The Right’s Unnatural Obsession with Sex: Projection, Power, and the Politics of Control
Welcome to another installment of “Doing What Matters for Women’s History Month,” where we celebrate progress and call out the well-documented absurdities of those who seem determined to rewind history like an old VHS tape stuck on patriarchal propaganda. Today’s take: Exposing the right-wing’s obsession with sex, gender, and, well, everything they claim to loathe but just can’t stop talking about.
If you spend more than five minutes listening to a MAGA rally or doomscrolling through conservative media, you notice a peculiar pattern: their rhetoric is positively dripping with sex. Not in a fun, liberating way, mind you, but in the kind of way that makes you want to wash your hands after listening. From Pizzagate to relentless fearmongering about transgender people, from their fascination with “trad wives” to their deep and abiding concern over what women do with their reproductive organs, the far right seems entirely consumed by the intimate lives of others. And not just consumed — obsessed, fixated, haunted.
It’s giving projection, and honey, the receipts are endless.
Projection: Accusing Others of Your Own Desires
Psychologists have a term for this: projection. It’s when someone casts their own uncomfortable thoughts, desires, or behaviors onto others because dealing with their internal insecurities about these issues would be too much to bear. MAGA’s obsession with policing gender roles, controlling women’s bodies, and crafting dystopian sexual morality laws suggests they are battling some serious inner demons.
Instead of seeking therapy, they’re writing legislation.
Take the rampant panic over LGBTQ+ “indoctrination.” When conservatives claim that schools are “sexualizing children” by acknowledging that gay people exist, though Madison Avenue, Hollywood, and Fashion Avenue have sexualized everything and everyone for years, this particular fixation among the right reveals their inability to separate gender identity from sexual activity. Their vote against school lunch programs for hungry kids while arguing that drag queens are the real threat to children is the real perversion here.
The “Family Values” Brigade: An Inconvenient Truth
This would all be amusing if it weren’t so terrifyingly hypocritical. While railing against the so-called decay of traditional values, MAGA’s top brass includes a rogues’ gallery of philanderers, alleged sex traffickers, and scandal-plagued men who can’t seem to keep their hands — or their NDAs — to themselves. Donald Trump, the GOP’s crowned king of contradiction, was caught on tape bragging about grabbing women by their genitals. Yet, he remains the moral compass for a movement that wants to legislate women’s bodily autonomy. Matt Gaetz, always on a political crusade against “groomers,” was investigated for allegedly trafficking minors for sex. The list goes on.
Let’s not forget their favorite trope: the defense of “real masculinity.” When Missouri Senator Josh Hawley is out here writing entire books about the so-called “crisis of manhood,” you have to wonder: why is he so worried? If being a man is so self-evident and natural, why does it need constant reinforcement? To see Fox News hosts wax poetic about testosterone levels and Tucker Carlson films bizarre segments about tanning testicles, one has to ask: who exactly is fragile here?
Why the Obsession? Sex as a Tool for Social Control
Beyond projection, there’s a deeper reason why sex and gender are such political mainstays for the right: control. If you can control how people express their identity, whom they love, how they behave in the most intimate aspects of their lives, you can control society. Conservatives, particularly the MAGA strain, have built an entire movement on rigid gender hierarchies. The idea that women might reject traditional roles, that men might not conform to 1950s notions of masculinity, that gender itself might be a spectrum rather than a binary — this is an existential crisis for them because it disrupts the very foundation of their worldview.
This is why the right’s war on reproductive rights isn’t just about abortion — it’s about punishing women for exercising autonomy. It’s why they target trans people, particularly trans women, with so much venom — because trans identities challenge their simplistic, patriarchal ideas about gender. And it’s why they love pearl-clutching over women who don’t fit their mold of servitude — because a woman who thinks for herself is a threat to their order.
Fighting Back with Reality and Reason
So what do we do about it? First, we call it what it is. Every time a conservative politician spirals into a moral panic over drag queens or obsessively debates whether men are “manly enough,” we point out that their hysteria says more about them than the people they’re attacking. We remind the world that the same movement claiming to “protect children” is gutting education funding and ignoring systemic child abuse, hunger and poverty. We highlight the hypocrisy, the projection, and, most importantly, the harm that comes from their crusade against bodily autonomy and gender freedom.
Second, we support policies and leaders who champion actual freedom — freedom to live without government intrusion into our personal lives, freedom to make our own healthcare decisions, and freedom to exist without being the scapegoat for someone else’s repressed anxieties. And finally, we refuse to let this moral panic go unchallenged. Because if history tells us anything, those who scream the loudest about other people’s supposed sins often have the most skeletons in their closets.
So, happy Women’s History Month. Here’s to rejecting the hypocrisy, embracing reality, and fighting for a future where women, LGBTQ+ people, and all humans can live their lives free from the obsessions of insecure men in ill-fitting suits and overlong ties because the only thing more fragile than their masculinity is their grip on power.
