Teen Vogue was actually just one of a new wave of websites — Jezebel, Mic, Refinery29 — that served the same restless demographic, who, ironically, weren’t actually teenagers at all but mostly 20- and 30-something women. According to a Washington Examiner report, just 1.7% of Teen Vogue’s May 2018 audience was 17 or younger, and slightly more, 2%, were 18 to 24 years old.

More specifically, the Teen Vogue audience was the kind of economically and culturally ascendant urban, single Millennials soon to become both the Democrats’ most loyal bloc and the Right’s favorite scapegoat. Teen Vogue readers, editors boasted, were no longer just consumers, but now “considered themselves activists.”

Duca did not simply join that moment of hyperpolitics — she was that moment.

Before her viral stardom, Duca was a pop-culture writer, specializing in celebrity profiles and reality-TV analysis. She knew Donald Trump not as a political figure, but a reality-TV character — not that there was much of a difference: Trump accelerated the merging of social media, reality TV, and politics. “I felt qualified to write about [Trump] because he was, in a way, an entertainment product,” Duca says.

What happened after the “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America” essay has now become media lore. The piece went viral, drawing millions of views and overwhelming Condé Nast’s servers. Duca was told that Anna Wintour nearly fainted on a train, shocked by both the article and the response to it. Overnight, a magazine built to sell eyeliner became a hub for #Resistance politics; its 25-year-old writer got half a million Twitter followers; and cable-news hosts came calling (she became MSNBC’s Millennial whisperer).

Her subsequent showdown with Tucker Carlson remains one of the strangest artifacts of that era. Carlson had invited Duca on his Fox News show to discuss her tweets about Ivanka Trump. Duca barely knew what Fox News was, and even less about the channel’s fiery prime-time pundit.

“I just thought he was that guy with the bowtie,” she recalls. The conversation quickly imploded into mutual contempt — Carlson sneering that she should stick to writing about Ariana Grande’s “thigh-high boots,” Duca rolling her eyes. As her microphone faded out, she mouthed the words “You’re a sexist pig.”

Duca recalls: “my kind of fundamental reaction was, like, is this middle-aged man bullying me on TV? I was just like, ‘Are you serious?’ ” The debate went viral instantly, and within hours, the clip had been viewed millions of times.

Duca felt like she had to keep riding the wave of fame before it crashed, even as spending up to 15 hours a day glued to screens and political narratives was sending her to a darker place: “it wasn’t just your average internet addiction, because I would fire off a hot take, and then a car would come and pick me up and drive me to MSNBC. Like, it was farm-to-table hot takes. And my tweets would be the news for a not insignificant period of time. It was horrible.”

Soon after the Tucker interview, she launched a new column for Teen Vogue called “Thigh-High Politics.” Simon & Schuster signed her to write a book titled How To Start a Revolution: Young People And The Future of Politics — ambitious stuff for someone who, a year earlier, was still writing celebrity-obsessed stories like “Debby Ryan Just Dyed Her Hair Rose Gold.”

That book, published in 2019, now reads like a time capsule of Millennial liberalism: half manifesto, half motivational poster. The title promised radical transformation; the text offered empowerment slogans and civics lessons written in the language of self-care. The idea that posting, educating, and “raising awareness” could amount to transformational change of national politics was the central illusion of the era — and Duca, like her publication, embodied it at the time.

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She also paid the price for it. In 2019, the same attention economy that had made her a celebrity turned cannibal. BuzzFeed News published a lengthy and relatively catty exposé about her short-lived teaching gig at New York University. It described her as “both a feminist icon of her generation and a phony quasi-journalist who has taken advantage of a few lucky moments in her life.” Duca was portrayed as self-absorbed, erratic, and obsessed with her own brand. The piece was brutal, and Duca’s name became a punchline in the same corners of the internet that had once celebrated.

But she quietly cheered on her cancellation in a twisted way, she said, even as her personal life collapsed along with her reputation. “I took down the old Lauren completely, you know? This person, essentially my avatar, was floating through hyperspace without my input, and I just didn’t really bother defending her anymore,” she said.

The next half-decade of Duca’s life was a total deconstruction of her old self. She got divorced, became a lesbian, briefly joined a psychedelics cult in South America, suffered “ego death,” almost died, found Jesus, moved from New York to Tucson, Ariz., and, of course‚ logged off the endless scroll. And if that sounds like a comedy bit, well, it kind of is. She’s turned it into a one-woman show about her life, How Embarrassing is Jesus?, playing off Broadway. 

Duca in 2025 is an inversion of her old ethos: the once-loud, self-assured political avatar has turned quiet mystic, talking about God, energy, and healing. “I did believe that political action was the driver of a good life,” she tells me. “I had this insatiable energy to be the Millennial feminist warrior queen, and then I didn’t have the energy anymore.”

In many ways, Duca’s decade-long trajectory is an extreme version of the story of the larger Millennial Teen Vogue generation: the first raised entirely online, who experienced politics as a series of viral flashpoints since Trump’s first election in 2016: Bernie rallies, women’s marches, pussy hats, and fist-raising #BLM Instagram graphics. It was addictive, intoxicating, and unsustainable.

Duca once wrote that Trump’s election “made the country spark like an aurora borealis of lightbulb moments.” Even then, she was describing politics as energy rather than institution-building — something to be felt rather than built. Almost a decade later, many who once flooded the streets are now raising children, paying mortgages, practicing mindfulness, or, in Duca’s unusual case, finding Jesus in the form of a praying mantis under the influence of psychedelics.

Teen Vogue is gone. The Lauren Duca who embodied its political moment is gone, too. 

The interview went viral in 2012. And the final line, shortly after it was uttered, became culturally ubiquitous, particularly on social media where it proliferated as a reaction GIF — it was also, crucially, the subject of a fierce debate about whether its popularity was racist. Did we love Sweet Brown for her story and her screen presence, or was it because she was a walking, talking stereotype of the archetypal sassy black woman?

That debate has waxed, waned and evolved over the years, but the one thing it stubbornly refuses to do is die. Five years after Sweet Brown’s original interview, it was given new weight with the coining of a phrase. In a Teen Vogue essay, Lauren Michele Jackson described the act of non-black people using reaction GIFs featuring black Americans as “digital blackface”. And so, a trend was born: The New York Times weighed in, followed by The Guardian, followed by the mommy bloggers and the service journalists. Just when it seemed like the internet had squeezed the concept dry, it returned again, last weekend, in the form of a clickbaity banner on the front page of CNN: “What’s ‘digital blackface’? And why is it wrong when White people use it?”

For those who remember this argument in its original iteration, the immediate reaction is probably best encapsulated by a meme from the pre-social internet — not one of the ones that allegedly constitutes digital blackface, but the one from Mean Girls, in which an enraged Regina George hisses: “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! It’s not going to happen!” We do not need to do this again. This argument was transparent, racebaiting, outrage fodder even when it was new; now, it is all of that and tired.

If anything, the notion that, as CNN’s John Blake insists, employing reaction GIFs featuring black people represents “one of the most insidious forms of contemporary racism” is illustrative of just how badly the discourse is foundering in the wake of the massive racial reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd. All that momentum, all that money, all those marches and protests and pleas for real change end up being squandered again and again on luxury beliefs: galaxy-brained takes that circulate like wildfire among members of the coastal media class while being utterly bewildering to any normal person. The absurdity of Blake’s argument seems obvious even for those who think America is a long way from being a post-racial paradise. This is a country where black citizens remain underrepresented in key positions of power, and disproportionately suffer from poverty and violence. How terminally online must one be to think that the “most insidious” form of racism comes in the form of some 60-year-old Facebook grandma in Des Moines who feels that her emotions are best represented by a GIF of Stanley from The Office rolling his eyes?

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But then, one gets the sense that no one does think this. Not even the people who are earning a living — or at least, a few hundred freelance dollars a pop — by arguing as much. Every writer who tackles this topic has dutifully attempted to connect the mimetic phenomenon of reaction GIFs to the atrocious (and happily defunct) practice of minstrel shows featuring performers in actual blackface. But given the integrated state of contemporary society, and the substantive difference between posting a video of a black cultural icon and doing a mocking impression of one yourself, that’s a tough argument to sell.

Often, those recycling it don’t even seem to be trying. Women’s Health claims that using the wrong reaction GIFs isn’t just upstream from minstrelsy, but also from murder: “[As] it has been proven throughout U.S. history, a Black man can be killed for demonstrating aggression, confusion, or even indifference. Popular GIFs of Kanye West looking serious, Nick Young with question marks around his face, and others, show Black men expressing themselves which, while technically be harmless [sic], can oftentimes be fatal.”

This isn’t just unpersuasive; it’s practically incoherent. Does anyone believe this argument? Does anyone even believe that the writer believed it? The whole enterprise feels so convictionless, more like a simulation of an opinion than the real thing.

If anything, the concept of “digital blackface” reads like an attempt to meme more racism into existence by claiming that it’s already everywhere. Like the too-credulous coverage of outrageous hate crimes that turn out to be hoaxes, stories about the hidden racism of reaction GIFs suggest the need for constant vigilance, which in turn fuels perpetual mistrust. The overarching narrative, as I wrote last year, is one of a deep and roiling river of racial conflict running beneath the surface of American society. The moral of the story is that we can only ever relate to each other through the lens of power, privilege, resentment, and loathing — that, as Robin DiAngelo instructs, there can be no question of racism’s presence in any given interaction, only of how the racism manifests.

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It’s a pessimistic and profoundly superstitious mode of thinking — racism, the devil lurking in every room — and one that has spawned a particularly fervent adherence among millennial white women, for whom self-help and self-hatred have always been inextricably intertwined. Blake’s essay quotes a young woman named Elizabeth Halford who narrates her use of reaction GIFs with the ecstasy of the confessing sinner: “I’ve appropriated Black trauma as punchlines and peeled their faces off to put on my own and say what I can’t say, to make you laugh, or just because it went viral.”

It’s hard to imagine who or what is served by this confession, apart from Halford’s masochism. It is also hard to imagine that any GIF could represent a greater affront to black people than the idea that selecting said GIF is akin to peeling their faces off.

But more discouraging than the pessimism (and bizarre Hannibal Lecter comparisons) inherent to this worldview is its racism — and not the insidious, subtle kind. The original Teen Vogue essay introducing the concept of digital blackface bemoaned that “black reaction GIFs have become so widespread that they’ve practically become synonymous with just reaction GIFs”, as if the ubiquitous presence of black people in American culture is a bad thing.

Blake’s CNN piece calls out specific, seminal memes: an outraged Tyra Banks on America’s Next Top Model shouting, “I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you!”, or Michael Jordan crying at his induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Maybe these are “black reaction GIFs”, in that they are reaction GIFs featuring black people. But surely what they capture is something bigger. These are American celebrities. This is American culture.

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But lately, an impulse has found a regrettable level of validation in American media, academia, and cultural institutions — an impulse to fracture and resegregate society along racial lines. American colleges hold exclusive, separate graduation ceremonies that segregate students by racial background. Lizzo, a multiple Grammy winner and one of the most famous musicians in the country, is forced to defend herself against allegations that her music is too popular among white people. An influencer goes viral for urging white moviegoers to stay away from the new Black Panther movie. Media institutions fret over race-matching the authors of book, theatre, and film reviews to the content they’re critiquing.

All of this is great, of course, if you have an economic stake in keeping Americans at each other’s throats. But for the rest of us, it only fuels polarisation and mistrust. The most incisive response to the latest “digital blackface” article came from Wilfred Reilly, a professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, who tweeted: “This stupid article is important in only one way: it illustrates that, as actual racism continues to decline, new varieties will simply be invented/’promoted’ and used to make us fight one another.”

In a diverse, thriving, integrated society that includes people of multivariate backgrounds, of course non-black citizens are going to engage with, appreciate, and relate to cultural products created by their black countrymen — and vice versa. Not only could it not be otherwise — culture, in our highly mimetic species, has long proven itself impossible to contain — but isn’t it what we want? The popularity of these GIFs stems from the fact that they represent events, emotions, and cultural touch points that millions of people recognise and relate to; in many cases, they speak to something not just specifically American but deeply human. That something like the Crying Jordan meme has become a global visual shorthand for conveying our feelings — the fact that people of every age, shape, colour and creed feel represented by the raw emotion captured there — should be seen as a triumph of common humanity over identity category. It is, at the population level, exactly what an inclusive society should strive for.

In this context, it seems not just absurd but grotesque for our national news media to argue that we should wall off these memes from the American mainstream, or make it so fraught for non-black people to engage with them that it becomes effectively taboo. The idea that black culture, whether it’s memes or music or slang or style, needs to be kept separate for its own protection is indistinguishable in practice from the racist ghettoisation that once sidelined black artists and athletes from the mainstream, lest they pollute the spaces where white people gathered. At its root is the notion that black culture is not American culture, that black people are somehow other. And, well, you know, there’s a word (and a GIF) for that.

I got to play-act at being ‘empowered’ and ‘in control’, while the male visitors to the club enjoyed being theatrically humiliated. But in all other respects, the establishment followed the age-old pattern: men with money to spend, keen to surround themselves with young female bodies.

I was reminded of that ignoble episode watching the brouhaha over Cardi B’s song WAP, whose explicit lyrics and trippy, porny video have upset conservatives and spawned a flurry of culture-war argument.

https://twitter.com/BradleyCongress/status/1291735105774522368

The DJ remix of Ben Shapiro reading the lyrics is, in my view, far better than the original, which tells you how middle-aged and jaded I am these days. But while it’s easy to mock Shapiro, it was the pop-feminist defences of the song that rang hollow to me — not least in the light of my own London Bridge memories of the ambiguous relationship between sex, empowerment and perky boobs.

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Clickbait doesn’t get more pop-feminist than Teen Vogue, where “Senior identities editor”, Brittney McNamara, argued that Shapiro et al are frightened of female sexuality. This view has its roots in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when women began to push back against ideas of ‘modesty’ and passivity in favour of a more active and casual idea of female desire. This aspiration is encapsulated by Erica Jong’s phrase ‘zipless fuck’, coined in her 1973 novel Fear of Flying:

“The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not ‘taking’ and the woman is not ‘giving’. No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn.”

Jong’s novel struck a chord with those countless women stuck in sexually unfulfilling marriages. Many sought to kick over the traces of monogamy in favour of affairs, sexual agency and the bodily autonomy which became a cornerstone of second-wave women’s liberation.

The zipless fuck has come a long way since Jong. Largely sidelining the body of thought devoted to specifically female sexuality by feminists since the Sixties, the mainstream view that’s emerged today sees men and women as broadly similar, sexually speaking, with the only difference being patriarchal oppression.

Men have historically oppressed women, we’re told, forcing us to wear baggy garments and get married so men can be sure whose baby we’re gestating. But once freed of economic dependence, the risk of pregnancy, and Ben Shapiro, women will all want nothing more than to empower themselves by donning pleather skimpies and gyrating for the cameras.

Off-camera, and aided by hookup apps such as Tinder, today casual no-strings sex is a social norm for young people of both sexes. But is it really the case that the zipless fuck (or ultra-tight wipe-clean undies) is really what women want? In 1972, a year before Erica Jong popularised the term, the biologist Robert Trivers was investigating the cross-cultural asymmetry in male and female interest in in zipless fucks.

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That is, the evidence shows that across cultures, men are considerably keener on no-strings hook-ups than women. Trivers’ ‘Parental investment theory’ argued that this is not a patriarchal imposition. Rather, it has an evolutionary basis: across many species, the parent which spends the most time rearing young will be most picky about when to reproduce and with whom to do so. And indeed, study after study shows that women are fussier shaggers than men (not just among humans but animals too) – and that this difference persists even in highly egalitarian societies.

It makes sense. Contraception is a recent invention, while human preferences have been evolving for millennia. If sex leads to pregnancy — but only for women — and pregnancy leads to at least a decade of child-care commitments, then damn right you’ll prefer to do the nasty with someone who has resources and shows a willingness to stick around. Even if we can now, in theory, have consequence-free sex, evolved preferences aren’t going to disappear overnight.

Sex egalitarians, though, have ignored this possibility. Rather, we’re encouraged to dismiss quaint notions such as wanting marriage or long-term commitment from a man who wants to get into your pants as a hangover of patriarchy.

After all, now that women can control our fertility, there’s no longer any need to constrain our sexuality, right? So even if it is evolution rather than patriarchal conditioning that leads women to want a relationship as well as a shag, we aren’t mindless animals. We have agency. So modern women can sack pesky evolution off along with patriarchy, in favour of Tinder hook-ups and twerking in paddling pools.

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But just because we want something in theory, doesn’t mean we end up enjoying it in practice. Studies show that intimacy is the best predictor of sexual satisfaction — and women in particular tend to prefer sex that’s connected, intimate and relational.

By accepting a supposedly egalitarian approach to sex, women are suppressing a common, evolved desire for a more emotionally connected sexuality. It’s making many of them miserable. Worse still, in downplaying the possibility that female sexuality differs profoundly from the male sort, we do women a still deeper disservice than encouraging them to have empty and disappointing sex. Because in pretending male and female desire is symmetrical, when it manifestly is not, we’re obscuring another asymmetry — the one that got me free entry to fetish clubs in my early twenties.

We can pretend men and women objectify each other’s bodies in similar ways. But it’s well established that male arousal works differently from the female sort, and men are far more visually stimulated than women. Men are also consistently interested (again for evolutionary reasons) in women at peak fertility. Put simply, that means men are much more motivated to gain visual and sexual access to hot young women than vice versa. No one (at least not in heterosexual settings) is granting free nightclub entry to buff 22-year-old males.

As my 22-year-old self can attest, this grants young women a measure of power. For a while, at least, men seem mesmerised by you, and today’s ‘empowered’ version of female sexuality sees this as a legitimate source of female leverage. As Cardi B puts it: ‘Ask for a car while you ride that dick’.

The reductio ad absurdam of this dynamic is the growing trend among teenage girls for posting alluring shots on Instagram until they’re 18, then shifting their followers to OnlyFans (think Patreon for user-generated porn) the moment they’re ‘legal’, where their simps send them money for nudes.

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Here we see what the official narrative of sex egalitarianism wants to brush under the carpet. The young women self-objectifying via OnlyFans don’t seem to stop and wonder why, if we’re all the same, there isn’t an equally voracious market for buff young men stripping to please rich middle-aged women.

The truth, though, is that sex can’t be egalitarian — at least not in the sense of men and women having the same desires and priorities. We’re evolved animals; nothing is more central to that evolution than sex and reproduction; and the different reproductive roles of male and female humans leave us with different priorities. That doesn’t mean we have no agency, but ignoring our animal nature in favour of an abstract vision of egalitarianism has ended up disproportionately harming women.

Teen Vogue nearly gets there when McNamara briefly considers the possibility that lyrics glorifying aggressive, brutal and abusive sex might just possibly be calibrated more for a male audience. But rather than following that thought through, she retreats hurriedly to the safe haven of Emma Watsonesque ‘choice’ feminism, in which (as The Onion put it) women are now empowered by literally everything a woman does. “Whether or not “WAP” is a product of the male gaze,” McNamara simpers, “what’s important is that it made Cardi and Megan feel empowered.”

A cynic might wonder if it’s also important that teenage girls could watch that video and think this is how they are expected to behave in order to retain a boyfriend’s affection. Fully 40% of UK teenage girls today experience sexual coercion in relationships, a fact that correlates strongly with rising youth consumption of sexually explicit content. Even painful and risky anal sex is now normalised, along with the expectation that girls will not enjoy it.

A sexual revolution that set out to free women from unfair expectations of modesty hasn’t levelled the playing field between the sexes at all. Instead, it’s rolled out an aggressive, visual, low-intimacy, emotionally disconnected male-standard sexuality for everyone, including women — to our considerable detriment. In doing so, it’s stripped women of any vocabulary with which to pursue their own erotic interests, in the form of long-term sexual and also emotional commitment.

The pitiful trade-off women are offered for sacrificing female-centred sexuality is the opportunity to exploit their youthful beauty in pursuit of money or power. But what (predominantly young) ‘sex positive’ feminists seem to ignore is how short-lived this form of power is.

In a relationship based on mutual affection and respect, other bonds sustain a couple beyond youth, and love and desire can both persist. But where a couple has rejected intimacy in favour of a transactional relationship based on mutual exploitation for sex and power, once a trading partner loses leverage the deal is off. There are no prizes for guessing who it is who generally loses leverage first in this ‘economy’. For a middle-aged woman left with the kids, as her beauty fades and her formerly adoring partner moves on to showering someone younger and perkier with gifts, what then does empowerment look like?

The twerkers, girl-powerers and Teen Vogue sex-pozzies have nothing. Framing this bait-and-switch as feminist is a profound betrayal of women’s interests.

This article first appeared on 19 August, 2020

I got to play-act at being ‘empowered’ and ‘in control’, while the male visitors to the club enjoyed being theatrically humiliated. But in all other respects, the establishment followed the age-old pattern: men with money to spend, keen to surround themselves with young female bodies.

I was reminded of that ignoble episode watching the brouhaha over Cardi B’s song WAP, whose explicit lyrics and trippy, porny video have upset conservatives and spawned a flurry of culture-war argument.

https://twitter.com/BradleyCongress/status/1291735105774522368

The DJ remix of Ben Shapiro reading the lyrics is, in my view, far better than the original, which tells you how middle-aged and jaded I am these days. But while it’s easy to mock Shapiro, it was the pop-feminist defences of the song that rang hollow to me — not least in the light of my own London Bridge memories of the ambiguous relationship between sex, empowerment and perky boobs.

Suggested reading

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By Mary Harrington

Clickbait doesn’t get more pop-feminist than Teen Vogue, where “Senior identities editor”, Brittney McNamara, argued that Shapiro et al are frightened of female sexuality. This view has its roots in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when women began to push back against ideas of ‘modesty’ and passivity in favour of a more active and casual idea of female desire. This aspiration is encapsulated by Erica Jong’s phrase ‘zipless fuck’, coined in her 1973 novel Fear of Flying:

“The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not ‘taking’ and the woman is not ‘giving’. No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn.”

Jong’s novel struck a chord with those countless women stuck in sexually unfulfilling marriages. Many sought to kick over the traces of monogamy in favour of affairs, sexual agency and the bodily autonomy which became a cornerstone of second-wave women’s liberation.

The zipless fuck has come a long way since Jong. Largely sidelining the body of thought devoted to specifically female sexuality by feminists since the Sixties, the mainstream view that’s emerged today sees men and women as broadly similar, sexually speaking, with the only difference being patriarchal oppression.

Men have historically oppressed women, we’re told, forcing us to wear baggy garments and get married so men can be sure whose baby we’re gestating. But once freed of economic dependence, the risk of pregnancy, and Ben Shapiro, women will all want nothing more than to empower themselves by donning pleather skimpies and gyrating for the cameras.

Off-camera, and aided by hookup apps such as Tinder, today casual no-strings sex is a social norm for young people of both sexes. But is it really the case that the zipless fuck (or ultra-tight wipe-clean undies) is really what women want? In 1972, a year before Erica Jong popularised the term, the biologist Robert Trivers was investigating the cross-cultural asymmetry in male and female interest in in zipless fucks.

Suggested reading

What sort of sex do women really want?

By Louise Perry

That is, the evidence shows that across cultures, men are considerably keener on no-strings hook-ups than women. Trivers’ ‘Parental investment theory’ argued that this is not a patriarchal imposition. Rather, it has an evolutionary basis: across many species, the parent which spends the most time rearing young will be most picky about when to reproduce and with whom to do so. And indeed, study after study shows that women are fussier shaggers than men (not just among humans but animals too) – and that this difference persists even in highly egalitarian societies.

It makes sense. Contraception is a recent invention, while human preferences have been evolving for millennia. If sex leads to pregnancy — but only for women — and pregnancy leads to at least a decade of child-care commitments, then damn right you’ll prefer to do the nasty with someone who has resources and shows a willingness to stick around. Even if we can now, in theory, have consequence-free sex, evolved preferences aren’t going to disappear overnight.

Sex egalitarians, though, have ignored this possibility. Rather, we’re encouraged to dismiss quaint notions such as wanting marriage or long-term commitment from a man who wants to get into your pants as a hangover of patriarchy.

After all, now that women can control our fertility, there’s no longer any need to constrain our sexuality, right? So even if it is evolution rather than patriarchal conditioning that leads women to want a relationship as well as a shag, we aren’t mindless animals. We have agency. So modern women can sack pesky evolution off along with patriarchy, in favour of Tinder hook-ups and twerking in paddling pools.

Suggested reading

Teen Vogue's idiotic hypocrisy

By Douglas Murray

But just because we want something in theory, doesn’t mean we end up enjoying it in practice. Studies show that intimacy is the best predictor of sexual satisfaction — and women in particular tend to prefer sex that’s connected, intimate and relational.

By accepting a supposedly egalitarian approach to sex, women are suppressing a common, evolved desire for a more emotionally connected sexuality. It’s making many of them miserable. Worse still, in downplaying the possibility that female sexuality differs profoundly from the male sort, we do women a still deeper disservice than encouraging them to have empty and disappointing sex. Because in pretending male and female desire is symmetrical, when it manifestly is not, we’re obscuring another asymmetry — the one that got me free entry to fetish clubs in my early twenties.

We can pretend men and women objectify each other’s bodies in similar ways. But it’s well established that male arousal works differently from the female sort, and men are far more visually stimulated than women. Men are also consistently interested (again for evolutionary reasons) in women at peak fertility. Put simply, that means men are much more motivated to gain visual and sexual access to hot young women than vice versa. No one (at least not in heterosexual settings) is granting free nightclub entry to buff 22-year-old males.

As my 22-year-old self can attest, this grants young women a measure of power. For a while, at least, men seem mesmerised by you, and today’s ‘empowered’ version of female sexuality sees this as a legitimate source of female leverage. As Cardi B puts it: ‘Ask for a car while you ride that dick’.

The reductio ad absurdam of this dynamic is the growing trend among teenage girls for posting alluring shots on Instagram until they’re 18, then shifting their followers to OnlyFans (think Patreon for user-generated porn) the moment they’re ‘legal’, where their simps send them money for nudes.

Suggested reading

Let's make sex education sublime

By Rowan Pelling

Here we see what the official narrative of sex egalitarianism wants to brush under the carpet. The young women self-objectifying via OnlyFans don’t seem to stop and wonder why, if we’re all the same, there isn’t an equally voracious market for buff young men stripping to please rich middle-aged women.

The truth, though, is that sex can’t be egalitarian — at least not in the sense of men and women having the same desires and priorities. We’re evolved animals; nothing is more central to that evolution than sex and reproduction; and the different reproductive roles of male and female humans leave us with different priorities. That doesn’t mean we have no agency, but ignoring our animal nature in favour of an abstract vision of egalitarianism has ended up disproportionately harming women.

Teen Vogue nearly gets there when McNamara briefly considers the possibility that lyrics glorifying aggressive, brutal and abusive sex might just possibly be calibrated more for a male audience. But rather than following that thought through, she retreats hurriedly to the safe haven of Emma Watsonesque ‘choice’ feminism, in which (as The Onion put it) women are now empowered by literally everything a woman does. “Whether or not “WAP” is a product of the male gaze,” McNamara simpers, “what’s important is that it made Cardi and Megan feel empowered.”

A cynic might wonder if it’s also important that teenage girls could watch that video and think this is how they are expected to behave in order to retain a boyfriend’s affection. Fully 40% of UK teenage girls today experience sexual coercion in relationships, a fact that correlates strongly with rising youth consumption of sexually explicit content. Even painful and risky anal sex is now normalised, along with the expectation that girls will not enjoy it.

A sexual revolution that set out to free women from unfair expectations of modesty hasn’t levelled the playing field between the sexes at all. Instead, it’s rolled out an aggressive, visual, low-intimacy, emotionally disconnected male-standard sexuality for everyone, including women — to our considerable detriment. In doing so, it’s stripped women of any vocabulary with which to pursue their own erotic interests, in the form of long-term sexual and also emotional commitment.

The pitiful trade-off women are offered for sacrificing female-centred sexuality is the opportunity to exploit their youthful beauty in pursuit of money or power. But what (predominantly young) ‘sex positive’ feminists seem to ignore is how short-lived this form of power is.

In a relationship based on mutual affection and respect, other bonds sustain a couple beyond youth, and love and desire can both persist. But where a couple has rejected intimacy in favour of a transactional relationship based on mutual exploitation for sex and power, once a trading partner loses leverage the deal is off. There are no prizes for guessing who it is who generally loses leverage first in this ‘economy’. For a middle-aged woman left with the kids, as her beauty fades and her formerly adoring partner moves on to showering someone younger and perkier with gifts, what then does empowerment look like?

The twerkers, girl-powerers and Teen Vogue sex-pozzies have nothing. Framing this bait-and-switch as feminist is a profound betrayal of women’s interests.