The smear of a recruit of Ole Miss College is a return of the Bush era

In February, a group of men on a sports talk show broadcast with casual and false rumor on the sex life of a teenage girl on national television, which made her humiliation and tirelessly. It was again as if it was in 2007, and talk-show jokes were a brief break before the calendar in charge of our country to make fun of the break of Britney Spears.

On the Bro-Y d’Espn Pat McAfee showThe McAfee holder presented a segment on the NFL recovery choices by chatting on a first cycle rumor he had heard: that a sorority daughter at the University of Mississippi had cheated on his boyfriend with his father. McAfee did not mention the young woman or her boyfriend by name, but then shared the clip on X to her 3.2 million followers (the post is still in place, on April 3). The personality of Barstool Sports Jack Mac then promoted a piece of memes named after the daughter in question: Mary Kate Cornett, first year student. Cornett denies the rumor, but that did not prevent him from spreading like a trail of powder.

As indicated on the New York Times, athletics, while rumor spread, harassment Cornett experienced a touch. She had to leave her university dormitory and move into emergency housing after campus police said she was in danger. Someone sent a false tip to the police to send a swat team to their mother’s home. Cornett’s vocal messaging and SMS filled with degrading messages of foreigners qualifying it as a whore and telling it to commit suicide; Similar messages have also reached his 89-year-old grandfather. Cornett now says that she intends to pursue legal action against McAfee and ESPN. ESPN and McAfee refused to comment on the athletic and others.

There is something so 2000 in this story – the kind of thing you would read on a feminist blog at the time. He has all the rhythms of a shame of classic slut: an anonymous teenager, men on a talk show using her humiliation as an inactive chatter, the way in which Chit-Chat takes up and takes place until the girl receives anonymous threats from foreigners. She is a very faster girl, in which a graphic band of an eighth year student made for the boy for whom she had the crush has become viral. It was very Vanessa Hudgens in 2007, when she was forced to apologize to the fans and rush to save her Disney career when naked photos of her were disclosed. It is essentially all the episodes that the Talk-show hosts of the 2000s have now apologized. The only part that is really new is the same and the right ecosystem of X which allows such gossip to flourish.

Certainly, a person might think that we have exceeded this type of national shame of slut now. We live in a post-metoo world. Culture had to go beyond the sexual humiliation of adolescent girls.

However, in a way, Ole Miss’s story is the kind of thing that has long been to come. The right was interested in rekindling the Rauch of the Bush era (think Girls have become wild) and the culture of purity (think: the obsession with the virginity of Britney Spears) for years now. The culture of purity and the culture of raunch walk hand in hand. The sexual objectification of the raunch is applied by the rigid shame of purity. Both are united by compulsory objectification and humiliation of women, whose bodies in this system are always controlled by men.

As sociologist Bernadette Barton has shown in her 2021 book The Porification of America: How raunch culture ruin our societyRaunch has become fundamental for self-conception of the post-Trump right. Barton notes the number of pro-Trump memes which “explicitly connects provocative female bodies with Trump accessories”, or “contrast” sexy conservative women with “ugly and non-female” liberal women.

“Misogynes are no longer confined to the old dichotomies who frame women as virgins or whores,” observes Barton. “Raunch cultivation has facilitated a new sexist dichotomy: hot or not. “”

Ideology claims all hot girls like their own and demands that they place themselves in the service of men, for their fun. The management of this position allows a woman a certain cultural currency, which is why the right likes to sing that hot girls vote for Trump and only the ugly girls are liberal. However, being a hot girl also opens the possibility of the kind of vicious humiliation and harassment and highly sexualized with which Cornett is confronted. It is the ideology that allowed the right to claim an apolitical silhouette like Hawk Tuah Girl as a symbol Maga, and at the same time to dirty Kamala Harris as “the original girl Hawk Tuah”.

The goal is to deteriorate, dominate, specify that sex exists to satisfy men. Humor an anonymous teenager for pleasure is the natural end of this ideology. It was always what was hidden under hot girls for Trump jokes.