by ARWA MAHDAWI
Greg Gutfeld’s creepy rant is just the latest example of the US right’s obsession with sex
Fox host, 58, complains college kids not hot any more
Kids these days, eh? They’re all “deliberately ugly-fying themselves”. That’s according to Fox News host Greg Gutfeld, anyway. The 58-year-old recently went on a weird tirade about how college students aren’t adhering to his beauty standards. “You see them on TikTok, they’re out of shape, asexual,” Gutfeld said on Thursday, during a conversation about college loans. “They’re rejecting the truth in beauty, they all look like rejects from a loony bin.”
There’s nothing particularly surprising about a Fox anchor going on a creepy rant about the physical appearance of people three decades younger than him. Ninety per cent of the “news” on Fox, after all, seems to be bizarre commentary on how women look. (Remember when they speculated about whether anyone would listen to congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez if she “was fat and in her 60s”?)
However, Gutfeld’s little outburst is worth noting because it underscores just how sex-obsessed rightwingers are. The party of supposedly small government is constantly inserting itself into other people’s pants. They want to ban sex education in schools; they want to restrict contraception; they want to force women to give birth; they want to ban women from wearing revealing clothes; they want to complain that college students aren’t wearing revealing enough clothes. Republicans don’t have any meaningful or coherent policies, they just have a fixation on controlling women.
While rightwingers are busy sexualizing college students young enough to be their own kids they’re also, of course, simultaneously shouting about how liberals are “groomers” who are trying to “recruit” children. The moral panic over “grooming”, it must be said, is starting to look a lot like projection. Let’s not forget, after all, that Matt Gaetz, a sitting Republican congressman is still under investigation for underage sex trafficking. Meanwhile Matt Walsh, a prominent rightwing commentator, has suggested that we should be pushing for more teenage girls to marry and get pregnant because it is “technically when they’re at their most fertile”. The party of family values, ladies and gentlemen!
The Guardian for more