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Maybe she was born with it, maybe it’s Mar-a-Lago face Forget expensive moisturizers or designer clothes. Ladies, if you want a quick and easy glow-up, you may want to try Republicanism. This one weird trick of voting against your own reproductive rights will instantly make you 10 times hotter. That’s not my personal sales pitch, I should note. But it’s increasingly how conservatism is being marketed to young women. As is painfully clear almost one year into Donald Trump 2.0, Maga authoritarianism doesn’t have any meaningful selling points for most normal people. It’s not making life cheaper. It’s not making your job more secure. It’s not making the world safer or more stable. It’s doing quite the opposite. And so, devoid, of any real substance – other than the knowledge that the people you hate are being hurt – conservatism is being packaged as an aspirational lifestyle. See, for example, a recent discussion about the actor Sydney Sweeney on Fox News. Trump voters are obsessed with Sweeney, whom they consider one of them. Unfortunately for the actor, they’re not obsessed enough to pay good money to support her movies – her recent project Christy had a historically bad opening weekend – but they sure do love talking about her various assets. This week, the folks at Fox were discussing Sweeney’s appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, where the actor’s outfit and new bob, numerous people remarked, made her look just like a Fox News anchor. “The media says she got a ‘Mar-a-Lago makeover’ and it’s driving liberals loco,” the Fox News host Jesse Watters said in response to this, on his eponymous primetime show. The Fox Business host Katrina Campins concurred, telling Watters: “[Sweeney’s] getting hotter, and they’re so jealous, right? … [S]o my advice to all the ladies, our side is better, and you get hotter, right? All Republican women are hot! Tell me that’s not true.” “It is true,” replied Watters. “So when you register Republican, you just get hotter.” I’m not sure “hotter” is the right word, but women (and a significant number of men) who register Republican certainly do gravitate towards a certain look. Politics have always affected sartorial choices to some degree, but it’s remarkable how everyone in Trump’s orbit now seems to have exactly the same face. You know what I mean: puffy lips, lots of filler, frozen forehead. It’s become such a marker of Maga power that plastic surgeons in Washington DC have seen a surge in requests for Mar-a-Lago face. And it’s not just Fox News hosts who are trying to hammer home the idea that it’s hot to be conservative. Maga is on a mission to recruit a new generation of young female voters and is increasingly reaching them through a “womanosphere” of health and wellness content and the “Make America healthy again” (Maha) movement. Alex Clark, the 32-year-old host of the popular wellness podcast Culture Apothecary, is one of the key players in this drive to make conservatism more aspirational. Clark, who calls her audience “cuteservatives” (gag), was the opening speaker for Turning Point USA’s 10th annual Young Women’s Leadership Summit in Texas this summer. “Let’s just be honest: it’s never been hotter to be a conservative,” Clark said in her opening remarks. “The left, they’ve got TikTok activists with five shades of autism, panic attacks, and a ringlight. We’ve got girls who look like they just walked off the cover of Vogue and can deadlift more than Harry Sisson.” (Sisson is a young Democratic influencer.) “You are witnessing a cultural revolution,” Clark told the crowd of about 3,000 women. “Less Prozac, more protein. Less burnout, more babies. Less feminism, more femininity.” Clark isn’t shy about explaining her strategy of reaching out to politically disengaged women via lifestyle content and slowly bringing them into the rightwing fold. “It’s sneaky,” Clark told the Washington Post last year. “I want to be seen as: Alex Clark, cool girl, loves health and wellness, happens to be conservative. I’m not trying to beat people over the head with that. I don’t think that’s persuasive.” “Conservatism is selling sexy in all aspects,” Clark similarly told New York magazine after her speech at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit. “Even the branding for President Trump’s campaign is so aesthetic and so genius and brilliant. The Make America Great Again hat is going to be a pure Americana staple forever. We are pop culture now.” Clark isn’t entirely wrong. Maga has been so successful because it’s more than a political movement, it’s a brand. But, like most brands, the promises and emotional value propositions it is peddling are pure puffery. The only thing getting hotter under the Trump administration is the climate. China is making contraception more expensive to boost birth rates Under a revised value-added tax (VAT) law, contraceptive drugs, including condoms, will have a 13% levy on them for the first time in three decades. This is part of a number of pro-natalist policies as China attempts to boost its birth rate. As Bloomberg notes, “[t]he VAT also comes as HIV – which has been decreasing worldwide – increases sharply in China … Most new cases of the illness are linked to unprotected sex.” New Texas ‘bounty hunter’ law targets abortion pills Residents of Texas can now sue people if they suspect them of distributing abortion pills. While women who take the abortion pills can’t be sued under the law, manufacturers of the pills, as well as anyone mailing them, could face penalties of at least $10,000. University of Alabama shuts down Black and female student magazines The university-funded student magazines have been suspended after a federal memo on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives issued by the attorney general, Pam Bondi. Write about anything other than straight white men, it seems, and you’re committing wrongthink. Nevertheless, as rights and opportunities get yanked away from women, the media can’t seem to get enough of the likes of Scott Galloway talking about the “masculinity crisis”. The FBI was paid nearly $1m in overtime to redact Epstein files The project was called … wait for it … the “Special Redaction Project”. I wonder what they were redacting? Hillary Clinton thinks people are being brainwashed into being pro-Palestine Speaking at the Israel Hayom Summit on Tuesday in New York, Clinton bemoaned the fact that people, including “young Jewish Americans”, are getting their information about Gaza on TikTok. I don’t know, Hillary, maybe the problem isn’t TikTok. Maybe the problem is that there is an ongoing genocide in Gaza and an enormous surge in settler attacks in the West Bank. Maybe the problem is the mainstream media isn’t covering a lot of these issues: indeed settlers attacked and robbed Italian and Canadian volunteers in the West Bank this week and it barely made the US news. Maybe the problem is that people don’t like seeing kids starving to death and aid seekers apparently getting their bodies bulldozed. The week in pawtriarchy Thoughts and prayers to a raccoon in Virginia who is nursing one hell of a hangover after falling through the ceiling of a liquor store and drinking everything he could get his paws on. The raccoon was found spreadeagled on the bathroom floor, leaving a trail of smashed whiskey bottles in his wake. The bottle shop bandit has now been safely released to the wild after his bender. One imagines he feels like trash. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist