Is there a "Hot Woman Vibe Shift?"

The woke overlords never confiscated boobs and ass, but many men feel like they did.

I don’t normally publish on Saturdays (typically I publish 5 articles each week, taking Sunday and one weekday off.) However, something of monumental importance came up that I wanted to write about right away. I might take an extra day off next week to prevent overwhelming you, or perhaps you’ve scored another article by surprise—we’ll see.

---

I’m going to say something that I feel I, as a nice liberal, am finally allowed to say: all the cancel culture stuff was real and annoying.

Of course, “annoying” or even “often unhelpful or detrimental politically” is not the same as “causing plane crashes.” There’s a big area between firing someone for publishing a study about politically effective nonviolent protests because it made coworkers feel “unsafe” and asserting, as JD Vance did, that working with people of color and women (aka “DEI hires”) is so stressful that it causes undue strain on the white men who apparently deserve to be there. And just because tweets (especially benign ones taken out of context) shouldn’t ruin a person’s life, they hold more weight for powerful people, which is why even the libs who weren’t fans of cancel culture take issue with Elon Musk reinstating a high-ranking DOGE employee who ran an openly racist Twitter account. Basically: any reasonable person can find a middle ground on this stuff, but the vibe shifts always seem to overcorrect in both directions.

Right now, most people can tell that a vibe shift is happening, mostly because of Trump’s reelection—and not just his reelection, but him easily winning the popular vote and the GOP sweeping all three branches of government. It’s a mix of Republicans saying, “Okay, we’re in charge now and we’re doing things our way, and that way is saying the R-slur at work” and Democrats saying, “Okay, now that Republicans are in charge we need to distance ourselves from the stupid fringe stuff we always knew was stupid.” (Before anyone uses this a jumping off point for their own bigotry, I’m not talking about LGBTQ rights or anti-discrimination as “stupid fringe stuff.”) I kept my mouth shut about “traveling to Hawaii is genocide,” and didn’t admit to unmasking well into 2023. I never argued with people who insisted shoplifting at Sephora was actually good. Years ago, I deleted a tweet about how people screaming threats on the subway made me afraid to bring my kids there after someone called it “racist” (I never mentioned race, so this is kind of them showing their ass) but I wound up writing an entire article on the subject in 2025. And now that the vibe shift has happened, I’m free to call my old self what they wouldn’t let you say before: a pussy.

I once read a joke (sorry, I forget who coined it) that went something like, “Cancel culture isn’t real, and if you think it is, let’s see how your employer feels about that.” Basically, that’s done, and we are not going back.

But you know what we apparently are going back to? Sexy girls in Carl’s Jr. ads:

My first thought was, they stopped doing that? I guess I don’t really pay much attention to Carl’s Jr. But it seems the vibe shift has given everyone on the right an inflated ability to “claim” things that either never went away, or weren’t political at all. See: Sydney Sweeney’s boobs, or even just boobs in general. This was my initial response to the Carl’s Jr “hot girl clampdown.”

I was curious about whether Carl’s Jr. had, in fact, attempted to sexualize anyone even remotely adjacent to this imaginary person. I vaguely recall there being controversy about their ads many years ago—when I was in college in the late 2000s, I took a sociology course where the professor dissected a Carl’s Jr. commercial and the smart-ass of the class asserted that Carl’s Jr. objectified women to make up for an “emasculating” brand name (the “Jr.” was too babyish, she said) while randomly throwing in that their use of the term “black angus” was racist. I went to see what Carl’s Jr. ads were like around 2020. Apparently, at least for a while, they did retire the skinny blonde biting into a leaky burger, and replaced her with this fucking slut:

O-face cartoon stars aside, the reemergence of the Carl’s Jr. hot women (and the “conservative dad MAGA babes calendar” as described on the

Feminine Chaos

podcast) got me wondering: who can really claim hot women as a political symbol? Can anyone? After all, the conservatives of 2004 notoriously hated flagrant displays of sexuality on TV (“think of the children!”) Were hot women ever really barred from the spotlight over “woke,” or is it all a bunch of anti-woke hysteria and a ploy to play the victim? And if there was, in fact, an anti-hot-girl mood in America, did it do anything—to women, or to men?