Earlier this month, the popular MAGA influencer Sólionath was having a real one on X. The U.S.-based poster had built up a healthy audience of 65,000 followers after Elon Musk purchased the site formerly known as Twitter by sharing the usual deplorable garbage: defending white supremacists murderers, trying to get people fired for not mourning Charlie Kirk after his assassination on Sept. 10 and concocting lies about the Epstein files. But now he was expressing his very strong opinions about the approximately 99% of Americans who have sex at some point in their lives.
“I could make a dating app profile and lose my virginity by dinnertime,” claimed this devoted champion of President Donald Trump. “But very few people alive have ever actually had *sex*,” he continued. “They’ve slapped their damp, clammy body against another damp, clammy body, like the wriggling of a suffocating fish.” Sólionath then attempted to wax poetic about how he would be different if “I ever tried to make love.” Because unlike people who have done the deed, he would “reveal the deepest and most primal aspects of myself to a woman,” and in the process, “she [would] be mine in totality and no other human even think of her existence.” He also promised to impregnate this imaginary woman.
Sólionath was mad because British talk show host Piers Morgan made fun of MAGA podcaster Nick Fuentes for announcing he is a virgin. An open admirer of Adolf Hitler, Fuentes preaches to his 1.2 million X followers that the MAGA movement’s biggest problem is that it’s not racist enough. Since the death of Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, Fuentes has been attempting to take his place as a major MAGA leader. Fuentes has had help from figures like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who suggested Fuentes’ views “have won” during a fawning October interview with the podcaster.
Morgan, a conservative who is more moderate than Carlson, wanted to frame Fuentes as a freak. He asked the 27-year-old Nazi apologist if he’s ever had sex.
“No, absolutely not,” Fuentes said. He complained “women are very difficult to be around” and suggested men who do have sex end up “henpecked.”
“You think you’re an expert on women, given you never got laid?” Morgan replied.
The constant drumbeat of weird sexual displays is likely a major reason the MAGA coalition, which was flying high at the beginning of the year, is losing popularity rapidly, especially with younger voters.
Fuentes is no outlier in MAGA. In 2025, the right’s leaders and influencers revealed the deep sexual dysfunction driving their movement. The constant drumbeat of weird sexual displays is likely a major reason the MAGA coalition, which was flying high at the beginning of the year, is losing popularity rapidly, especially with younger voters. Being a 27-year-old virgin who deems himself an expert on other people’s sex lives doesn’t stand out in a community where few seem to have a healthy relationship with human sexuality. Trumpist leaders love pointing the finger at LGBTQ+ people and liberals, calling them “groomers” and suggesting they’re violent perverts. But in 2025, the nation really saw how much that behavior is old-fashioned psychological projection.
Certainly, the biggest example of this is the Epstein files, the 5.2 million pages of documents collected by the Justice Department during the investigation into accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who died in jail awaiting trial in 2019. As the files continue to leak out ever so slowly, Trump’s frantic efforts to prevent their release make more sense. It’s not just that a notorious convicted sex criminal deemed himself “Don’s best friend” and appeared closer to Trump than any other human being in the president’s life for nearly two decades. From Trump reportedly writing Epstein a birthday card that celebrated how he had “certain things in common” with a man accused of abusing minors to stories about Epstein victims being raped at Trump’s house while he hosted parties, the nation got a glimpse of the sexual world the president apparently inhabited, or at least stood in close proximity to, one which wasn’t glamorous but simply gross.
Podcast host Megyn Kelly exposed the dilemma for Trump’s defenders in November when she attempted to minimize raping minors. “There’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old,” she complained, describing Epstein’s victims as “the barely legal type.”
As many immediately pointed out, there’s nothing legal, barely or otherwise, about raping girls as young as 14, which is what Epstein was charged with doing. Kelly was deluged with people posting photos of 14- and 15-year-old girls, demonstrating how childish they look, which also underscored how ghastly it is that Epstein and Trump hung out together to leer at girls under the guise of “judging” modeling contests.
Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Sign up for her free newsletter, Standing Room Only, now also on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
While the pictures of Trump flanked by underage girls are hard to look at, it’s disturbing in another way to see how women who want to earn power from him feel they must look now. In 2025, “Mar-a-Lago face” entered the lexicon, a term used to describe the combination of plastered-on makeup and aggressive plastic surgery that makes women look like inflatable sex dolls, as Trump’s apparent sexual tastes have morphed MAGA aesthetics into something inhuman. The year ended with a Vanity Fair photographer capturing a close-up portrait of 28-year-old White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt that appears to show visible injection spots on her lips.
Billionaire Elon Musk, the self-proclaimed “First Buddy.” also invited the world to take a closer look at his sexual proclivities in 2025, having installed himself in government to run the pseudo-agency Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) while proclaiming he would destroy the “woke mind virus.” Musk wants everyone to think it’s progressives who are weird, mostly because they accept trans people. Instead, we learned that he has a fetish for impregnating women, which he justifies with an even stranger claim to be single-handedly battling the imaginary threat of depopulation. Musk frequently hits up strangers on X to ask if they’re interested in having his babies — of which he has at least 14 already. If they’re game or greedy enough to say yes, he reportedly tends to forgo the typical impregnation technique — which most people cite as the most fun part of the process — in favor of having a doctor do it for him with IVF.
Musk’s kink swept through MAGA. To hear movement leaders talk, it’s a woman’s duty to be pregnant as often as possible, ideally non-stop. “Tradwife” content that fetishized female submission and over-the-top fecundity was everywhere in right-wing bubbles in 2025. When pop star Taylor Swift became engaged to NFL star Travis Kelce, Charlie Kirk ranted that she needed to “submit to her husband” and “have lots of children.” MAGA media was also awash in disinformation painting birth control as dangerous and unnatural, enabling the Trump administration to destroy millions of dollars worth of contraception, rather than let poor women have it.
Nearly all women who have sex with men use contraception at least some of the time. But in 2025, MAGA was infected with online ideologies like “incel” — short for “involuntary celibacy” — and the “redpill,” a misogynist worldview that treats dating as a dominance battle between men and women, instead of a shared activity.
It’s why Fuentes professes pride at being a virgin. The online right is flooded with sexually dysfunctional straight men who argue that their romantic woes aren’t due to their own failures, but because feminism has “ruined” women. Bored, angry men are a lucrative audience, so it makes sense that the grifter-heavy right would churn out endless content appealing to the bruised egos of these malcontents. But their dysfunction is seeping into politics in ways that are increasingly distorting and dangerous.
The phrase that cinched this bizarre, inverted worldview in 2025 was “sexual matador.” Technically, it was coined in late 2024 by Fox News’ Jesse Watters to describe Stephen Miller, who now serves as White House deputy chief of staff. But the term got new life in September when Miller’s wife Katie repeated the phrase on Fox News in a moment that was too confusing to be upsetting to anyone outside of the bizarre world of MAGA sexuality. On some level, it seems they were trolling Stephen Miller, who by conventional standards does not exactly exude sexual magnetism.
We need your help to stay independent
But trolling or not, “sexual matador” doesn’t even make sense. A matador frustrates a bull until he kills it, which is not a metaphor that coheres to how normal people have sex. Perhaps it makes sense to the incels and redpillers that staff the MAGA movement’s online army, as well as the sea of bitter divorced men and angry virgins who think it’s everyone else’s fault they can’t get someone to like them enough to volunteer for sex. Or maybe it just sounded like a cool phrase, and no one involved grasped the weirdness of the metaphor. Either way, making us think about Stephen Miller’s prowess is a small act of sadism.
Maybe MAGA has grossed out the rest of the country enough that they will finally stop forcing their disturbed proclivities on the rest of us in 2026. Or maybe we’ll plumb new depths of dysfunction in the coming year. Musk hasn’t even started to imagine impregnating women with artificial intelligence, so things can always get worse. Either way, there’s one thing I can predict with confidence: We’ll get another round of articles handwringing about why it’s so hard for Republicans to find a date, which will show no understanding that the answer was always obvious.
Read more
about this topic
