Make America Desire Again?After Tuesday's elections, there's a sense of relief and enthusiasm in the air that feels alive and sexy. But the current state of desire is complicated! So here's a poll.
TL;DR: A year ago, in the wake of the 2024 election, I asked readers where they were at when it came to sex, desire, and their bodies. Now, a year later, I’m following up. How are you feeling in your body? How are you feeling about sex, love, and relationships? What is your current experience of desire, in the broadest sense of the term?Click the button below to take the survey via Substack. I’ll keep your answers anonymous, but you won’t be anonymous to me. If you want to remain anonymous to me—all good, I get it—click here for a strictly incognito survey.I’m writing this in the wake of Tuesday night’s election results, as people are giddily posting “libbing out” memes and “woke is back” jokes. I’m noticing something beyond the self-aware libbing, though. I detect signs of life, hope, and… desire. Multiple people sent me a video of a young woman announcing that Zohran Mamdani has “done more for the straight male community than he could have ever imagined.” She adds, “Until he came on the scene I genuinely forgot that men could be hot and smart.” People are joking about a baby boom in New York resulting from his win. Nearly 90,000 people liked an election-night tweet reading, “god to be in a nightclub in new york city tonight.” And exit polls are going around suggesting that Mamdani was favored by 68 percent of young men who voted.¹ It’s like the vibe shifted overnight. I don’t know how long it lasts, exactly. People are still being kidnapped off our streets, Trump is still trying to steal the next election, they’re still trying to take the birth control pill away—and on and on. But suffice it to say: this is a very different vibe from exactly a year ago. Donald Trump had just won and exit polls showed that 56 percent of young men had voted for him. Nick Fuentes was looking into his webcam and cackling, “Your body, my choice, forever.” You remember the rest: Google searches spiked for the “4B movement.” Women went viral announcing that they were going to swear off men, given the state of our politics. At the time, I found my body revolting against my own desires:
I ended up putting out a call to readers to answer an anonymous poll about where they were at post-election. The response showed people generally moving either toward, or away from, sex:
Now, a year later, I’m doing a followup survey. I’ve been wondering about what happened to those feelings of bodily protest and erotic resistance. How did they evolve over the last twelve months? I’m that much more curious after Mamdani’s win, California’s passage of Prop 50, and Democrats’ sweep of key races. There is definitely a sense of relief and enthusiasm in the air that feels alive and sexy. It’s the opposite of bodily shutdown. But the landscape of desire is necessarily complicated by our country’s slide toward authoritarianism, alongside continuing assaults on reproductive rights, immigrants, trans people, and so much that we hold dear. Love and sex are political. They do not remain untouched behind closed bedroom doors. Our bodies, desire, and romantic lives are entangled with systems designed to control them. Although, sometimes, if we’re lucky, we can access a feeling of mutual escape. This is all a long preamble to asking you to please fill out my survey on desire. You can do so here on Substack by clicking the button below or, if you want to be anonymous to even me, you can click here instead. 1 I am already preemptively exhausted by the inevitable takes to come on Mandani’s “healthy masculinity” (why, again, must we reduce people to “masculinity”?).
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četvrtak, 6. studenoga 2025.
Make America Desire Again?
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