This month, I started a job that has me going to an office two days a week, and traveling once or twice a month. There’s nothing like going from fully remote to to unemployed to sometimes-in-person to reveal a gap in your wardrobe! Specifically, work-appropriate trousers, rather than the pile of Zoom-friendly sweatpants, leggings, and dolphin shorts I’ve gotten used to. Which means I had some shopping to do. [deep existential sigh.]

Clothes shopping as an activity has always been a chore. Being both tall and fat means it’s unlikely for me to find even half of what I’m looking for in a brick-and-mortar store. Even if a brand does make size 18 trousers with 35-inch inseams1, it’s better than even money that they only make those trousers available online. It’s okay for us to wear the label, but not for us to be in their stores. Stores are for the normals, you see. And now that Body Positivity™️ is very much over, it’s unlikely for me to find what I’m looking for online, either—even from brands that claim to carry sizes up to 4X. (For more on this plus-size trousers issue, check out ’s excellent essay!)

As I’ve written about before, the death of the Body Positivity movement isn’t an accident. Its replacement—an insidious new iteration of body fascism—has coincided with America’s embrace of ultra-conservatism.

It’s not just that fatphobia is back in fashion. Tradwife dresses are still frightfully popular, driven by influencers who peddle their cutely conservative ideas about how liberating it is to depend on a man for financial security. Young Black men have reinvented respectability politics by bragging about their quarter-zips, the most perfunctory clothing item that also doubles as a political statement. Like, any man who wears a quarter-zip sweater and counts Rich Dad, Poor Dad among his favourite books has really said it all, you know?

This conservative aesthetic is, naturally, trickling down from the elites. The cult that the GOP has become has very strict visual standards. The Fox News anchor look is entry-level at this point—Try harder, Karoline! And remember that little woman who wanted to be a style influencer from the White House? With her dull little frocks. Bless her. She doesn’t fit the bill either. True believers are all in on Mar-a-Lago face. Visible plastic surgery, especially around the cheekbones and jawlines; makeup applied by sandblaster; plumped up lips; and a wig on top of another wig. There can be different versions—Kristi Noem and her hats follow a whole “strong woman making it in a man’s world but still staying feminine” playbook, while the recently fired Lindsey Halligan represents a more corporate girlishness—but they’re still variations on a theme.

As for the men, they’re mostly happy to show up for work dressed like they’re gonna invade Poland. Some of them lean fully into their Ken Goes To Army looks, while others seem to find power in looking like the perfect average of every Florida Man mugshot. But they all like to tout their physical fitness at completely inappropriate places, even though they’re all terrible at doing fitness. Watching these kettlebell swings without laughing is a workout in itself, honestly.

It’s all very ugly, very exaggerated, very pathetic gender performance, from the people who claim that gender is a biological fact.

At the same time that these noxious trends are expanding, we have a Secretary of Transportation who insists that it’s our patriotic duty to dress up for air travel like it’s the 1960s Camelot era.2 His campaign is quite literally called “The Golden Age of Travel Starts With You,” and the official video announcement comes complete with Frank Sinatra singing “Come Fly With Me” while an AI-generated narrator drones on about how great flying used to be. Then the images switch from the ‘60s-80s to present-day, with footage of people fighting and cursing at each other on planes and in airports. Pointedly, most of these people are wearing sweatpants or leggings, and too many of them have their feet out. It’s not exactly subtle.

I guess it was only a matter of time before conservatives took their Broken Windows philosophy to the friendly skies.

Of course, as with the Broken Windows bullshit, this narrative leaves out a whole lot of reality. Like, the fact that air travel completely sucks these days. There’s the nearly guaranteed delays, due to on-going air traffic controller shortages. There’s the indignity of going through TSA and having your body and belongings x-rayed and/or pawed over. Once you finally get on the plane, there’s the ever-shrinking seats and legroom situation.3 And! And! There’s Customs and Border Patrol searching our social media history to see if we should be detained for being insufficiently supportive of this regime.

And this Stick Stickley motherfucker says I’m supposed to wear hard pants for this? I think the fuck not.

Mind you, this is the same guy who is rolling back the Biden Administration’s plan to compel airlines to pay us passengers back for egregious flight delays. So he and his administration are knowingly making life worse for us, and then telling us we need to bring back some civility and decorum. It’s honestly a perfect encapsulation of the Trump Administration’s approach to governing. They take a battering ram to a load-bearing pillar of a functioning society, create some AI slop to promote their lies about what they’re doing, and accuse anyone who suffers for it of being insufficiently American and therefore deserving of whatever punishment they land on.

Some random cabinet member telling us how to dress for a flight seems like a minor deal next to the murderous atrocities that this administration carries out on an hourly basis. But I promise you, it’s all of a piece. Authoritarianism isn’t just about hard power (brute force, militarism, tariffs, etc). It’s a soft power game, too. It’s about controlling the culture, and what counts as culturally acceptable. Because if something—an aesthetic, a presentation, an entire category of people—is deemed as culturally unacceptable, then the masses will more readily accept that thing being marginalized, targeted, and punished. Which is why conservatives fell all over themselves to find, and then fabricate, pictures of Renee Good looking too queer and too defiant to be mourned or avenged.

So, it’s not just some random cabinet member talking about the value of non-iron button-downs. It’s a high-ranking government official telling us how to look in public when we’re moving through the country and interacting with law enforcement. Ultimately, this white supremacist government is demanding that its citizens be white, thin, cis, straight, able-bodied, and wealthy, or risk punishment.

The gag is, this administration’s love of image craft is matched only by their inability to craft intentionally impressive images. They don’t have half the omnipotence they want to project, and can’t control the narrative the way they might have in the 1930s, for example, so they’re flailing even as they’re becoming more violent. Li’l Greg Bovino was so excited to cosplay as an S.S. leader while carrying out his S.S. activities that he didn’t consider how cheap and stupid he looked. And his cheapness and stupidity, his inability to sell the image of an all-powerful state, is what’s gotten him on the fast track to “retirement” and replaced by someone who will stay the course but look less ridiculous.

I’m carrying my passport with me whenever I leave the house, and I’m anxious about crossing state borders, let alone leaving the country, because of this gaggle of incompetents. It’s pathetic.

And this is simply my mental state right now. All my thoughts bend back towards this fascist hellscape. Just ordering a pair of trousers sends me spinning into thinking about how vulnerable I am in this country, and how disposable this society makes all of us. I’m exhausted.

Thank you so much for reading! if you enjoyed this essay, please take a second to feel Al Gore’s Rhythm by liking and sharing it.