Fascist Fetishcore: From MAGA to Muaddi Heels
How Fascism Harnesses Repressed Sexual Energies
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“You’ve been a bad girl, you’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.”
Right before the 2024 elections, Tucker Carlson delivered a jarring speech at a Trump campaign event in Georgia. In it, he compared Americans under Democratic leadership to a toddler smearing diaper contents on living room walls, as well as to a “hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter” slamming her bedroom door after giving her parents the finger. And then, declaring that Trump was Daddy returning home to administer punishment, Carlson grinned and continued: “This is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl.”
Viewed at the time, this bizarre performance seemed to come out of left field. But here’s what everyone misses: Carlson’s political BDSM commentary anticipated the rise of fetishcore in current American conservatism.
Case in point: The Cut recently featured the rising Tiktok “cleanfluencer” Kylie Perkins, who has amassed 2 million followers in weeks by yelling at young mothers to “get your shit together.” Much of her content is made up of her screaming directives like “You’re capable of more than scrolling on your phone all day!” Conservatives are flocking to Perkins’ account, crediting her content with finally getting their daughters to clean their rooms.
Here’s why this matters right now: this is due to a political vibe shift. Authoritarian cultures have historically thrived on harnessing repressed sexual energies for political purposes. This rise in BDSM fetish isn’t a side effect of fascism — it’s its signature.
Sadism & Pleasure in Fascist Cultures
Acts of domination and submission are core features in fascism, often fueled by the eroticization of pain.
Trump’s new draconian immigration policies highlight these sadistic tendencies. In February, the new administration announced they were reopening Guantanamo Bay for undocumented immigrants and started shipping people there—many of whom had no criminal record. This government has also started deporting migrants to Panama, where they are then to be sent to primitive jungle camps.
Peak sadistic pleasure is on display in a video posted by the White House called “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” which showed immigrants shackled and restrained. ASMR normally refers to soothing, pleasurable sensations triggered by soft sounds; here, the sound of rattling shackles becomes a twisted source of bliss for a regime openly reveling in cruelty. The sounds of the sadistic subjugation of disempowered people becomes a source of pleasure.
Eroticizing Discipline: From SS Uniforms to MMA
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944) noted that fascist regimes often aestheticize discipline, violence and control, transforming them into spectacles which controlled the masses through harnessing their unconscious desires.
For the Nazis, this aestheticization of discipline was encapsulated in the hyper-masculine SS (Schutzstaffel) uniform, produced by luxury fashion house Hugo Boss. Susan Sontag (Fascinating Fascism, 1974) unpacked how this uniform became a symbol of fascist erotics: sharp tailoring emphasizing a hypermasculine figure, black fabric implying dominance and intimidation, and silver accents—like skulls and insignia buttons—suggesting an otherworldly authority.
Discipline in today’s context is eroticized in the martial arts, where the sports’ teaching of discipline is linked to a primal, militant form of masculinity.
has called this the Brazilian JiuJitsu practitioner-to-fascist pipeline, and some of its most prominent proponents include Mark Zuckerberg, who effused that the sport helped him rediscover his “masculine energy,” while Elon Musk considers it one of his weapons in hand-to-hand combat.The obsession with discipline extends beyond Brazilian Jiu Jitsu to MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) and the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) competition. Jack Crosbie has detailed how the rise of the UFC is inextricably linked to the rise of Trump via Dana White and Joe Rogan. Instructively, the White House invited a series of MAGA jiu jitsu practitioners and MMA fighters to Mar-A-Lago to celebrate after Trump’s second inauguration.
Modern fascism fetishizes the discipline learned in martial arts, as Joe Rogan enthusiastically illustrates here: “Nothing turns you into a libertarian like jiu jitsu. Nothing turns you into someone who values hard work, discipline, and struggle like jiu jitsu. It's an exposure of character. Nothing else is like it.”
In short, while the Nazis fetishized discipline through uniforms and militarism, today’s fascists channel it through an obsession with hypermasculinity in the world of martial arts.
Pleasure in Submission
Fascist fetishism isn’t just about sadistic dominance. It’s also about the pleasure of being dominated. Both Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Facism, 1933) and Erich From (Escape from Freedom, 1941) identified a critical double bind in fascism: authoritarian personalities derive sadistic pleasure from dominating those below them while simultaneously finding masochistic thrills by submitting to those above.
This duality appears in a new Amina Muaddi campaign featuring influencer Nara Smith crushing paint tubes—complete with “paint fart” sounds—while wearing Muaddi’s signature luxury heels.
notes that this ad campaign references a recent viral #fetishtok video, and is “a direct pull from an actively engaged fetish economy— 304Tok, cash dom culture and other sex work-adjacent online spaces that are shaping how young people perceive power, sex and money in real time.”
Here, the audience experience an awkward ASMR pleasure from the body-noise adjacent sounds of paint tubes popping under Smith’s heels. It’s also significant that Smith, well known as a #tradwife influencer, is cast as the domme—viewers participate by masochistically submitting the visuals of being crushed by her heels.
Fetishcore & the New Conservatism
Fetish aesthetics have even seeped into political resistance. On February 25, an AI generated video of Donald Trump kissing and licking Elon Musk’s feet was broadcast on screens at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. While framed as a critique suggesting Musk, not Trump, is actually in charge, this direct invocation of a foot fetish highlights how repressed sexual energies are surging to the political surface.
Adding to the spectacle, the video featured the phrase “Long Live the Real King” overlaid over Trump’s worshipping of Musk’s feet, reinforcing the theme of submission and domination in authoritarian dynamics.
Discussions of the Trump administration’s brutality often return to Adam Serwer’s phrase “the cruelty is the point” — the idea that inflicting suffering isn’t just incidental but central to the agenda. But viewed through the lens of fascist cultures, this cruelty isn’t just about violence; it’s about pleasure.
Republicans have long had a fraught relationship with sexuality. One of politics’ worst kept secrets is that demand for sex workers always hits an all-time high when the GOP convention is in town. But as the Trump administration pushes the U.S. deeper into authoritarianism, these repressed energies won’t just be simmering beneath the surface — they are primed to erupt in ways both titillating and terrifying.
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Great analysis. The highs they get from the sadomasochistic thrill of living out their power fantasies are part of why trying to reason with them is a lost cause.
So apt! Brilliant analysis.