The Republican Dommy Mommy Archetype
hunting wives, the fascist cult of beauty, and the final frontier of sexual taboo for queer women
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The Hunting Wives is the most viscerally horny I’ve been for a TV show in a long time. Like… run into the next room for a vibrator horny. And it’s not just because Malin Akerman and Dermot Mulroney as a couple hit me right in my Kinsey 5 tea (very homosexual, incidentally heterosexual). It’s bigger than that. Deeper in my lizard brain. But more on my theories about why in a second. First let’s time travel.
It was February of 2025 and Mr. Dune’s Christmas gift to me was a trip to Nashville to see Father John Misty, my longtime fave, in concert at the historic Ryman Auditorium. The Ryman is a famous music venue built in the late 1800’s. It has remarkable acoustics, an intimate feel, and the seating is in church-style pews, so throughout the show you can hear the creaking of wood. It’s charming and transportive. That night, it was a safe bubble of Misty fans: leftists on Zoloft1, men with 2010’s-style beards, and lovers of vintage fashion. It was a perfect way to experience my favorite artist. We all even shared a laugh at Morgan Wallen’s expense as Misty riffed on whether he would become a Jimmy Buffet-type figure to future generations, known only for his mediocre presence in the restaurant industry (the venue is across the street from the repugnant country star’s venture ‘This Bar’).
And then we emerged onto the street into Nashville’s downtown party zone. I felt immediately out of place, visibly an outsider. And in light of the recent change in the executive branch, the whites around me seemed… gleeful. Craven. Girls with barrel curls and boots and men in weird jeans and trucker hats seemed to leer at us. They were high on their own supply. Just like the guy we’d seen that morning in an Americana-themed diner: tall, handsome, young, proudly wearing the latest black (SS-coded) MAGA hat. This was so much more sinister than what we’re accustomed to in California, which is seeing visible Trump voters only in rural areas and being able to tell ourselves a story about how the working class has been duped by billionaires.2 These were young, urban people who were under no illusions about who was on the winning team. And they were psyched. They were doing the right-wing version of libbing out.
What adds insult to injury right now is that the lion’s share of politicians who call themselves Democrats and most people who are willing to call themselves liberal are essentially what Republicans used to be in recent memory, just with better branding. America’s mainstream “left” is right-wing in most developed nations. They’re not doing shit right now on the whole except slick virtue signaling while trying to sabotage Mamdani and other working class-aligned politicians with actual action plans. They have no message because, as a great tweet I saw recently put it, it’s impossible to serve the interests of the ruling and working classes simultaneously. So we get the Kente-cloth kneeling and no measurable backbone or structural change. So as the Right frolics on the streets, we don’t have anything to rally around. It’s easy to feel like losers. Cucks, even.3
Light spoilers for episodes 1-3 of Hunting Wives to follow ~
This tension is on full display in The Hunting Wives,4 Netflix’s new glossy good-bad thriller based on a book by the same name. It’s fun to watch and just the right amount of dumb. It’s like someone at Netflix woke the fuck up from a long coma and remembered how to make an enjoyable TV show (I was not into the Nicole Kidman weirdness with the group dance number. Snore.) The show opens as Sophie O’Neill (Brittany Snow), a Boston transplant, is thrown into the upper-echelon of rich, gun-toting Texas Republicans at an NRA fundraiser thrown by her beta-cuck5 husband’s new boss (Dermot Mulroney). Sophie realizes the theme of the fundraiser and starts having a panic attack, horrified at the rhetoric she hears about crime coming in through the Southern border, et cetera.
But here’s the thing: she and her husband are affluent as well (if not mega-rich like their new associates). She drives a Tesla (which, when this was shot, was still a signifier of being an eco-conscious lib. Lol.) The series takes us a lot of places, but ultimately dramatizes how quickly Sophie is seduced by the unfamiliar, and how effortlessly she’s ready to jump ship on her values. It calls into question the moral constancy of a certain kind of white woman to her pussy hat values, implying maybe Sophie was just going along to get along, bolstered by moral outrage and a fantasy of superiority. As soon as she got a gun in her hands, she gets dizzy. And horny.
The Hunting Wives themselves are played big and played pretty cartoonishly. You have the megachurch pastor’s wife with her closet full of skeletons, the Sheriff’s wife who’s secretly fucking another woman, and then there’s Margo. Enter: Malin Akerman as Dermot Mulroney’s smokin’ hot bad girl wife. We’re introduced to her in the bathroom with Sophie at the party asking for a menstrual pad, and seconds later she’s fully nude as she puts it on. My attention was piqued. Margo goes on to become a kind of big sister to Sophie, introducing her to the guns, jet skis, and infidelity on offer in her new world. Everything is bigger in Texas, etc. We realize quite quickly that Margo and Dermot Mulroney are in an open marriage of sorts where both can do whatever they want with other women. Of course, they don’t call it that because:
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Bisexual polyamorous writer Gab Alexa joins me to discuss bi-erasure, queer baiting, and her spicy time at the infamous swinger’s retreat Hedonism.
As both pursue Sophie, Margo ends up winning out against Sophie’s better instincts. The deal is a good one: Margo gets to corrupt the new girl, and Sophie gets to step outside of her liberal pearl-clutching and be bad.
The Right-wing Dommy Mommy as an archetype wasn't invented in this show. It also appeared recently in season 3 of Hacks, played to acclaim by Christina Hendricks.
Ava (Hannah Einbinder) spends the day at a charity golf tournament caddying for her boss. A b-plot develops where Ava has a crush on Christina Hendricks playing a hot older women with a powerful swagger. Later that night, they meet up at the hotel bar and Christina Hendricks takes Ava back to her room. They’re making out when Ava stops the action and reveals she’s not actually a golf caddy, but a writer. Christina Hendricks is visibly put off, revealing she was only into the fantasy of fucking Ava if she was actually a caddy:
Ava: Okay… is this some weird power thing where you only wanted to fuck me because I’m your working class subordinate? Kinda problematic.
CH: Oh god, everything is so problematic these days. What are you, gonna lecture me on inclusivity and tell me how I can’t fund fracking?
Ava: Fracking? Are you a Republican?
CH: Obviously.
Ava: You’re a gay Republican? How does that make sense? Where’s my shirt?
CH: I was really looking forward to pissing on a caddy.
Ava: You were NOT gonna piss on me.
CH: Yeah I was. I was going to piss all over you.
Ava: You weren't gonna piss on me, no.
CH: Oh, wow, a liberal kink-shamer. I thought you people were supposed to be sex positive.
Ava: Oh my god. I would HAPPILY let a socialist pee on me.
CH: Your loss.
While Ava didn’t go through with it, there was still an intense eroticism about Hendricks’ character’s Domineering attitude, inability to be shamed, and tight, breasty sweaters. Even though Ava resists her, the fantasy is an understandable one. It’s worth noting, underscoring, putting in neon, even, that both of these fantasy scenarios concern queer women. Hannah Einbinder’s Ava is often the butt of the joke for her leftist antics, a display of the exhaustion inherent in always doing everything right. Sophie is the same. She’s all too eager to throw off the cancel culture shackles and get into bed with the enemy. So what’s going on here?
If you too fantasize about being taught how to use a rifle from behind by Malin Akerman, there’s historical precedent for the intermingling of fascism and horniness. It’s an open and dirty secret of the BDSM community that leather aesthetics can be traced to Nazi S.S. uniforms. As Leather cohered around fraternal motorcycle clubs post-WWII, Nazi imagery dominated the public imagination, and the PTSD of these the gay veterans who formed this subculture. Leather boots and flat-topped caps emerged as a visual signifier in direct response to that overt aesthetic of power. Ever notice how many leather bars are called ‘The Eagle’? These descend from The Eagle in New York City, whose name was changed from ‘The Eagle’s Nest.’6 This play with power and trauma earned kinksters a uniquely marginalized place in the queer community, with our ancestors spending decades explaining that they were not Nazis, but rather queering and appropriating their visuals.
If you’re interested in looking directly at the intersection of the erotic imagination and fascism, watch director Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974). The controversial film takes place in 1957, and follows Lucia, a former concentration camp prisoner, and Max, a former SS officer. As we watch their post-war lives, the narrative is interspersed with their memories of the sadomasochistic relationship they had when she was in the camp and he was her captor:
In one noteworthy flashback, perhaps the film’s most disconcerting and iconic sequence, Lucia is seen amongst a number of SS officers, several of whom are masked. Donning suspenders, long gloves, loose uniform pants and no shirt, she sings Marlene Dietrich’s “Wenn ich mir was wünschen dürfte” to the convened guards. The ominous musical number is capped by Max bestowing to his newfound beloved the head of a camp casualty who had formerly tormented her, a highly unsavoury declaration of devotion and, remarkably enough, protection. The scene is significant for its sexually charged content and its range of Nazi-era iconography, which Cavani proffers throughout the film, emphasising, for example, the physicality associated with “ideal” bodily specimens.
As an aside, if you recognize this vibe, Lady Gaga’s ‘Alejandro’ video is highly visually referential to The Night Porter:
I knew for this piece I’d need a source from a brilliant female writer defining the tenets of fascism, and was vaguely aware of Susan Sontag’s 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism.”7 I went and found it in its 30-ish page entirety and was shocked and delighted to find that it dives into exactly this issue around fascist eroticism. The essay starts as a critique of a book of photography capturing the “beauty” of the Nuba tribe of southern Sudan. The book, as it happens, was assembled by Leni Riefenstahl, director of many of the most memorable Nazi propaganda films. In the seventies, she’d found some recognition among feminists who sought to appreciate her achievements in directing while de-Nazifying her films’ subject matter. Sontag analyzes the language of the book with a scalpel, laying bare the fascist ideology that still underpinned Riefenstahl’s gaze. And that gaze was directed inward too: Riefenstahl was considered a perfect Aryan woman by Hitler himself, a paradigm of Alpine health. She performed Aryan beauty with conscious precision. Just look at these weird shots of her skiing in a swimsuit:
Sontag uses Riefenstahl’s completely desexed obsession with a bodily ideal to contrast against the rising visibility of the gay leather community in the mid-seventies. Fascists do not participate in the erotic, preferring to convert sexual energy into subjugation to the supreme leader. Sontag:
The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a “spiritual” force, for the benefit of the community. The erotic is always present as a temptation, with the most admirable response being a heroic repression of the sexual impulse.
Modern Republicans continue to pursue the cult of beauty, with perplexingly hideous late-capitalist results. Namely ‘Mar-a-Lago face,’ the look Fox News anchors and Trump associates have become famous for. The women wear their hair in barrel curls, their makeup spackled on, and they are more pumped than the most Med Spa-addicted drag queen returning for All Stars. As fascists pursue “beauty” they alienate themselves entirely from the natural, the sexual, and become wholly plastic. Maybe that’s what these women have to do to contort themselves into the death cult. Kill their humanity and freeze their emotions with Botox8.
I was discussing the MAGA aesthetic with my brilliant friend, author Elizabeth Rose Quinn (buy her incredible thriller about murderous Mommy Influencers here), and she fired off this text I’ll be thinking about for the rest of my life:
I heard something about how all the MAGA women have bad plastic surgery and bad blonde hair and bad extensions because the point is not to look good or natural. The point is to perform that they will deform themselves to prove their dedication to the cause.
Haunting. Sontag puts it another way,
Fascist aesthetics… flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, and extravagant effort; they exalt two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of dominations and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication of things and grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, “virile” posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender; it exalts mindlessness: it glamorizes death.
These women have themselves become the fascist art, transforming their faces into the congealed and static pose. Killing all evidence of femininity to increase proximity to power. I personally find Mar-A-Lago Face to be hideous, probably because I don’t have the same taste in women as Donald Trump. And yet, as a queer woman, I have a visceral understanding of the Republican Dommy Mommy and why she’s gracing our screens. And I think she’s here for the same reason that our queer foreparents started playing with SS regalia.
Here’s where Sontag and I diverge. Above (hundreds of words ago, we’re really in this now), I characterized BDSM’s dalliance with Nazi imagery in the forties through the seventies as a trauma response. This may be anachronistic, I don’t know, I wasn’t there. This understanding on my part comes from the writings in the early eighties (Coming To Power) and nineties (LeatherFolk) from kinksters themselves as the AIDS crisis necessitated urgent solidarity among divergent queer communities. It also comes from my own work and the Millennial mindset of viewing all sexual choices as “valid” or, even better, “healing.” I firmly believe in BDSM’s healing powers, and this is a big part of what has made my work popular with the little corner of the internet we’re all on here. But I want to name that bias as clearly as possible when engaging with historical themes.
Sontag’s points about Leather aesthetics diverge from my understanding in that she frames sadomasochism as “theatrical” and “performative.” She likens it to art, leaving the question hanging about what kind of art it is, having just explored the ins and outs of Fascist art. She concludes the essay claiming BDSM is cribbing Nazi aesthetics as “a response to an oppressive freedom of choice in sex (and, possibly, other matters), to an unbearable degree of individuality.” She goes on:
[The Marquis de Sade] had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the decor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.
This is the very end of the essay, and she stops short of analyzing why queer people might eroticize death (if that is what’s going on in kink. I defer to the reader on that one). Even before the AIDS epidemic, queer people faced a relentless threat of physical violence, imprisonment, psychiatric institutionalization, and worse. “Queer” as a verb wouldn’t be coined until the nineties9, so you can’t blame Sontag for lacking the vernacular. Issues of violence and the body are heightened for queer people, and it’s only natural to convert that charge into an erotic one, to bring our fears into a consensual container to transmute them. These containers also give us a space to inhabit and reckon with that which we can’t understand. And there’s nothing more perplexing to your average queer woman, I’d argue, than Republican women, moreover Republican women who are also closeted queers.
The Hunting Wives shows a haunting flippancy about politics, a kind of Laura Loomer, Lauren Boebert-esque trolling rinsed of its true ghoulishness for the Netflix audience. Still, they are very ‘tee-hee’ about their “values.” Not unlike the White House’s deportation ASMR tweet recently, which meme-ified a human rights crisis and their heinous treatment of real human beings. This indirectness has something almost feminine in it — they’re using the same strategies with which white womanhood has been used to uphold white supremacy: innocence, purity, inculpability. They want to have it both ways: they want to be tough and strong but they also want to be persecuted. They want to win, but also flex a jester’s privilege they don’t have. As much as Trump is here to “make deals” and own the libs, his victim mindset is cooked into everything he does.
Riefenstahl herself applied the same ‘did I do that?’ performance to her de-Nazification tour, insisting for decades that Goebbels hated her. But Sontag dug up a quote from her book in 1935 that illustrates her empowered participation in the Third Reich:
In her book published in 1935, Riefenstahl had told the truth. The Nuremberg Rally “was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting —but as a spectacular propaganda film… The ceremonies and precise plans of the parades, marches, processions, the architecture of the halls and stadium were designed for the convenience of the cameras.”
When the Republican Dommy Mommy graces the queer erotic imagination, she is universally in a topping role. She is not feigning weakness, she’s shooting tequila cocking a rifle against her denim-swathed hip. In this fantasy, she sheds the performative vulnerability that makes these women so dangerous in real life. The queer fantasy shows the Republican woman finally being honest, proverbially or literally admitting she wants to pee on you. While stripping you of your rights. Maybe deporting you or your lovers. It’s that exact line where fear becomes fascination and the erotic takes over to give us control.
So are we looking at a generation of sapphic spaces styled after Mar-A-Lago in the tradition of The Eagle? Will the natural wine bars be replaced by beige marble and Bud Light? We have thoroughly queered Carhartt, camo, bright orange, Oakleys, and mullets. Will Mar-A-Lago face become a sapphic signifier? Are we going to start wearing hideous bright red dresses? Is Christian Girl Autumn about to gain new life?
I’d argue no. The Republican Dommy Mommy is a fixation on themes rather than aesthetics, a place to exercise control over our fear and confusion. Was I horny in the streets of Nashville?10 Not at all. In fact, I don’t even think we fucked at all on that trip, which is very out of character. The whole environment was drained of the human, the real, the messy aspects that actually get me going. That said, do I fantasize, briefly, about riding a jetski with a hot older woman wearing a swimsuit with a fugly belt on it? Sure. Because the erotic imagination is built on tension. And here we all are, powerless, tied to the metaphorical hotel cuck chair watching the lit fuse of fascism burn ever closer to the bomb. This is exactly the kind of tension that, like it or not, makes people horny. Except for the Republicans. They may be having sex out there, somewhere (ew), but they’re not fucking. Getting jerked off in the THE-A-ter notwithstanding. Which is why The Hunting Wives is ultimately a liberal fantasy, a place where we can project understanding onto Republican womens’ deal with the devil. Maybe if they’re getting gay plowed while their husbands are running for governor, they can be understood. But no, I think their reality is much more grim. And that’s their bed to lie in. Just because we have the fantasies, doesn’t mean we’re getting in that nasty Joanna Gaines-coded bed with them. Sleep soundly in your Parachute linen sheets. There is no slippery slope here.
More on all this from me…
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I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.
As I write this I wonder if this narrative on our parts is classist in its own way. Discuss in the comments?
I’m describing things this way to describe a cultural mindset. I know so many leftists who are organizing and taking local action despite this prevailing attitude. But the big picture is relevant to an argument about sexuality. Stay with me.
Mr. Dune rightfully pointed out that it’s wild that they missed the opportunity to call it Hunting Wives (no ‘the’) bc is it Hunting Wives or Hunting Wives…. Makes you think
Sorry but it takes one to know one
As a fun aside, I first encountered this essay when it was quoted in this 2020 New Yorker article about Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers.
I have botox, this is not a botox shame zone.
It bears mentioning there are plenty of “Y’All Means All” enclaves in Nashville, it’s not all Republican bullshit.
I’ve always said that as a whole, beauty aesthetics for the sake of trend are less about the aesthetic and more about the performance of belonging. The duck lips high brows overfilled cheeks (which men hate but still date) are not about being attractive but about signalling a subservience to the system. They’re not saying ‘I’m pretty look at me’, they’re saying ‘I’m agreeable pick me’. And in response, when men date this person they claim they don’t find attractive (which is probably true) all they’re saying is ‘I’m good enough’ and ‘I fit in.’ And that barely touches on the eugenics coding of it all.
Really interesting piece. Bookmarking to come back after I read the Sontag essay.
"this is a big part of what has made my work popular with the little corner of the internet we’re all on here"
Another big part is that you write very well. You discuss abstract ideas in clear and concise language.