The History of BDSM

Youtuber Matt Bernstein speaks with Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub (of the podcast In Bed With The Right) about “The Incoherent Sexual Politics of the Right”. The right wing/conservative resurgence we’ve seen over the past decade or so swings widely from the puritan to the libertarian in sexual matters. There’s a desperate scramble to seize the sexual high ground, to present themselves as the side of beauty and pleasure, and denigrate the sex of queer people and feminists as ugly and boring.

In particular, the conversation follows the trajectory of the “tradwife” image, epitomized by the “raw milkmaid dress”. They describe how the tradwife went from the epitome of conservative female modesty and domesticity to a sexualized fetish outfit over the span of only a year or two. Classically Abby, one of the best known advocates of tradwifism, shut down her Youtube channel late last year, because of the raunchy side of her supposed supporters.

There’s a long-standing precedent of female clothing that is supposed to de-sexualize the wearer becoming sexualized and fetishized; e.g. the French maid cliche. That a fetishized version of the tradwife image would appear so quickly is hardly surprising.

It represents the internal rift in the conservative movent, between the puritan and libertine wings. The image of the tradwife in Evie magazine, as modest yet seductive, sexually adventurous yet strictly hetero and monogamous, proved untenable. They couldn’t reconcile that dialectic.

Puritans and libertines have one thing in common: they both believe they should have control over other people’s bodies. In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale, the patriarchal, theocratic fascists of Gilead subdivide women into specialized groups, each with their own sartorial code: handmaids in red for reproduction, wives in blue for running households, aunts in brown to manage handmaids, marthas in green for housework, and jezebels in fetish costumes from the old “decadent” days. They’re all different parts of the same system.