Against "Hot Girls"

The discourse that needs to die

You will be old and shriveled one day (God willing) and no one will pay attention to anything you say. The lines on your face will grant you obsolescence instead of gravity and the grandchildren you were lucky enough to have will only half-listen to you, quarter-listen to you, dutifully calling you once a week (if you're lucky), your words weightless among far more pressing concerns. "That's nice Nana" they will say after five minutes. "I have to go now, but it was lovely to hear your voice." You will die finally, and your possessions will be divvied up. Your youngest granddaughter will pull a crinkled-up shirt from the bottom of a box and hold it up on herself by the mirror. "HOT GIRLS FOR BERNIE" it will say on the front. And that's okay. Everyone likes to think of their grandma as having been hot.

You know it truly grinds my gears to have to write this. There are so many disgusting things that are so obviously beneath contempt to so many people that I have to try to stop myself from writing about them. That’s what a Twitter tantrum is for. But it keeps cropping up and I keep wanting to hack at it with a machete so here we are.

Zohran's wife discourse. General Hot Girls for Zohran redo of Bernie-era posting. The Conservateur's “America is Hot Again” event I attended. Super annoying "Hot Girls for Capitalism" shirt I saw on X before deactivating for the third time this week. The general meaninglessness of calling anyone "hot" in 2025. The perversion of calling yourself "hot" at any time. The left calling anyone who agrees with them hot. The right calling only one type of person hot. Is it ironic? Is it sincere? I can’t tell anymore. I can’t tell anything. The waters are muddy. Everyone needs to shut up.

Here. I’ll list out the reasons:

• It’s extremely cringe and tacky

• Morality is not tied to outer beauty¹

• If you were actually hot, you wouldn’t talk about it (noblesse oblige of hotness)

• Noblesse oblige of hotness exists because everyone already knows that hotness exists. No one is denying that. It is an enormous distraction all the time. The only way we can overcome this is by collectively ignoring or pretending to ignore its existence in favor of higher virtues. This is ancient knowledge that we’ve lost because our culture is rapidly becoming a drooling mass of godless, algorithm-poisoned porn addicts. And I mean that.

• Strategically speaking, focusing on hotness so much (like focusing on fertility by shaming women of childbearing age who are either already socialized to be hyper-aware of their biological clock or who have been socialized to be hostile towards any reference to it) defeats the purpose of whatever good end you were trying to achieve. It creates polarization and neuroses in others.

• Politics of hotness (like politics of cruelty) will always bite you back. People who weaponize politics of hotness can’t be trusted. They rarely depend on any higher principles. The method is in the madness, the method is the madness.

Just as “Hot Girls for Zohran” feels try-hard and overdone (I’m sure he would have won without their specific brand of support), Right wing tongue-in-cheek aping of Hot Girls for Bernie in 2025 (see: the “Hot Girls for Capitalism” shirt I saw on X) just doesn’t hit the same as it might have in 2018, back when playing into “hot girl” rhetoric felt a little transgressive (see: Red Scare). That seed of subversion was planted long ago and has now overgrown into a totally unsubtle hyper-fixation on cartoonish Abercrombie hotness at best and a strange fascistic focus on (see: Red Scare; The Conservateur’s America is Hot Again event; any RW aesthetic account). Now it may be (as a friend argued to me) that the prevalence of leftist “hot girls” outweighs the vocal right ten to one and so this kind of joke - while in poor taste - is needed. I just don't understand why I should lap up this slop just because it’s skewering the left. I don’t understand why I should lap it up at all.

It is virtuous to be a good steward of your body, of your God-given gifts, of animals and the natural world, of money, of your family and community but it is more virtuous still to be a good steward of your spirit. Hotness - the kind you're born with - doesn’t matter. It literally doesn’t matter. It radically does not matter at all. When will we transcend?

I would like to be remembered for being interesting, for being funny, for being really, really nice, for having a good spirit, for having overcome many difficulties, maybe even for being what they used to call a ‘handsome’ woman. I would love to be remembered for being hot too. As long as someone else is doing the remembering.

1. I do not care to argue this one. God sent Jesus to the earth in humble form and circumstances on purpose. He had "no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him”