In February, a group of men on a sports talk show casually spread a salacious and untrue rumor about the sex life of a teenage girl on national television, resulting in her being humiliated and relentlessly harassed. It felt as though it were 2007 again, and the talk show banter was a brief pause before our nation’s busy schedule of making fun of Britney Spears’s breakdown.
On ESPN’s bro-y The Pat McAfee Show, the titular McAfee introduced a segment on NFL draft picks by gossiping about an undergraduate rumor he’d heard: that a sorority girl at the University of Mississippi had cheated on her fraternity boyfriend with his father. McAfee didn’t mention the young woman or her boyfriend by name, but later shared the clip on X to his 3.2 million followers (the post is still up, as of April 3). Barstool Sports personality Jack Mac then promoted a meme coin named after the girl in question: Mary Kate Cornett, a first-year college student. Cornett denies the rumor, but that hasn’t stopped it from spreading like wildfire.
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As reported on the New York Times’ The Athletic, as the rumor spread, the harassment Cornett experienced ratcheted up. She had to leave her college dorm and move into emergency housing after campus police said she was at risk. Someone sent in a false tip to the police to have a SWAT team sent to her mother’s home. Cornett’s voicemail and text message filled up with degrading messages from strangers calling her a whore and telling her to kill herself; similar messages have also reached her 89-year-old grandfather. Cornett now says she intends to pursue legal action against McAfee and ESPN. ESPN and McAfee have declined to comment to The Athletic and other news outlets.
There’s something so 2000s about this story — the kind of thing you would read about on a feminist blog at the time. It has all the beats of a classic aughts slut-shaming: an anonymous teenage girl, the men on a talk show using her humiliation as idle chit-chat, the way that chit-chat picks up and runs rampant until the girl is getting anonymous threats from strangers. It’s very Swiffer Girl, in which a graphic tape an eighth-grader made for the boy she had a crush on went viral. It’s very Vanessa Hudgens in 2007, when she was forced to apologize to fans and scramble to save her Disney career when private nude photos of her were leaked. It’s basically all the episodes that the talk show hosts of the 2000s have by now apologized for. The only part that’s really new is the memecoin and the right-wing ecosystem of X that allows such gossip to flourish.
Surely, a person might think, we have moved past this kind of national slut-shaming by now. We live in a post-MeToo world. The culture must have moved past the sexual humiliation of teen girls.
Yet in a way, the Ole Miss story is the kind of thing that’s been a long time coming. The right has been interested in reviving Bush-era raunch (think Girls Gone Wild) and purity culture (think: the obsession with Britney Spears’s virginity) for years now. Purity culture and raunch culture walk hand in hand. The sexual objectification of raunch is enforced by the rigid shaming of purity. Both are united by the compulsory objectification and humiliation of women, whose bodies within this system are always controlled by men.
As sociologist Bernadette Barton showed in her 2021 book The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture is Ruining Our Society, raunch has become fundamental to the self-conception of the post-Trump right. Barton notes the number of pro-Trump memes that “explicitly link provocative female bodies with Trump paraphernalia,” or that “contrast ‘sexy’ conservative women with ‘ugly, unfeminine’ liberal ones.”
“No longer are misogynists confined to the old dichotomy framing women as virgins or whores,” Barton observes. “Raunch culture has facilitated a new sexist dichotomy: hot or not.”
The ideology claims all hot girls as their own and demands that they place themselves at the service of men, for their amusement. Taking on this position allows a woman a certain amount of cultural currency, which is why the right likes to crow that hot girls vote for Trump and only ugly girls are liberal. Yet being a hot girl also opens her up to the possibility of the kind of vicious, highly sexualized humiliation and harassment that Cornett is facing. That is the ideology that allowed the right to claim an apolitical figure like Hawk Tuah Girl as a MAGA symbol, and at the same time to smear Kamala Harris as “the original Hawk Tuah Girl.”
The point of it is to degrade, to dominate, to make it clear that sex exists to gratify men. Humiliating an anonymous teenager for fun is the natural endpoint of this ideology. It was always what was lurking under the hot girls for Trump jokes.
