From Liberal Currents
The group chat leak reveals what over a decade of incel messaging and Bronze Age Pervert have done to Young Republicans.
“The Spanish came to America and had sex with every single woman.”
“Sex is gay”
“Sex? It was rape.”
“Epic”
This text exchange is part of the cache of messages sent in a Telegram group chat by Young Republicans. In these messages, exposed by Politico reporters Jason Beeferman and Emily Ngo, hundreds of racial and homophobic slurs are used by leading Young Republicans, including a Kansas state senator, along with joking references to Hitler and the Holocaust.
A lot has already been said and written about the deeply racist, misogynistic, and anti-LGBTQ+ exchanges from this group chat. But I wanted to focus on this exchange because I think it helps highlight some crucial aspects of the sexual politics of the new young right.
I’ve argued in the past that the new right has endorsed a politics of rape, one that is in keeping with a longer tradition of rape and domination as keys themes in right-wing, authoritarian politics. Here, I want to elaborate on this argument by stressing how a fixation on the male form, homoerotic ideas about strength and beauty, and a contempt for women’s bodies plays into this right-wing politics of rape.
The problem with sex is the other
It’s important to note that “sex is gay” is an idea found among the incel—or, involuntary celibate—community, most notably from neo-Nazi and self-styled incel Nick Fuentes. In 2022, Fuentes went on a rant on his show, in which he argued that his lack of sexual experience with women “actually makes me really more heterosexual than anyone.” As Fuentes explained:
If we’re really being honest, never having a girlfriend, never having sex with a woman really makes you more heterosexual, because honestly, dating women is gay, having sex with women is gay. And having sex with men is gay. Really it’s all gay. And if you want to know the truth, the only really straight heterosexual position is to be an asexual incel. That’s it. That’s all there is… Having sex in itself is gay, I think. I think that it’s really a gay act to begin with. Think about it this way: What’s gayer than being like ‘I need cuddles. I need kisses… I need to spend time with a woman.’
This is classic incel thinking: self-aggrandizing, misogynistic, and revulsion at the very thing they also claim to have been denied—sex itself. As Laura Bates puts it in her 2020 book The Men Who Hate Women, “Incel logic seems to reveal a hopeless contradiction: women are simultaneously reviled for sleeping with men and for refusing to do so.”
Alan Elrod is the president & CEO of the Pulaski Institution, an Arkansas-based think tank. He is also a columnist and Contributing Editor at Liberal Currents and an adjunct instructor at Arkansas State University-Beebe.
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