How Hot Girls Became the Right’s New Obsession

It all began with Sydney Sweeney’s cleavage.

In March, the 27-year-old actress hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time, wearing low-cut outfits during the start and close of the show, which featured a number of jokes about her physical appearance, including a sketch where she played a Hooters waitress.

SNL cast member Bowen Yang revealed in a recent episode of the Fly on the Wall podcast that the Euphoria star “was practically begging everybody” to make body-related jokes.

“She came in and was like, ‘Please, everyone, make jokes about my boobs,'” he said.

At the time, Sweeney’s appearance sparked much discourse and was lauded by a number of right-wing commentators as “the death of woke” (more on that later).

The actress had become a so-called conservative hot girl — a pin-up for the modern day right-wing movement as it attempts to expand the appeal of conservatism beyond the confines of its largely older, white, male base.

Sweeney and other conservative hot girls don’t necessarily have any tangible involvement with politics (though some have strong political affiliations), but they have been claimed by right-wing public figures as their own, whether they appear to like it or not.

Who Is the Conservative Hot Girl?

The conservative hot girl “isn’t a particularly new phenomenon,” according to Victoria Cann, an associate professor at the University of East Anglia. “Women have been positioned through the lens of the masculinist imagery in conservative, populist politics for a very long time.”

Sweeney appears to have kicked off the latest wave of conservative hot girls, at a time when conventional beauty standards have been adopted as a purported antidote to “wokeness.” That word was initially associated with progressive movements but has since been co-opted by conservative critics to mock what they perceive as excessive political correctness, virtue signaling, or a tendency to overemphasize identity politics.

Amy Tatum of Bournemouth University told Newsweek that “this focus on ‘hot girls’ is a way for the right in the U.S. to fight back against perceptions of ‘wokeness,’ holding up women in a sexualized fashion could be a tactic to reinforce gender stereotypes around women’s appearances.”

Following Sweeney’s appearance on SNL, right-wing political commentator Richard Hanania shared a clip of the actress on the show in a low-cut dress, with the caption: “Wokeness is dead.” An opinion piece in Canada’s National Post asked, “Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?”

The author of that piece, Amy Hamm, wrote that Sweeney knows she’s admired and owns “her sex appeal with zero apologies,” arguing that “today’s diversity, equity, and inclusion” advocates have discouraged admiration of beauty due to its exclusivity, implying that exclusion equates to hate.

“We aren’t supposed to admire Sweeney’s beauty; but we’ve done it anyways,” she added.

That point was echoed by Inez Feltscher Stepman, senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum and self-proclaimed “anti-feminist.”

“Men don’t ONLY like Sydney Sweeney for her boobs, they like her bc she’s the first starlet in a long time to unrepentantly and cheerfully chase the male gaze,” Stepman wrote on X after Sweeney’s SNL debut. “She is clearly giving permission to ogle and enjoying that feminine power. An oasis for men in a nut vice culture lol.”

In early August, Sweeney posted a series of photos to Instagram, with the caption “I think they call this a thirst trap.” The sports commentator Joe Kinsey later shared the images on X with the caption: “It’s a bad week to be a militant blue-haired lesbian,” in a thread of messages that also included posts about university sororities.

Why Sweeney? She’s conventionally attractive and popular, and although the actress has never publicly discussed her political leanings, an event for her mother’s 60th birthday in 2022 caused a whirlwind of speculation.

Pictures from the party circulated online of guests wearing hats that said, “Make Sixty Great Again,” in the style of Trump’s, “Make America Great Again.”

Sweeney responded at the time telling people to “stop making assumptions,” and wrote on X that, “An innocent celebration for my mom’s milestone 60th birthday has turned into an absurd political statement, which was not the intention.”

Newsweek has reached out to Sweeney for comment.

Sweeney isn’t the only young woman getting the conservative hot girl treatment. Haliey Welch, better known as the ‘Hawk Tuah’ girl, shot to fame in June after she appeared in a TikTok interview in which she offered sex advice.

When asked by the interviewer: “What’s one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?” Welch replied: “You gotta give ’em that ‘hawk tuah’ and spit on that thing.”

“Hawk tuah” is the sound someone makes while spitting.

The 22-year-old from Tennessee has no obvious link to any political party, but this hasn’t seemed to matter. The top comment on a Instagram post of Welch’s, where she is posing in a red-white-and-star-spangled cowboy hat for the Fourth of July, reads: “We did it internet, we finally made the RIGHT person famous.”

Her “Hawk Tuah” catchphrase has been adopted by conservatives and put on merch that is a similar style to former President Donald Trump‘s, and is often emblazoned over an American flag. Merch of this style, with the catchphrase “Hawk Tuah ’24,” printed in red and white on a blue or black backdrop, is also sold by Welch’s official merchandise store.

Writing in Newsweek about her newfound fame, Welch said, “All the opportunities created by the viral clip are new for me and I’m learning along the way, so I hope people give me a little patience and forgiveness because I’m gonna slip up.”

Newsweek has reached out to Welch for comment.

Victoria Cann of the University of East Anglia said, “Sydney Sweeney and Haliey Welch have actively distanced themselves from those right-wing politics, but [have] nevertheless become entangled within them because of what they represent, not what they actually think.”

There are women in the conservative hot girl bracket who actively engage in right-wing politics. That list includes Republican National Committee national spokeswoman Elizabeth Pipko and Republican congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna. Right-wing and right-leaning media outlets, rather than commentators online, seem to have been behind these women’s conservative hot girl labels.

Pipko, who the New York Post described as the “MAGA-loving bikini model who’s the GOP‘s sexiest new spokeswoman,” told Newsweek that “I don’t think about my looks as much as I think about learning to embrace and love every part of who I am. I’m proud to try and wake up and do that every day, and more importantly, to inspire other young people around the country to do the same, politics aside.”

Luna made headlines back in August after a nearly decade-old video of her wearing a ‘MAGA’ swimsuit resurfaced. The Daily Mail described her as a “MAGA Bombshell.” In response to the video, the Florida lawmaker said on X, “I’m confirming that I have indeed worn swimsuits, and you can tell I am biologically a woman.”

The episode prompted Ginger Gaetz, the wife of Luna’s fellow Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, to share various images of conservative women on X, including a photo of Rep. Lauren Boebert in a bikini.

Newsweek has reached out to Luna for comment.

“There is something titillating about seeing a beautiful young woman spouting right-wing slogans,” Catherine Rottenberg of Goldsmiths, University of London told Newsweek, and described this as “saying ‘F-you’ to feminists and other progressives.”

She added that it’s “an attempt to show that they are fighting wokeness.”

Pipko responded, “I don’t consider myself someone who spouts anything but pro-American slogans and I’m very proud of that.” She described this criticism as being made by people who are “confused or so blinded by their hatred for those who hold differing political views that they forgot what being a feminist actually means.”

“Some people are considered conventionally beautiful. But when you have a pattern (where hot girls are the faces of the movement) — and when they are using tropes (bikini shots) as a way of sending a particular kind of message — then that feels extremely regressive,” Rottenberg said. She added, “I am all for having lots of smart, articulate, and good-looking women as spokespeople for movements — but we need a wide range of faces, ages, and body shapes.”

Conservative hot girls have one thing in common, besides implied or explicit political values, according to Erin Cassese of the University of Delaware.

“[These] aren’t just ‘hot women,’ they’re white women,” she told Newsweek. “It’s a narrow and conventional definition of sex appeal, or ‘hotness.’ It runs counter to cultural change reflecting an expansion of beauty standards to be more inclusive in terms of body size, race, and ethnicity, for example.”

What’s Behind the Hot Girl Obsession?

The focus on the conservative hot girl comes at a time when the political gender divide in America is wider than ever. A poll previously conducted for Newsweek found that more men (26 percent) have become more conservative than women (19 percent). Slightly more women (18 percent) have become more liberal than men (17 percent).

The Pew Research Center released an analysis in April which showed that Republicans tend to skew older than Democrats: two-thirds of voters ages 18 to 24 (66 percent) associated with the Democratic Party, with the largest Republican voter demographic being over 80 (58 percent).

Goldsmiths’ Catherine Rottenberg said, “Like advertisements that sell objects by objectifying women and their bodies, this seems to be a similar strategy. Attractive women are good for business.”

“By having ‘hot’ young women as their icons, multiple messages are sent: that if you align yourself with the movement, you will be able to ‘hang’ in the company of these gorgeous young things; that the movement attracts attractive people – and not just old white men,” she said.

The Republican Party is predominantly male. The Center for American Women in Politics reported that in 2024, around 16 percent of Republican nominees for the U.S. House of Representatives are women. This is lower than the Democratic Party, where nearly 46 percent of the nominees are women.

Cassese said that the conservative hot girl is, “A way of appealing to other men on the basis of the male gaze. Attractiveness and power have always gone hand-in-hand. The presence of ‘hot girls’ makes conservatism look appealing.” She added that this is, “coinciding with reporting that conservative men are struggling on dating apps.”

“Focusing on these ‘iconic hot girls’ may send a message that one’s ideal partner is out there, somewhere,” Cassese said.

What Does This Say About American Conservatism?

Does the conservative hot girl’s rise symbolize a more liberal thinking about sexuality, or is it the installation of women as objects for political gain? “Definitely the latter,” Rottenberg said. “There is no liberal thinking about sexuality here.”

“Patriarchy and populism go hand in hand,” Hannah Yelin of Oxford Brookes University in England told Newsweek. “Policing women, their appearance and their bodies is an integral mechanism of the American right.”

Cann said that the women involved in this movement who “actually readily align themselves with right-wing populism oftentimes represent a profound interest in traditional gender norms and an explicit rejection of feminist politics.”

Cassese pointed to the fact that the reification of the hot girl is “coinciding with the erosion of women’s reproductive rights” and that this, “points to a regressive tendency to prioritize men’s sexual gratification over women’s agency.”

The University of Delaware academic added, “The ‘hot girl’ is the opposite of the ‘childless cat lady’ being invoked by leaders like JD Vance. These two competing images of womanhood arising in conservative rhetoric are two sides of the same coin, and they say a lot about what conservatives value about women.”

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