Federalist Lady Very Upset Over Alleged Booty Surplus

Just some good old fashioned slut-shaming.

It's been a real rough week. But it's Saturday and my head still feels like it is filled with cotton balls from having gotten my first jab on Thursday, so I got you all a beautiful present — a terrible Federalist article in which a white lady pines for the days when there wasn't so much ... booty?

Yeah, I don't know either.

Anyway! Federalist writer Madeline Osburn saw a tweet of a guy talking about how seeing "too much booty" on social media has made him "numb" to it and taken the joy out of "ass-gazing."

There's obviously some things we could get into here, starting from the fact that this guy probably has an ass-centric algorithm situation and is just seeing a lot of ass because that's what he's been looking at, and moving on to the fact that maybe not everythingis about his personal boner and women shouldn't have to rearrange their lives or their social media presence to ensure he only gets the precise amount of ass he wants to see. But let's not and say we did. Let's move on to Miss Madeline, who saw this video and then wrote an article titled "This Man Is All Of Us: America Is 'Bootied Out' And It's A Shame." 

First question:  Is he though? He's not me. He's not Madeline Osburn. She makes it quite clear in the rest of her essay that she is a heterosexual woman, and therefore it seems unlikely that overexposure to other women's asses is making her less excited about seeing women's asses. In fact, I would bet you that you could scroll down any of her feeds for an hour and you would not find any of the "booty" this man is seeing.

But go on.

In addition to explaining the inflation and the devaluation of the dollar better than most economics professors, our friend here perfectly explains how the flooding of social media with booty pics has devalued women's bodies, which is a shame for both women and men.

It's "devalued women's bodies?" Are you kidding me?

If men don't like it when women have agency over their bodies and when they are enthusiastic about what they are doing, then they are the ones with the problem. No one would think to say that thousands of pictures of shirtless men would "devalue men's bodies" because we're all supposed to assume that men are more than their bodies.

Madeline then quotes Camille Paglia and we're not even going to get into that for reasons of Camille Paglia.

The more we as a culture are inundated with women trying to out-titillate each other, whether on TikTok or in Cardi B music videos, the less titillating they become. As our friend above says about the 37 booties he sees on one scroll through Instagram, "Y'all have taken the joy of -ss gazing out of my life."

Oh christ, this is about WAP , isn't it? It's actually incredible how mad conservatives are about WAP. Like, really? They listen to Ted Nugent's varied and sundry odes to gang rape, but they're going to complain about one song about female pleasure? For months on end?

Why should women feel sorry for this man? His joy is not our responsibility, but the devaluation of women's bodies hurts women too.

Before we were all "bootied out," a woman's sexuality was not just mysterious and proactive, but the most powerful force on the planet. It drove men to face great risks, cross oceans, write ballads, and even start wars just for the chance to gaze at a woman's booty. Women held all the cards in intimate relationships.

Yeah, so first of all, Helen of Troy was not a real person. Her dad was Zeus, King of the Gods, who impregnated her mom, Leda, while disguised as a swan . Her face did not actually launch 1,000 ships, because she did not exist and therefore neither did the ships.

Second, if our sexuality was the "most powerful force on the planet" then why did we have to wait so long to be allowed to vote? And the idea of women having "held all the cards in intimate relationships" is about as fictional as Helen of Troy and her Swan/God rapist father. We couldn't even have credit cards, Madeline! We couldn't own property, which would have been much more helpful than a ballad.

Now, men sit back while women work their butts off, literally, trying to hold a man's gaze before he swipes left or right onto the next one. In an attempt to liberate ourselves, we relinquished our power, and in doing so, diminished the quality of the men we hope to attract. Is it just a coincidence that fewer men are graduating college and joining the workforce than ever before? Should I mention that men's testosterone levels are also plummeting ?

Because they're seeing too much booty? Because yeah, I am gonna say these things are definitely all coincidences.

Is she actually suggesting that women having agency over their sexuality is preventing men from graduating college and getting jobs and is ... depleting their testosterone? I am not a testosterone scientist but I am relatively sure that that's not actually a thing.

In order to make booty great again, we must make booty limited again. In today's butt-centric media landscape, women who understand how to conceal their curves, and who instead deploy the "magic, mood and mystique" of sex, as Paglia describes it, will unlock the secret to yielding power over men again.

"Yielding power" is quite the Freudian slip there. This woman is in no way old enough, however, to have experienced any kind of hallowed past where women who "concealed their curves" wielded great power over men, both because she looks quite young and because that past never existed. Also, if we look at cultures that require women to dress modestly, women don't actually have a whole lot of power in them. In fact, they are usually a pretty terrible time for women. The FLDS, the Amish, the Duggars ... I could go on .

It's clear that Osburn's deal is that, like other conservatives, she just desperately wants to push "modesty" on women, and sees this as her way in. She's basically "I'm not a chicken, you're a turkey" -ing women's sexuality. But the fact that she's specifically using some supposed "booty" surplus to do this feels more than a little racist and gives off some very strong "opening dialogue of 'Baby Got Back'" energy.

And for men like our friend @gotsnacks_ who are feeling "burnt out," stepping away from the social media booty deluge may not only have a positive impact on those testosterone levels, but will increase the value of real, tangible, unfiltered booties IRL.

No, it won't have "a positive impact" on testosterone levels. That is actually insane. Look at asses or don't look at asses. Look at boobs or don't look at boobs. Everyone has a choice here. As does Madeline Osburn.

If Madeline Osburn wishes to embrace "modesty," she is free to do that. I don't care how other people dress unless they are paying me to dress them, or we're friends and they ask me "How do these jeans look? Should I buy them, yes or no?" In fact, she should really enjoy this upcoming season that is for some reason filled to the brim with hideous prairie dresses with giant puff sleeves. It is not, however, her business to tell other women what to do with their bodies on social because she thinks that's the thing keeping men from starting wars over her face.

[ The Federalist ]

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